Social Networking on Squidoo
Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers. It’s what’s considered a web 2.0 site that allows users to create “lenses,” which are individual pages situated on the Squidoo.com domain that promote a specific topic.
You may be wondering what’s so great about that, when thousands of other sites allow you to do the same thing. But Squidoo is unique. Not only do they make it incredibly easy to create a web page, ripe with graphics, content, and interactivity, but they allow – and even encourage you – to use the page to make money (very different from the marketing ban you face on MySpace).
A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place, such as HubPages. But they’re far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profiting potential.
Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years. This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why Tiffany Dow penned the eBook Social Networking on Squidoo, which was endorsed by an endless supply of guru marketers thanks to its step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.
Squidoo has finally created a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.
Of course, with the influx of honest marketers, a wave of spammers came to try to take over. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, and a sharp drop in traffic to boot – known as Google’s Squidoo Slap.
Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. They also banned four major spam topics from the site. This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.
They also instituted some policies with regards to quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself. This also helped deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links.
Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.
You can cross-promote your lenses. Build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the SERPs for many competitive keywords and phrases.
People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers. Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. But you can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly through to your own domain.
