Here is an opportunity to get another online presence absolutely FREE. Plus, it is one of the easiest ways to set up a site within minutes without any tech knowledge.
Squidoo, created by Seth Godin, the wildly-successful author of highly influential marketing books such as Tribes, Small is the New Big, The Dip, Purple Cow, is a site where anyone can create a “lens”, which is Squidoo speak for a one-page site.
Through their easy-to-use interface, you can create a page about any subject you wish. You can easily integrate content from any RSS, YouTube video, Twitter, your blog and more.
For online retailers, it is easy to come up with products/product lines to feature. If you don’t know what to choose, try a product line that is interesting, unique or exclusive to you. Need to get inspired, try these lens ideas. As of February 2010, there have been over 1.4 Million lens hand-created.
Why Squidoo? In addition to the active community within Squidoo, their lenses have always been indexed well in search engines. This is the real reason to create a lens on Squidoo.com – you can get another page (indirect link) to your online store!
OPTIMIZING YOUR SQUIDOO LENS:
Here is how to optimize your Squidoo lens for an even greater opportunity to rank higher in search engines:
- Keyword rich URL – create a keyword-rich name for your lens. The naming convention is http://www.squidoo.com/YourLensName.SUPER TIP:
If your preferred lens name is taken, try adding a hyphen, underscore or multiple hyphens in between the words in your keyword phrase. If that doesn’t work, try adding “action” words to your keyword phrases such as http://www.squidoo.com/buy-plasma-tv-today or http://www.squidoo.com/find-mothers-day-gifts-online. - Add keywords to your lens – don’t abuse this, but make sure to have your keywords within your lens content
- Comment on other lens – this helps your lens get inbound links and gives you an opportunity to find influencers in the Squidoo network. Ask people to rate your lens whenever possible. Other tips to maximize the Squidoo community are to visit other people’s lenses and sign their guestbook and participate in the forums to meet other Squidoo members.
- Write a keyword rich description in the author bio box
- Add “tags” to your lens – this helps Squidoo return your lens when someone searches their networks for an appropriate lens.
SUPER TIP:
To find popular Squidoo tags, ones indexed in Google already, go to Google.com and type in the following phrase:
“site:www.squidoo.com/tags”Also, you can also add a keyword after the above phrase to find lenses in your niche that are already in search results on Google.com.
e.g. “site:www.squidoo.com/tags gift basket” - Use bookmarking features – each lens can be bookmarked on popular Web 2.0 bookmarking sites. Don’t forget to bookmark your lens or encourage you customers, Facebook fans or Twitter followers!
- Link to your Squidoo lenses – in your online marketing efforts and on your online store or blog, make sure to link to your lenses. If you need banners, then Squidoo offers creative to help you do this – all found here.
Sample Squidoo Lenses from retailers:
NOTE: Squidoo is an extremely active place for affiliates. If you have an affiliate program, it is likely some of your affiliates are using Squidoo to drive traffic to your online store. Plus, Squidoo makes it super-easy for anyone to optimize their lens to make money with Google AdSense, eBay, Amazon and many other monetization opportunities.
Examples of lens built by affiliates:
For more examples of a good lens, try the Top 100 list at Squidoo. Although these are not necessarily retailers, you can see plenty of examples of quality lenses.
Here’s to your online (Squidoo) success,
David
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