Do you Squidoo? – An Introduction to using Squidoo
Squidoo is a unique online tool for creating a single webpage about something important to you. It’s like a cross between Wikipedia and Facebook, an encyclopaedia and a social networking site combined in one. You can make a page about practically anything and it’s really searchable because Google loves Squidoo
Seth Godin, a marketing expert who saw potential for this type of site to generate income, set up Squidoo. The website was launched in 2005 but became fully functional in early 2006. Squidoo is interesting because although they make money through their advertising revenue, they share it with charities and their users. At present there are over 700,000 pages on Squidoo and growing every day.
Creating a Squidoo page is incredibly easy; you don’t need to have any technical knowledge as Squidoo guides you through each step. What you do need is something to say about your topic, as you’ll be asked to fill in lots of boxes for content. For this reason, if you’re going to use Squidoo, you need to be able to write good quality content, a Squidoo page without much decent content will be a wasted opportunity.
Setting up Squidoo is fun. First off, you need to think of a topic. When you have a topic, it’s time to make a lens. A lens is the name for each single page relating to a single topic. You can make as many lenses as you wish and those people who create a great deal of popular well-visited lenses can make money. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. So, Step 1 asks:
What’s your lens about? This is a chance to make sure that people outside of Squidoo can find your lens by making sure the words that you choose are Keywords or Keyphrases. So don’t forget the power of your SEO knowledge at this stage. Whatever you name the page will be like one of the headers on your website and people outside Squidoo will be able to find it from Google.
The next thing it will ask is ‘What’s the goal of your page’? It’s worth thinking about this, without a goal, you’ll be all over the place. What do you want to achieve with your Squidoo Page?
The following step will be to choose your title and the URL. Again, think about Search Engine Optimisation and choose a page title that people might search for and an URL that will get you noticed by Search Engines and human visitors alike. If someone has already created a page with the same URL, you will need to choose another. Ensure that whatever you choose includes a keyphrase.
Squidoo will then ask for some great keywords to tag your lens with, in order to make it easier to find by other people. You’ll then get a skeleton view of the page, don’t be put off, this is where you can add your photo and add something of a personal biog about yourself too. Remember, your potential clients could read this, so be sure to give off the image that you want to project.
This same page allows you to add an introduction section and description. It’s a chance for you to speak about your topic, explain something about why you’ve written it and generally give an overview of the page. Whilst you’re changing this section, you can also add a photo or logo to the page (different from your personal photo) and for this you could use your company’s logo or your own photograph. Again, consider who might be reading this page.
Next you get to choose which ‘modules’ are added to the page. Modules are just a techno-word for sections of the page. You can have text modules, to write content into, you can have You Tube modules, to add video and many other different kinds of modules that are rather self-explanatory when you play with them.
Squidoo is an excellent way to promote yourself online. It’s an easy way to create a small independent web page with all of your relevant details, some great original content and links back to your own website.
There are various reasons why you should use Squidoo for your business marketing:
SEO
You can use Squidoo to help with the Search Engine Optimisation of your own website. By placing links onto Squidoo from your lenses, you’ll have strong backlinks to your website which will make the Search Engines happy. Remember, Google loves Squidoo, so that will make your page rank highly. The URL that you create should feature your Keyphrases/KeyWords, and because Squidoo is new, you can still get a URL with great potential.
Brand Leading
By creating a Squidoo Lens, you get the chance to immediately publish yourself as a Brand Leader on the Internet. You get to present yourself as an expert and people will be able to find you. This helps to build online credibility as an expert in your field.
Article Marketing
If you understand the power of article marketing, you’ll see the immense possibility within Squidoo. You could create hundreds of searchable, popular, original content rich, traffic heavy lenses; all with good quality links back to your site.
Affiliate Marketing
This is the perfect environment in which to maximise your Affiliate Marketing potential. You can create endless lenses to fill full with exciting, content rich affiliate marketing opportunities.
Sell Products
You can sell products directly from your website through Squidoo. Squidoo even helps you do it.
Traffic Enticement
The chances are that Squidoo can produce more traffic than your own new website, so by placing links to your website onto Squidoo, you entice traffic to come to your website through Squidoo.
Of course, the content of your Squidoo lenses still needs to be well-written and excellent quality. The content needs to be keyword rich, optimised, original and intriguing to the human visitor. Take time to build excellent lenses and you can really benefit from them.
The final thing to say about Squidoo is that there are money-making opportunities within Squidoo. If your lenses get a lot of traffic and induce a lot of ad clicking, you’ll make money at the same time as Squidoo. Don’t quit your day job just yet, but there’s earning potential in those lenses!
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