Why use Squidoo?

You’ve probably heard of Seth Godin’s Squidoo. It’s a free blogging platform where anyone can set up an account and write a “lens” which is their name for a post. You can even instruct them to monetize the post and get a share of the profits. But we’re serious bloggers, and we use our own domains, so we don’t need to think about Squidoo, right?

Wrong!

Have a look at this search for “How to use Twitter”

Can you see that entry number three is a Squidoo lens?

How about this one for “Internet Memes'?”

This time there’s a lens at number six.

So, we’ve established that Squidoo lenses can rank well in search – the site is set up for good SEO, and all lenses benefit from being on the main URL www.squidoo.com

How can this help us?

It means we can get valuable traffic by writing lenses ourselves with links back to our own blogs. There are three key  benefits to doing this:

• We can gain some traction for a particular post
• We can promote our whole blog
• We can direct traffic to a sales page

Let’s use the last as an example. You have an E Book that you sell on your site called “How to Cook a perfect paella.” You’ve developed a terrific sales page that explains all that the book contains, and does a persuasive job of selling the book to anyone who wants to know how to cook a paella. The problem is nobody is visiting that page. We need to find a way to get some traffic to it. Enter Squidoo!

Create a Squidoo Lens

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by taking you step by step through creating a lens – you can do that! But we are going to talk about what to put into your lens:

• The title should match the keywords you’re looking for. In this case “How to cook a perfect Paella”
• The introduction should identify you as the author of “How to cook a perfect paella” so establishing your authority
• The content should offer enough tips and ideas to make the lens informative and worth reading. Perhaps quote some sections from your book. But don’t tell the whole story.
• The summary should keyword link to your sales page to encourage people to get more information from your book

Simple, isn’t it? And you can apply the same to any post, or to your blog as a whole. You’ve instantly gained a link to your site, and if the lens starts to rank well in search, you could be on to a decent amount of incremental traffic.

Have you used Squidoo already to promote something on your blog? How is it going?

Want some more?

1/ Bring a great post back to life!

2/ So your E Book isn’t selling

3/ How the blogging market is changing