I'm Just Sharing

Posted by Mitch on Nov 19, 2008

Today we have a special guest post from Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secrets Revealed. The basic thrust of his business is reviewing web hosting companies, and man, do they need reviewing! One of his major reviews was for a site called Lunarpages, which you should check out. I don’t know a lot about Squidoo (although I know John Dilbeck does), so this should be a very informative post for everyone.

It is no secret that many web marketers are now leveraging Squidoo as one of their marketing tools online. If you have no idea what ‘Squidoo’ is, you are losing a lot of opportunities in pulling web traffics for free.

So what is Squidoo?

Squidoo is not an Asian dish, nor a new cocktail, nor a sea creature (though their mascot looks like one). Launched in October 2005 by Seth Godin, Squidoo, in their own definition, is a website manufactured to make web content publishing free and simple.

Getting started with Squidoo

Squidoo is a web portal of user-generated lenses (single webpages) that highlight one person’s point of view, expertise, as well as recommendations. Getting started with Squidoo is easy – all you need to is to create a Squidoo account and start creating lens. Users who create and maintain these lenses are known as lensmasters.

To be user friendly for the non techies, Squidoo provides tons of handy tools so that web content publishing is ultra simple for all. The Web 2.0 portal also leverages other website services smartly. A single lens could contains written words by lensmaster, web gallery of Flickr photos, Google Maps, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, RSS from related blogs, NetFlix movies, as well as series of interactive features like polls and discussion boards.

Why Squidoo is a must have in your marketing plan?

Squidoo offers valuable marketing potential to millions. Everyday, millions of web publishers, readers, web surfers, and shoppers hang around Squidoo – sharing, communicating, interacting, shopping, and writing. By joining Squidoo, you get the chance (for free!) to build network and sell to millions.

If that is not enough to explain why Squidoo is such essential in your web marketing plan, check out these numbers: Squidoo, at the time of writing, has more than 700,000 hand built pages and had been reviewed by the New York Times, Mashable, as well as BoingBoing. More over they are one of the top 300 websites in U.S. and well recognized world wide, running a Google PR8 homepage, and guess what, the website along (excluding direct affiliate and ebay sales) generate hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to their users!

How Squidoo can be your best friend in web marketing?

So now you learned that web marketing Squidoo is advantageous and easy, how exactly can you benefits from the web portal? As stated in our article title, I am going to share a few tips on how you can leverage the power of Squidoo and win web marketing war:

1. Link Juice Power House – use Squidoo lenses to boost your websites Google PR.

2. Keyword Research – Squidoo provide comprehensive analytics tools, use that for long tail keyword research.

3. Community building – Meet people with the same interests or alike mind, join Squidoo groups and build your own fans base.

4. Sell your product directly – Squidoo allows affiliate links and provide direct eBay plugin, use that wisely and sell your products directly to millions of Squidoo users.

5. Find marketing partners – Don’t be surprise to meet other web marketers around Squidoo – they are all using Squidoo lenses to do web marketing. Take advantage on that and propose joint venture with other web marketers on Squidoo.

6. Better SEO quality – Can’t rank high with your websites? How about do it with Squidoo lenses! It’s no secret that Google tends to weight Squidoo lenses better in their SERP. Hence those with Squidoo lens stand higher chances in out-ranking their competitors on Google.

7. Draw free web traffics to your websites – Use Squidoo lenses as an entry point for your website and draw targeted visitors. There are various tools like ‘Big Arrow’ and ‘Black Box’ for those who are trying to market their website – use them!

8. Showcase your blogs – Publishing your blog entries via Squidoo RSS helps in many ways: one, your blogpost get link juice; two, with proper title writing it draws interested readers to read further – either ways increase your blog popularity and hopefully, profitability.

9. Get customer feedbacks and opinions – In the Web 2.0 era, gone are the days where your audience will just listen to you like a 5-year old kid. For continuous improvement, one can always use Squidoo features (like poll and discussion board) to collect comments and new ideas.

Bottom Line

Well, that’s 9 ways on how you can employ Squidoo in your web marketing strategy. A few points worth noting are that Squidoo is completely free. Also, lensmasters are enrolled in royalty payment where you can share the website’s profit for your own good or for charities (cool isn’t?).

Wrapping things up, I see there is nothing to lose for you to start Squidoo-ing. So why wait? Start a Squidoo lens today!

My thanks to Jerry for this great post. I hope you leave him lots of comments, and of course visit him at Web Hosting Secrets Revealed to learn more.

20 Comments »

Lindsay:

I’ve been playing with Squidoo (on a very part time basis) for about three months, and I do get some traffic from there. Some comes from my lenses and some comes from the forum.

I’m not sure I’ve been on there long enough to see any SEO benefit for my own sites.

Lindsay´s last blog post..$250 Writing/Blogging Contest — Write a Fable for Your Blog and Win!

Mitch Reply:
November 20th, 2008 at 9:52 AM

Thanks for your post, Lindsay. I don’t know anything much about Squidoo either, at least until reading this post, and John’s post, and now I’m going to have to seriously consider trying it out.

November 20th, 2008 | 2:46 AM

Ajith Edassery:

This is a very nice post. I never used Squido though I have been hearing about it for a long time now…

What about the traffic potential to your blog if you ’squido’ a lot?

Cheers,
Ajith

PS: Mitch, for some reason your blog is very slow of late. You may want to check your server stat

Mitch Reply:
November 20th, 2008 at 9:36 AM

Thanks for writing Ajith. Either Jerry or John’s post below should answer the traffic potential, but it looks like it’s good.

On the other, I had a plugin that, oddly enough, was supposed to speed up the site for people, but it’s been known to slow it down also. Just turned it off and it’s working faster for me, so hopefully it’ll run faster for others as well.

November 20th, 2008 | 5:25 AM

John Dilbeck:

Good morning, Mitch.

Thanks for mentioning me in your introduction. I love Squidoo.

I’ve been building lenses since Squidoo was in beta and have plans for many more in the near future.

Jerry, I agree with the points you made.

I’d like to add a few more.

If you don’t mind, I’ll use my lensography as an example: Who is John Dilbeck?.

Starting at the bottom of the right column, each lens comes with social networking tools, built in. Additionally, we can optionally set up our account so that we can send lens update notices to Twitter with the click of a link. I get quite a few visits from my Twitter followers just by doing this.

Each lens has an RSS feed that shows the most recent Squidcasts you’ve written about the lens. I’ve come to think of these feeds as a mini-blog. If you want, they can be syndicated elsewhere, posted to Twitter, or even broadcast to your mailing list using various tools.

In the left-column, just to the left of the social networking tools I mentioned, I’ve added a Lijit.com search module. This can be customized to include content from your lenses, blogs, websites and other content you offer.

When you search in that box, you should see what I’ve written, first. If you want to expand it to include my neighborhood (think in terms of MyBlogLog.com) or the entire web, it’s just a matter of clicking the appropriate tab.

I don’t know if anyone else uses it, but I find it handy when I want to find something I wrote and don’t remember which site it is on.

Below that are some of my newer lenses I want to feature. (Hang on a second, I need to add one. Done.)

A little way down the page, you’ll see where I’ve syndicated the RSS feed from my primary blog. It’s very easy to do.

Below that, I’m showing some of the latest comments I’ve made around the web using BackType.com.

Below that, I’ve linked to some of my favorite social networking sites. Come and be social, if you want.

Next, I’ve used the Twitter module to syndicate my tweets.

Then, my FriendFeed feed is syndicated.

Below that, you’ll see more of my lenses, a nonsense voting module about my qualities or lack thereof, another blog feed syndication, and more lenses.

Eventually, you arrive at my Lulu.com module where I show my publications available for download and/or purchase at Lulu. This is basically a placeholder for now, but I have plans to produce reports and ebooks that will be available at Lulu – some free, some will be sold.

Once the Lulu module is in place, all changes I make in my Lulu store will automatically be syndicated on any lens where I add a Lulu module.

Next, I’m promoting my CafePress store, where I sell a few hundred items every year. I love getting paid now for work I did months or years ago.

Towards the bottom is another syndicated blog and then a feedback section where fellow lensmasters can leave comments. This can be set for only logged-in lensmasters or for anyone to comment. I get much less spam when I set it to lensmasters only.

That’s a very long lens that is used only to promote me, my business, my lenses, my blogs, etc. It’s all about me.

As you can see, I have lenses that focus on a variety of topics and use lots of different modules to accomplish what I want.

Hi, Ajith.

I get quite a bit of traffic to my blogs from Squidoo, but much more from Google. I do think the Squidoo lenses help make my blogs more “visible” to Google, but I can’t prove it.

For those who are interested in Google page rank, you’ll be happy to learn that lenses can be ranked quickly. Even my newest lens, Can AWeber and Squidoo Work Together?, already shows a PR of 3 and it’s only a week or so old.

There are many other specialty modules that can be used on lenses that you’ll have to explore for yourself.

While we can do lots with our lenses, there are some things we can’t do. Most notably, to me at least, is the restriction against using javascript, and the HTML tags for forms and iforms.

They were misused in the past and have been restricted on our lenses.

I hope I didn’t get too long-winded or go overboard here. I really do love Squidoo. Not only is it free, but I get paid to use it every month. Nice deal!

Act on your dream!

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Can AWeber and Squidoo Work Together?

Mitch Reply:
November 20th, 2008 at 9:38 AM

Very nicely written, John; you always write valuable comments. There’s some things you do that I’d love to have an offline, possibly email, conversation with you about. Seems we have some similar thoughts on some things. As for Squidoo, it looks like you’ve really explored it thoroughly and found it to work well for you. My only question, and others might ask the same thing, is how long it takes to put one together versus writing a blog post or even creating a website. Thanks.

November 20th, 2008 | 8:05 AM

John Dilbeck:

Good morning, Mitch.

Sure, I’d be happy to have an email conversation with you.

It’s hard to compare a lens with a blog post.

Sometimes I can write a good blog post in a half-hour. Some take several hours.

I can create a basic lens on a topic in an hour, if I’ve already researched the topic.

Building most of my lenses and websites is a multi-step process. In most cases, I start with a basic lens with five or six modules and then add to it over time as I find something that fits.

Perhaps I add new links, an Amazon.com module, syndicate a category feed from one of my blogs, or whatever.

Most of my lenses are built over a period of months or years and I don’t ever consider them finished.

Well, that’s not true. There are some that are finished because I am no longer going to promote the topic they are focused upon. I’ll be deleting them when the appropriate time arrives.

Since I’m a Giant Squid, I have to keep a minimum of 50 good lenses to retain the status. Last year I had to delete 50 lenses when a company changed their direction and I’d already developed a lens for each of the 50 states.

Now, I’m back down to about 70 lenses and plan to delete about 10 of them around the first of the year, but, if things go as planned, I will be adding several dozen lenses over the coming year.

So, how long it takes to build a lens depends upon a number of things.

It’s also a process. Now that I have Twitter set up, it’s easy to add a Twitter module where appropriate.

The same thing applies to Lulu, Lijit, BackType, and other similar modules. It took some time to initially set them up, but now I can add one of those modules to a lens in minutes – and I’m on a very slow dial-up connection. If broadband were available here, I could do some of them in seconds.

Let me go back to that statement I made about the PR rank of my newest lens. I think it’s a 3, but I can’t be sure because the Firefox add-on I’m using has been flaky all morning. Sometimes it shows a N/A, 1, or 3, so I’m not sure if any of them are accurate.

I’d be happy to try to answer any questions about Squidoo. If I don’t know the answer, I probably know someone who does.

Act on your dream!

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Can AWeber and Squidoo Work Together?

November 20th, 2008 | 10:56 AM

Kikolani | Poetry, Photography, Blogging Tips:

I need to get back to work on my Squidoo lens about Social Media Marketing & Networking. I want to add a few more networks, including BlogCatalog, onto it before promoting it again.

~ Kristi

Kikolani | Poetry, Photography, Blogging Tips´s last blog post..Rays of Sunlight

November 20th, 2008 | 1:29 PM

Marelisa:

I love squidoo, the lenses are so much fun to build. I have five lenses, one of which was in the top 100 for about 47 days.

Mitch Reply:
November 21st, 2008 at 9:10 PM

To Marelisa and Kristi, I’ll have to find the time to explore Squidoo. I have to admit, goofy as this might sound, that I stayed away mainly because of the name. It just had this sound I didn’t like, so I never took it seriously. Judged the book by the sound; shame. lol

November 21st, 2008 | 3:41 PM

Dennis Edell:

“One of his major reviews was for a site called , which you should check out.”

What was the site?

Dennis Edell´s last blog post..2 NEW BLOGS Unveiled! FINALLY!!

Dennis Edell Reply:
November 21st, 2008 at 8:23 PM

Oops, forgot to check the notify me.

Dennis Edell´s last blog post..2 NEW BLOGS Unveiled! FINALLY!!

Mitch Reply:
November 21st, 2008 at 9:09 PM

Lunarpages. Now that’s odd; I hadn’t closed a tag, yet the broken link checker didn’t flag it, and I wonder why. Nice catch.

Dennis Edell Reply:
November 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 PM

It won’t catch it if the link isn’t actually produced.

Dennis Edell´s last blog post..2 NEW BLOGS Unveiled! FINALLY!!

Mitch Reply:
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:34 PM

Ahh, that makes sense. lol

November 21st, 2008 | 8:23 PM

Lee:

I’ve never tried Squidoo before – after setting up a page do you need to update and maintain it or can you just move on and create another?

Does it really generate much in the way of extra traffic?

Lee´s last blog post..5 Types Of Social Networking Scam – #5 Spam

November 23rd, 2008 | 6:14 PM

Jerry @ Web Hosting Secret Revealed:

Guys, thanks for all the comments and good words. Was away from my desk a few days thus am late for all the discussion.

@Ajith:
I think John’s detail reply had all your doubts cleared thus I’m not gonna go in length here. In short, yes, Squidoo helps driving traffics – regardless you are running a blog or website.

@Lee:
There are in fact, lots of web marketers using the method you mentioned – creating loads of short/simple Squidoo lens (and most of these lenses don’t provide real value to the users).

In case you’re aiming the Google PR then yeah, such ‘hit-and-run’ method would help. However if you are trying to earn traffics from Squidoo, your lens have to be providing real value and preferably ‘fresh’.

I would suggest to separate your subject into 5 – 10 lenses. Offer real valuable content – people are reading for real in Squidoo (after all, if you have a site on that subject, I’m sure you have plenty of understandings on it). Also, use Squidoo module ‘Big Picture’, ‘Poll’, ‘Big Arrow’… wisely to make your lenses appealing.

On the other hand, contradictory, the key of attracting traffics from Squidoo is NOT to throw out all the information to your users. Say that you’re running a lens on ‘How to lose 10kgs in 10 days’ – your Squidoo lens might cover the things to be done in the first 5 days; and ask readers to ‘read more’ at your website for the next 5 days. In this case, Squidoo lens is like your PR staff, it helps you connect and build trust with your readers, and lead them read further at your website.

I hope my answer helps.

Jerry @ Web Hosting Secret Revealed´s last blog post..How to retain search ranking when moving your blog?

November 24th, 2008 | 9:49 PM

John Dilbeck:

Hi Jerry,

That’s a great idea of providing partial information on a lens with a link to your blog or site for the rest of the information.

It’s like writing an article listing the top five items, and then having a resource box with a link to another five or ten items on the topic.

Right?

(Not that I know about article marketing – it’s something I’ve sadly neglected to do, but I can see how Squidoo and EzineArticles.com could be complementary sources of traffic.)

Act on your dream!

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Are you chasing your tail?

December 15th, 2008 | 1:24 AM

Mirjam:

nice nice, only found this post because you mentioned it in your newest post LOL, and the “Squidoo” got my attention. I am really getting into Squidoo lately, starting to love it really so this was nice to read ;9