Seth_Godin,marketer extroidinaire, is the founder of Squidoo, which makes perfect sense because it is a very smart site.  More accurately, it’s a very smart business model.  One of the holy grails of the Net is to manage to get user generated content.   In other words, you, the owner, are not having to produce the content or pay someone else or a team of people to produce the content.  Your users do it for you.   And Squidoo is based on that model. (The other other holy grail is having a transaction site where something….. goods or money, possibly information, is exchanged between users and you just provide the platform, stand in the middle, and collect on every transaction.  Ebay is a transaction site.  So is Paypal.  They are a great thing to have if you can figure out how to build on and get people to come.  But that’s another post.)

But, even though Squidoo is a very good thing for Seth Godin, it can be a very good thing for you too, if you have something you want to publicize.  Squidoo is a very popular website with millions of visitor.  Think in terms of diverting a small percentage of that traffic to your website by building links into your lens. Which brings us to….

Why Build A Lens?

Seth Godin explains:

Squidoo is a website hosting hundreds of thousands of handbuilt webpages (just to be difficult, we call them “lenses”). Each lens is one person’s look at something online. Your take on football or business or the best thai food in town. (Jane Goodall has a lens about chimps–to spread the word about a cause she cares about. Martha Stewart‘s company built a lens about cookies–to drive traffic to their site.)

Lenses are free to set up.

Lenses are easy and totally non-techy.

Lenses pay a royalty to hundreds of great charities. (Or straight to you! Lots of lensmasters earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a year).

Lenses get you credibility and traffic… and lenses only take a few minutes to build.

Quick! All the reasons ( at a glance)

The people who hope to do well on Squidoo build hundreds of lenses.  Is this a good use of their time?  Well, that will be determined by the results.  It seems to me you would really have to build a lot of sites to generate much revenue.  But it does seem to be a piece of the puzzle as far as driving traffic to your blog or website. Squidoo lenses can be picked up by search engines. You can place links to your site on the lens and then the Squidoo traffic, or at least some of it,  clicks through to your site.  I’m going to give it a try and will report th resuts back in a later blog.

If you build a Squidoo lens, please write to us and share the results.  We’re all learning this together!

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