Digital storytelling is a huge area in education and is emerging strongly in the home and community sectors and more slowly in affiliate marketing. It has even evolved into digital scrapbooking.

Many of the videos on YouTube are presented as digital stories. My Squidoo lens has a two-fold focus - (1) to help people to turn digital photos into digital stories or digi-stories and (2) to promote resources that enable people to make money from their digital photos.The catalyst for creating the digital-storytelling lens was my work over 5 years helping vocational education institutes in Australia to develop their online learning capacity.

So the original target was teachers but as the lens evolved, I came to understand that there was a much broader market involved, including community educators and affiliate marketers.

My digital-storytelling lens provides modules that offer:

* examples of digital stories from YouTube
* links on digital storytelling in education
* examples of digital stories in education
* digital storytelling in primary education
* digital stories dedicated to themes, e.g. community
* links to free software to create digi-stories
* links to free tools to use in making a digital story
* digital story mapping
* digital scrapbooking

When I last checked there were 3,180 Goggle searches per month on the term "digital storytelling" and the competition is very tough - 2,200 sites with the keyword in the URL, 24,700 with the keyword in a title, 17,800 sites with the term as anchor text (hyperlinked to another URL).

My digital-storytelling Squidoo lens broke into the top 100 Google results for the keyword "digital storytelling" when I was updating it regularly and pinging the directories.

Many people find the lens by using a variety of long tail keywords (50 different keywords at last count), as I have set up the lens in a way that encourages deep indexing in the search engines. So people find my lens by searching on Yahoo, Google or MSN for terms such as "earning income from digital photography", "free software to turn my pictures into movie" or "examples of online storytelling videos kids".

My major affiliate promotions on this lens relate to two products - a digital storytelling starter kit and a resource package that helps people sell their digital photos online. The former product was developed by one of the people in my teacher network focused on online learning. I have also created a separate lens to promote the second product that offers resources to enable people to turn their digital photos into income.

So Squidoo enables me to create lenses focused on relevant affiliate products that target specific niche markets - people who want to use their digital photos to create digital stories for education, community or marketing and/or to sell their digital photos online. The multimedia nature of Squidoo enables me to create an attractive, interactive and informative platform for this affiliate marketing.