Squidoo Your Business

Yesterday I was interviewed about the features and advantages of using Squidoo by Krishna De of the http://www.thepodcastsisters.com">PodcastSisters - the podcast will be available in the next few weeks and of course I will post a link here! We talked for just about an hour and I hope that I gave some valuable tips to the listeners.

Before the interview I had made myself some notes and I thought that ahead of the podcast becoming available I would share those with you here:

What Is Squidoo and Why Was It Created?

Squidoo is a social networking site that’s the creation of Seth Godin. Seth is a best selling author, entrepreneur and renowned speaker.

If you aren't familiar with social networking, it's about people coming together in groups to act as a community around shared interests.

Squidoo was created to provide a unique social site that allows its members to build their own web page which is called a lens or indeed many pages/lenses. Members can build a lens about almost any topic as long as it isn’t illegal.

How Do You Register To Create A Lens?

That's all very straightforward and you just need to go to Squidoo : Explore Lenses and create an account and follow the links that you will then receive in your email.

What's The Benefit of Having A Lens?

There are quite a range of benefits to having a lens or two depending on what you are looking to achieve. On the most simple level you can drive traffic to your other sites through embedding links into the lens, adding your RSS Feed from your Blog and writing lenses that review what you offer at your other sites.

Squidoo gives you the option to easily make your lens a cash generating machine, which is something that makes it unique among the many social sites online. As a lens owner, you have an option to add advertisements from vendors such as Amazon or eBay to earn a commission on sales generated from your Squidoo lens.

For Coaches and other business people it's a great way to drive traffic to the main site where you are offering your services or products. Let's say that you are a Career Coach - you could create a number of different Squidoo Lenses each of them focusing on a particular aspect of Career Development. This would be a chance to demonstrate your expertise in these areas and at the same time point your potential clients to your offering.

If you wish, you can create also lenses solely for charity. Then the money that’s generated from commission sales and Google AdSense ads are go to a charity of your choice. Many people use this option to help raise funds for charitable organizations.

One of the major advantages of Squidoo is that the search engines tend to rank well-created, informative Squidoo lenses favorably in their search results, especially Google. This allows individuals to build lenses and get them in the search engine rankings fairly quickly. This is great for webmasters who can create lenses and point them towards other existing websites they own.

What Makes For a Great Lens?

This is much the same as what makes for any great website or article:

- Well presented and attractive to look at - without being overly fussy
- Interesting and informative content that the reader can engage with or learn from.
- Good mix of content and products - whether that be your own products or affiliate modules
- Not spammy! There are still some people who think that you can throw a page up and do nothing but push a particular affiliate product. It just doesn't work!

How Do You Drive Traffic To Your Squidoo Lens?

In addition to all the welll used ways of driving traffic here are a few addtional things that I do:

- Joining Squidoo Groups in the category that your lenses are created in
- Posting links to reddit.com: what's new online!
- Using a Blog/Lens Pinging service like Blog and Ping Tool - Use Pingler.com to Drive Traffic your Blogs and Websites
- Making extensive use of Social Bookmarking through a tool like SocialBot V3.0 | Quickly Bookmark ALL Of Your Website's Pages Automatically (Without Doing It Page By Page) With SocialBot
- Tweeting about them on Twitter / PaulDuxbury

I will keep adding to this list over the coming weeks as I share more of my own experience of driving traffic to my lenses.

How Can You Make Money From Your Lenses?

Well, in addition to promoting your own services or products and affiliate products Squidoo has a number of built in ways of earning money. These include Amazon and eBay modules where you earn a percentage of any sales made through your lens. There are also a number of other similar modules which focus on affiliate schemes for specific types of lenses that you can explore as you become more familiar with Squidoo.

Tips To Get Started

If you are looking to get started with Squidoo these would be my three top tips:

Decide on the niche(s) you are going to target and develop a set of niche keywords - this is where I use Micro Niche Finder. extensively
Look at existing lenses in your niche(s) and see what they are covering and how you can do it better. Or is there an area of the niche that could be covered in more detail?
Create great content or adapt your existing PLR materials so that they will engage and interest your future readers and visitors.

What Would I do Differently Now From When I First Started on Squidoo?

Looking back, although creating over a 100 lenses has enabled me to become a Giant Squid, I would probably have looked to split the lenses into different accounts for each niche. That would have enabled me to be more organised at times!

Do You Build Lenses For Others?

I have built a number of Squidoo lenses for others and if there is a level of interest over the next few months I am looking at working with a limited number of people to help them with their lenses and marketing their services.

I am especially looking to work with Coaches in a number of coaching disciplines. The service offered will include Lens Building and a lens maintenance service at a reasonable price. As I say I will really be limiting the number of people I work with on this to ensure that they get my full attention and that I don't end up working with Coaches who are competing with one another!