Why Squidoo Makes Good Marketing Sense
Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers. It’s one of several interactive, multi-media web environments that is considered a web 2.0 site. The Squidoo interface allows users to create “lenses” which are individual pages hosted on the Squidoo.com domain that promote user expertise in a specific topical area.
You may be wondering what’s so great about Squidoo, when thousands of other sites allow you to promoter your expertise or do your own thing with a weblog or simple webpage. Make no mistake–Squidoo is unique. Not only does Squidoo make it incredibly easy to create a web page–ripe with graphics, traffic-building content, interactive modules, and widgets–they allow, in fact the strongly encourage you, to use the page to make money (which is very different from the marketing ban that severely limits profit opportunities on sites like MySpace).
A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place; HubPages is an example. But they’re far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other restrictive rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profit 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 so many ebooks and courses have been developed about Squidoo with an endless supply of guru marketers providing step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.
Squidoo provides savvy marketers with 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, honest marketing potential can never exist in a vacuum and Squidoo has seen its share of spammers who have tried to exploit the value of the platform. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google with a corresponding sharp drop in traffic. This was called 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 to ensure the 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 to 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 in an effort to grab cheap traffic.
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. You can build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone to be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the search engine rankings 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. You can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly to your own domain.
Squidoo is a powerful tool that provides new marketers with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that also has enough flexibility built in to satisfy the most demanding veteran marketers. Add a few lenses to your marketing strategy. If you use Squidoo properly, you may see both an increase in your preeminence as an expert in your field as well as some nice revenue each month from ad sharing commissions based on visitors to your lens.
