Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 300 most viewed in the United States. Squidoo grew 91% in 2008, and had 900,000 handbuilt lenses as of February 2009.
According to Seth Godin, creator of Squidoo, "Everyone's an Expert (about something). How do you get more people to visit your site? or buy your product? or donate to your charity online? How do you get your ideas to spread? If you work on the web, this is one of the biggest questions you wrestle with. It has led to SEO and to AdWords, to banners and to online copywriting, to blogs and to tags..." And now Squidoo.
What Are The Benefits of Squidoo?
1. Squidoo lenses get indexed very quickly. It is not uncommon to make a lense and find it in Google search returns in 48 hours. New websites have been known to wait MONTHS to feel some Google love!
2. Google LOVES Squidoo. Google places a lot of value in the pages here on Squidoo. Most lenses will climb to the top of the results for their keywords (given that the lens is made properly).
3. Squidoo shares revenue from advertisements with it's lensmasters. (Yes, you can make money from your Squidoo lenses)
4. Uh... It's FREE. Do I have to explain why a free and powerful tool is a benefit? Didn't think so.
The Squidoo lenses are a great way to get traffic and recognition as a niche expert. You can create a Squidoo lens about the products or your business and then market it on Squidoo. This way, Squidoo can be your steady traffic source for your website.
Squidoo marketing is not very difficult. The only major problem is the common mistakes which are repeated over and over again by the beginners. You should avoid them and there is no need to worry about the traffic then. You will surely get a lot of traffic from Squidoo.
Here are some of the classical mistakes which you should avoid at all costs.
Most of the people are unaware of the importance of the tags at the beginning. They do not use them properly and then at a later stage they realize that they have missed out on a golden opportunity. If your profile tags are proper, you would surely get more attention from the other Squidoo users as well as from the search engines. Use the proper spellings while tagging and make sure that you are putting the relevant tags. Also make sure that your tags do match with your keywords so that you can attract the interested people to your Squidoo lens.
You should use your keywords everywhere on Squidoo. Make sure that you have a good keyword density as well in your articles and the text based content. You should use your keywords in other places on the Squidoo lens as well. These may include polls etc. Also make sure that you are using the keywords in the titles. If you are not using the keywords in the titles and the URL, you are missing a great deal.
Another major mistake that the beginners make is to ignore the opportunities which come your way in the form of putting hyperlinks on the Squidoo lens. The people think that putting the banner ads at the bottom of the lens is sufficient and they do not realize that they do have a lot of other places as well where they can put their links. If you are new to Squidoo, make sure you have not missed any such place and you your hyperlinks at all the possible places.
Another mistake which is commonly made by all the new comers is to only emphasis on the Squidoo lens and forget the community of Squidoo. You should never do that. The community will help you to get more clicks and more visits. In fact they are the people whom you are trying to attract to your Squidoo lens. You should communicate with the community by joining the groups. The groups will help you to talk to the people and market your lens and the business there.