Squidoo is a website launched in October 2005. It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Squidoo came out of beta testing in March 2006.
Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.
Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions.
Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 45 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.
Provided by: WikipediaÂ
Squidoo is a social networking site. If you're familiar with MySpace, imagine it without the rowdy teenagers running amok. It's a focal point for your interests, pursuits, charitable work, pet peeves or whatever else you imagine. Each member can have as many focal points as one wishes, called lenses. Think of it as the best of a blog, a Web site, an About Me page and a Search Results page, all rolled into one and crafted by YOU.
Each Lens on the Squidoo website is in relation to a specific topic. And each of the modules on that Lens, generally relate to the topic being depicted. With this concept, each Lens has a great chance to have good-quality content because each of the modules are providing semantic keywords that relate to the main topic of that Lens, a concept that could really become popular with the major search engines. Most of the major search engines will look for semantic keywords on each page and rank that page on whether the content is good or not.
A lens is a focus on a given area - expertise, opinions, business, charity, etc. You can have as many lenses as you want (and have time to maintain). The lens itself is a jumping off place to websites, blogs, physical destinations, communities and so on. Here's an example: suppose you search on Google for information on a given subject. You get 2,000,000 possible links - but which ones are best? A Squidoo lens is pre-screened info on what you may be looking for. If it ain't there, maybe YOU need to fashion a lens and become the "inpert" (like an expert, but in one focus) on the subject.
I use my Squidoo Lens on several occasions:
- As a landing Page for my eBooks I promote
- A overview of all my websites and what it can provide to its users
- An affiliate landing page
- To collect leads
Squidoo, has helped me promote my ebooks and it has helped me developed sales. One of my popular landing pages is: BlackJack Hacks and Tweaks. I will be creating more once more products are launched. Another great thing that I enjoyed about creating a lens on squidoo is the fact I can use iframes. The use of iframes gives me more diversity and more of a design aspect to the page. I can customize the layout, add in forms, my own adsense, etc.
Squidoo provides the opportunity to establish yourself as an expert and to create traffic and income to your website or blog. Ironically, Google ranks Squidoo lenses very highly and even more highly than blogs. I have a Squidoo lens that was ranked in the top ten results for my keyword within two weeks.
Google will continue to value Squidoo lenses because they give the community the results they are looking for when they use a search engine.
