Squidoo Lenses
Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply aven’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 ySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of our 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 few and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about our topic, as dynamically as possible.
Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever ince, slowly growing.
I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’m already starting to see Squidoo Pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for those member’s keywords!
They’ve now got about 65,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so here’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 email their review team once it’s one 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.
One other great feature to note is they share all advertising revenue with you for dvertising on your page! Some people are making lenses, and treating them as irtual Real Estate style publishing sites… Theoretically, you could make a few undred great lenses and live comfortably off the income forever.
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.