Squidoo Success Tips

Seth Godin’s Squidoo is an easy-to-use "plug-n-play" site that allows users to create content to help them share wisdom and point viewers to content on the web. To paraphrase Godin, people come online because they need help understanding something and Squidoo gives them some context by being your take on something. Godin wrote an ebook to introduce Squidoo and you can download this ebook here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/_everyoneisanexpert2.pdf.

Squidoo is free to sign up to and hosts many pages, called "Lenses". Users can create as many lenses as they want (although they’ve recently introduced some restrictions to fight spam so that might no longer be entirely accurate) and revenue can be generated from ads that appear on the lens.

Want 4 Reasons to use Squidoo?

• It’s easy: Drag and drop, basically. Anyone can do it, which means you can create a money making empire without actually having your own site.
• It doesn’t take a lot of time. You can create a lens in just moments, so you can create several lenses for your own business, plus lenses for each item in your product line-up plus lenses for each demographic in your customer list, and more. And it won’t take that long to do it!
• It gives you a backlink. Hey, we all want backlinks and Squidoo has a pagerank of 7 so it has lots of PageRank love to send to your website.
• It is frequently visited (ref. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/squidoo.com). If you can get some of that traffic to your lens, you can drive some of it to your website.

With just a few minutes a week, you can create an additional web presence that points back to your site and can drive traffic there.

However, like all internet marketing efforts, you can create it and leave it and it won’t do much or you can work on it a bit and reap the benefits. Here are a collection of resources that we’ve found helpful to make Squidoo lenses more successful:

- 5 Tips for Success on Squidoo. This gives a good basic overview of Squidoo and is a nice early-stage introduction to Squidoo success. http://www.wmtips.com/affiliate-programs/tips-success-squidoo.htm

- Social Media Money System. This article is one step up from the previous article in terms of Squidoo expertise. This is for intermediate users. http://www.a1articles.com/article_996080_12.html

- Squidoo Success. This Squidoo lens chronicles one person’s rise through the ranks of Squidoo success and includes links to other helpful information. http://www.squidoo.com/SquidooTactics

If you’re brand new to Squidoo, here’s where you should start:

1.    Download Godin’s ebook at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/_everyoneisanexpert2.pdf to get a feel for why he created Squidoo.
2.    Go to http://www.squidoo.com and read this page: http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo.
3.    Check out top ranked lenses at http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses to see what the level of quality is all about.
4.    Check out this site, created by an uber Squidoo user: http://www.captainsquid.com/. It’s full of more useful Squidoo tips than I’ve ever read anywhere else.
5.    Then, sign up to create your own lens, just to try it out.

Remember, like everything else, Squidoo is a marketing tool that can make you more successful it you invest your time and money into it. You need to decide if it’s right for you.