Use Squidoo to Build a Strong Web Presence

What is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a social website which permits the creation of pages to its users. These pages are also known as the lenses. The pages or lenses can be created for any subject of the writer’s interest. Squidoo has been ranked among the top 500 in world’s most visited sites. It also has a ranking in most viewed sites of the United States and is placed among the top 300. About 91% of the growth of Squidoo took place in 2008, and it had about 900,000 lenses on 1st February, 2009.

History

The development of Squidoo began in the year 2005. The site has reached nearly 1 lakh lenses within the first six months of its inception.

Structure

Squidoo is better known as a user-generated website. The primary feature of this website is the concept of a lens used in it.

The creator of Squidoo has defined the word lens in his ebook. According to him a lens helps in filtering light and helps us show what we actually need to see. Lenses are very similar to blog posts, except for one difference that they are on one single subject. The site also allows the content creators and writers to earn profits from links referred to sites such as Ebay and Amazon.com.

Anybody who is interested in a particular topic or subject is free to create a lens. Users who write and create lenses are known as lensmasters. They don’t need to be recognized experts in the field. In early stages of the development of Squidoo, Godin the creator observed that Jane Goodall’s and Martha Stewart lenses were not able to draw large traffic, whereas lenses like online game line rider and on MySpace became very successful. Squidoo is full of lenses on about 22 diverse topics, such as Food & Cooking, Health & Medicine, business, etc…

Payment method followed:

The payment scheme of the site is also unique. Of the total revenue earned by Squidoo, 5% revenue is given for charity. About 50% of the revenue goes away to lensmasters. The remaining 45% revenue goes to Squidoo. Creation of revenue for lenses and Squidoo is based on affiliate links and advertising. About 50% of the lensmasters contribute their royalties to charities featured by Squidoo. There are 65 such charities and also include the American Heart Association, the NPR and smaller organizations like Planet Gumbo and Chimp Haven.

How to generate traffic with squidoo:

You can generate traffic to your website with the help of squidoo by using the following four steps:

Create a lens, which will serve as a sign post to main page of your website since squidoo allows you to make a link to your website.
You should carefully build your profile particularly when selecting the page name or right lens. It is better to include the details of the products or services offered by you so that users can easily hit your lens.
Use catchy titles, so that more people will be attracted to view your website.