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.

As a child, I lived in an older home that my parents were restoring. One of the features of the home that my father created was a huge fireplace that he made out of fieldstone. He went out to an old gravel pit in the country, he dug up a big pile of stones, and brought them back to our house.

To look at that big pile of useless stones, you wouldn’t think it was much except a big pile of useless stones. But my dad turned those rocks into a beautiful work of art that became the stunning focal point of our living room. (Insert nostalgic pause here). As my father worked, I discovered that the secret to turning a big pile of stones into a beautiful fireplace was in carefully placing the stones and then working on the spaces in between.

The web is like that, too. Websites and blogs and wikis are like the big pile of rocks. They are out there for people to visit but they sometimes lack context. They’re in a conceptual pile and don’t always fit comfortably together. In a way, that’s what web 1.0 was all about: "Digging up a pile of stones" by creating websites.

But now we have this pile of stones, what next? How do we lay them out so that they become a manageable and useable group of sites?

This is what web 2.0 is all about: bringing meaning and coherence to those individual sites by bringing them together… in a way, it’s about creating the spaces in between.

Sites like Plaxo allows users to gather and manage online identities in one place. So if you have a blog and a website and a wiki and a half dozen other sites, you can gather them together and keep the content in a nice, neat, publishable stream.

Squidoo is another site that has been created to fit nicely "in betweens" sites to bring meaning to the big pile of stones. Rather than hoping that our website and our blog will be understandable to consumers, we can create a Squidoo "lens" to help people find our information and understand it. Along the way we can add content, additional links, opinions, polls, and other interactivity.

These sites are huge for opportunities for business. They may not be something you’d use on their own (although there are some who do so quite successfully) but instead, they act as the space between to help us bring context and meaning to our web presence; and tie things together.

If you have a number of sites or blogs or wikis (or some combination thereof), and they all link back and forth, that’s great. That’s step one. But there’s an important step 2 that you shouldn’t ignore: The mortar.

Start with a Squidoo Lens. They are free and incredibly easy to create. You’ll be able to link to and from all of your other sites and provide a new way for people to find you, but a way that will also help them to understand what you’re all about before they visit.

Visit the IAC Virtual Assistant Squidoo Lens to see an example of a great lens in action.  You’ll notice that because IAC Professionals offers much more than Virtual Assistants (and probably more than the first things you think of when you think "VA"), the lens expands on their many offerings across the web.

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