Squidoo Lenses

Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply haven’t tried it yet! This exciting Web 2.0 application is truly a Business Marketer’s dream come true. You can think of it as MySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of your own topic at About.com, but with even more functionality!

A lens is a web page on their domain that “brings into focus” your niche topic in a new and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about your topic, as dynamically as possible.

Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever since, slowly growing. (It’s #601 today, still steadily growing.)

I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’ve even witnessed many Squidoo pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for that lensmasters’ keywords!

They’ve now got about 180,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… A few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so there’s no reason you can crank out one for each of your business ventures or marketing ideas.

To attempt to get your lens featured, simply use good Tags on your page, and then email their review team once it’s done and they’ll consider making it the “lens of the day.” These get some serious traffic, but of course they won’t select a lens that appears to be blatant advertising or boring.

One other great feature to note is they share all advertising revenue with you for advertising on your page! Some people are making lenses to use as Virtual Real Estate style publishing sites… Theoretically, you could make a few hundred great lenses and live comfortably off the income forever. Many are trying to do just that.

For our purposes, however, the benefit of using lenses for marketing our other websites is clearly the main reason to get involved. The branding you create and the nearly automatic stream of traffic will be well worth the time.

And did I mention that they are a cinch to put together? You could literally start and finish one in 10 minutes. Of course, the more work you put into them the better they’ll perform, just like everything else in life.

So how do you get involved with Squidoo the fastest? Here’s a free download from Bob the Teacher called “How do you do, Squidoo?” that will show you all the best ways to use Squidoo for marketing. It’s a very valuable resource if you’re even thinking about creating a lens, and it’s totally free with no opt-in required.

Joel Comm once let Bob the Teacher tweak his brand new Squidoo lens with no page rank and within two days it went from around #168,000 (dead last at the time) all the way up inside the top 100 in all categories! Bob’s personally had the #1 ranked Lens himself, and has also taught many “LensMasters” to achieve that great honor too… The man knows his lenses. And you should too if you could use some free, quality advertising.