Introduction To Introduction To Introduction To Introduction To ...
Intro
r duc
u t
c ion To Squi
u do
d o
Squidoo, the web’s premier content sharing site, is promising
to change the way people interact with the internet in a big way.
Originally developed to serve as a user generated directory to the
internet, Squidoo has for the millions of people who use it grown
into a one stop shop for opinion and information on various topics
that interest them.
And in the span of less of than four years that Squidoo has
been in existence, it has grown into one of the most visited sites on
the internet – with daily visits running into millions.
The popularity of Squidoo can best be judged by its earnings.
It is possible to make reasonable estimates of Squidoo’s earnings,
because the site contributes a certain percentage of its earnings to
charity. And given that it has given hundreds of thousands of
dollars to charity in the last few years of its existence, it would be
reasonable to assume that Squidoo is doing pretty well for itself
financially, especially given that the site also gives a half of its
earnings to its members in a revenue sharing arrangement.
What is a
a Squi
u doo Le
L ns?
Squidoo lens are the basic units that make up Squidoo. A
squidoo lens is in fact a user-created web-page, and not an optical
instrument as the name might suggest at first glance.
Anyone can create a Squidoo lens and doing so makes you a
‘lensmaster’. As a Squidoo lensmaster, there is no limit to the
number of Squidoo lenses you can create – only your imagination
limits you.
And there is also no limit to the features you can include in
your Squidoo lens. Things that you can include in a Squidoo lens
include:
• Articles
• Videos
• MP3 links
• RSS feeds to your blog
• And even E-bay and Amazon auctions
Anything as long as it fits in the Internet, it also probably fits
in a Squidoo lens. What Squidoo does is to make the process of
getting your content live on the web even easier than the blog did.
As it were, the process of creating a blog and getting it live always
required a considerable amount of time and maybe a bit of
technological know-how if you were to get a truly interesting blog.
Squidoo does away with this layer of complexity – which kept many
imaginative people with really good content from publishing it.
Through Squidoo, you have the opportunity to get your
content live on the internet in ten flat minutes which is a huge
contrast to the hours of coding and tweaking one had to put in to
get their content live on the World Wide Web in the old days.
Making money on Squi
u doo
Many people who join Squidoo looking for a forum to share
opinion and links to interesting resources they might have come
across on the internet soon realize there is more to it than that. As
it turns out, Squidoo offers its members numerous money making
opportunities that are simply not available elsewhere.
• For those who don’t want to strain too much for instance,
there is Squidoo’s own automatic revenue sharing program
– and to benefit from this, all you have to do is create some
lenses on the site, popularize the lenses – and then supply
Squidoo with your PayPal ID for them to be sending your
share of revenues from the ads placed on your Squidoo
lenses.
• For those who are willing to go a step further in pursuit of
money there are other even more exciting opportunities on
Squidoo. The site, for instance, allows you to post links to
your affiliate marketing programs. If people read your
lenses and decide to follow the links to your affiliate
marketing sites, you earn your money and Squidoo charges
you nothing for this favor.
• And if you feel affiliate marketing is too much of a hassle,
Squidoo offers you another opportunity to make money more
easily on the site. For this, all you need to do is to post
various E-bay and Amazon auctions on your lenses – and if
someone buys the stuff you post on your lenses then Squidoo
gives you half of what it gets paid for facilitating that sale.
Why people are
r flock
c ing to Squi
u doo
With its unique structure and money making opportunity, it
is no wonder that millions of people are flocking to the site to
become ‘lensmasters.’
• For one, they notice that Squidoo offers them the opportunity
to be participants – and not just spectators - on the web. As it
were, through your Squidoo lens, you get an opportunity to
make your thoughts published – a clear departure from the
old days when only a few voices of the technologically gifted
were heard. If you make a good Squidoo lens, chances are
that someone will notice it, tell another person about it, with
the third person telling another one about it – and before long
you find your voice really being heard.
• Even if people don’t see your Squidoo lens, the Internet
search engines could. As it turns out, Squidoo lenses are
highly visible to the search engines, and if you take the
(small) trouble to optimize you lens, chances are that it can
very easily come tops on search engine results for what you
want to say through it.
• Of course the money in Squidoo is another reason people are
flocking to the site. The financial incentive always works.
While there are indeed a number of other revenue sharing
programs on the Internet, but Squidoo is unique in a number
of ways. For one, it is authentic and it feels so. Most of the
revenue sharing programs on the Internet often turn out to be
scams – meant to enrich the owners at your expense.
Squidoo’s revenue sharing program on the other hand is
transparent as you can always see what Squidoo is being paid
for a product from E-Bay or Amazon for instance and work
out what your share of that is, after deducting the allowance
for its charity giving program.
• The fact that Squidoo allows you to post links to your affiliate
marketing websites (and thereby draw traffic directly from it)
is unique. Do that in most other Internet content sharing
sites, and you earn yourself an automatic and immediate
expulsion, with a blacklisting to cap it. Squidoo on the other
hand not only allows you to post links to your affiliate
marketing sites – but even goes further to actually
encourage you to do.
Squi
u doo for
r Webmasters
r
Webmasters are another group of people who are fast
realizing the immense opportunities for success that Squidoo offers
them – and in web 2.0 nearly everyone is a webmaster with their
own website, blog or social networking site-page somewhere. An all-
time headache for webmasters, as it turns outs, has always been
how to drive traffic to their websites.
With Squidoo, however, webmasters have discovered a number of
low cost traffic generation methods.
• The simplest of this is to develop interesting lenses with
links to their websites. Squidoo does not put a limit on the
number of links they can put on their lenses, a clear contrast
to many websites of its stature which tend to discourage
linking – maybe in the fear of spammers. Squidoo on the
other hand gets round the spam problem by the simple
understanding that if a certain lens proves to be spammy,
people will simply give it a wide berth and it will ultimately
prove useless for its creators and go under. Of course Squidoo
does not condone blatant spamming (and there is a spam
reporting feature), but it does allow and encourage sound
business promotion practices.
• Another way through which Squidoo turns out to be a
Godsend for webmasters is by giving them opportunities for
search engine optimization. As it turns out, links on
Squidoo are very highly regarded by the search engines and if
you can create many enough lenses with links to your site,
then you stand a real chance of improving your site’s rating
with the search engines. And using Squidoo for search engine
optimization does not amount to a black hat search engine
optimization trick, as you might fear at first. On the contrary,
Squidoo was meant to be a directory to the Internet, and
since the Internet works through links, it is only fair that
Squidoo, as directory to it be awash with links. Of course it is
important to ensure that your lenses – the web-pages on
Squidoo bearing the links you use to optimize your website
have high quality information and not fluff.
Co
C ncl
c us
u ion
Going by the trends being seen on Squidoo’s membership and
earnings statistics, it seem clear that Squidoo is just starting and is
going places. Numerous people have managed to achieve their
objectives – whether the objective happened to be ‘getting heard’ or
earning some money or optimizing their websites for the search
engines. Indeed, for the money oriented, a considerable number
have earned their first online dollars through Squidoo. You too can
be part of the fun. It costs you nothing, it is really enjoyable and
you stand to gain a lot – whatever your goal – by joining Squidoo.
Joining Squidoo, by the way, just means making a lens - a process
that usually takes most people less than ten minutes. Now it
couldn’t get any easier – or could it?
