Squidoo Lens – What is Squidoo and Should I Be Using it to Promote My Business?

Squidoo Lens – What is Squidoo and Should I Be Using it to Promote My Business?
By Alana Burton

You may have heard of it, you may have even been on the website and had a look around, but you haven’t yet created a Squidoo lens as you’re still not too sure of what a Squidoo lens is and how it may be used to promote your business. If this sounds like you then read on.

If like many others you have put off getting stuck in to Squidoo because you simply didn’t have the time to get your head around it then follow the below to find out what makes Squidoo one of the world’s top 500 most visited websites and how it can be used to help promote your business online.

In basic terms, a Squidoo lens is like a mini website. Squidoo is a user-generated website community that allows users to log on to the site and create a free page about anything they like on any subject of interest as many times as they like. This page is called a lens as it is essentially a “lens” or focus into a particular subject area and as of early February 2009 there were almost a million Squidoo lenses online covering a variety of topics. The lens can then be found and promoted online, just as a regular website would be.

Anyone can create a Squidoo lens, and thus becoming a “lensmaster” and a simple lens can be created in a matter of minutes. Squidoo allows anyone to promote an area of interest through a web page without knowing any techy knowledge at all. It does help if you have a basic working knowledge of HTML to be able to add a lle extra something to the lens, but the beauty of Squidoo is that it allows you to create perfectly functional lenses without knowing any HTML at all. To create a functional lens there are a number of what Squidoo calls modules that you can apply to your lens to add links to YouTube videos, Flickr photo collections or even links to the weather report or to a chosen blog feed.

Not only does a Squidoo lens provide you with an additional way to promote an area of interest online but it also provides you with an additional way to generate income. You can earn money from your Squidoo lens quite simply and while the income generated does not amount to much, there are many people who are making a healthy income each month via their lenses.

Money can be earned through various affiliate schemes that can be linked to via your lens as well as through Google AdSense. If you have an eBay store, an Amazon affiliate account or a CafePress account then you can add these as a module, as they are known, to your lens. Any income then generated in this way is split 50-50 with Squidoo and you can also choose to donate your earnings to a worthy cause, as a high percentage of lensmasters do.

Alternatively, you can opt to have AdSense on your lens and the money generated in this way is pooled together from all lenses and is split between lensmasters of the community and Squidoo. This is done to prevent click fraud from lensmasters clicking on their own AdSense.

When it comes to promoting your business, Squidoo can be used to generate increased business as a means of internet marketing and it provides you with an additional way to direct traffic to your website. Once your lens is indexed by Google it will begin to rank in the search engines based on your chosen keywords so remember to make sure you choose them carefully. your lens can then achieve PageRank and just like with a website, an updated lens with regular fresh content will perform better in the search engines.

As a simple yet effective tool Squidoo has grown exponentially over the last couple of years and will continue to grow in the immediate future so start making your own lenses today.

Alana Burton

alana@artemisinternetmarketing.com

Check out my profile on Squidoo; http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/SEOVirgin

Alana works for an internet marketing company in Spain and specialises in Search Engine Optimisation. To find out more about Squidoo and of other ways of generating business online and how SEO can help your website perform in search engine rankings and to book a free SEO consultation visit Artemis Internet Marketing SEO Spain

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alana_Burton
http://EzineArticles.com/?Squidoo-Lens—What-is-Squidoo-and-Should-I-Be-Using-it-to-Promote-My-Business?&id=3326288