What is Squidoo and How Can It Help My Online Business?

Squidoo is a self-moderating social networking site, that allows users to organize websites, with blogs, links to Amazon products, Flickr photos and more, all focused on a topic the user finds interesting.

From the perspective of a marketing company, Squidoo is a great way to harvest a lot of linkbacks from Google Adsense keywords, so it's a great traffic builder.  Think of a Squidoo lens as a way to focus a lot of interest and traffic on the topic of your choice.

Here's how it works – you go to www.squidoo.com, and pick a topic that's important to you; we recommend picking a topic that's related to, but not quite the name of, your core product.  Or, more seriously, "What's your lens about?"  As with anything with marketing, "action words" are important – don't just make your lens about dogs, make your lens about activities you do with dogs.

Next step in the signup process is "What do you want to do with your lens?"  It's got four options of which the first (get the word out about) and "I want to make a list of my favorite things" are the most useful for marketing.  The first one is basically a "fill in the blanks" internet marketing campaign.  The second option (which is third on the list) is a way to do "stealth" marketing; by including your product in the list of products done by other people, you can use social networking to make it seem like consumer testimonials are backlinking back to you.  (Be sure to include a couple of "not quite glowing" reviews – they often help sell your products more effectively than a gushing review does, because it's easier to believe that a real human being wrote it, rather than it being a sock puppet for the company that makes the product.)

On phase 3, you need to pick your Lens Title – this is what people will see when they encounter your lens searching through Squidoo.  You'll also need to pick the lenses URL and rate it – in general, a G rated lens gets more traffic than one of the more restrictive sorts.

After you've done this, you'll have a set of options for customizing your content.  The nice thing about Squidoo is that it's a high traffic site with a lot of browsers; the more specific you make your lens, the more the filter effect of Squidoo will direct qualified, interested people to your site.  Plus, you can update it regularly including blog posts and polls, to generate user activity and get it referred by other Squidoo members.  By working your keywords in carefully, Squidoo is excellent at getting you high page ranks on Google AdSense.

Quite simply, Squidoo puts a lot of interesting marketing muscle at your command with no real techie skills required.  Any business that sells online, or wants to do market segmentation and differentiation, should look seriously into Squidoo.

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