Should you… what?
Squidoo is the brainchild of the well-known marketer Seth Godin. Squidoo is a multi-user site where, in a very user-friendly structured way, you create web pages on any topic you like. The web pages you created are called lenses. You don’t need any technical knowledge to create a Squidoo lens.
Why Create a Squidoo Lens?
If you already have a blog, why would you create a Squidoo Lens? One reason: backlinks. Backlinks are links back to your site from other sites. They are a measure of your site’s authority and popularity to other people, and to Google.
When you’re a new blogger, almost nobody is linking to you (except maybe others in your blog pack), so you can create links to your blog from Squidoo Lenses. These links are a portal for traffic, but they are also crawled by Google and added to its search index. You can put many links back to your blog in a Squidoo Lens, and you can create as many Squidoo Lenses as you like.
Legit Content or Gaming the System?
Squidoo has been in trouble in the past for being a haven for spam content, and it’s easy to abuse it in order to create a slew of backlinks to your blog. But think about what you’re doing, and what happens to people who try to game Google: your reputation may suffer, and Google is constantly improving in the fight against junk links and spam content. Remember: think Jedi blogger, not Sith. Think about what you want to achieve, not what you can get away with.
If you’re going to use a tool such as Squidoo as part of your blog marketing strategy, use it for the reason it has been created: content creation. Your strategy should be build a miniature empire of satellite content to the main “mothership” of your blog. That satellite content needs to be as carefully considered and useful as the content you create for your blog.
Even My Pitiful Lens Helps Me
I have a handful of sad little Squidoo Lenses, all of which are badly neglected and need updating. But the one I created for blog consulting has a Google PageRank of 3 and contains several followed links back to here. Do I get traffic from it? Almost none. But it is one more backlink with the anchor text I want, and that counts for something. Yes, I am nearly a complete failure at Squidoo, and I’m using that to teach you something valuable. That’s kinda cool, when you think about it.
I have tried to create legitimate content that isn’t just duplicative of Remarkablogger, but I know I could do better. Much better. Why haven’t I?
You Get Out What You Put In
Because I simply haven’t taken the time to bother with it. If I made this lens (and my others) into little powerhouses of great content, updated them often, and participated more fully in the Squidoo community, there is no doubt I would see even more benefits from my Squidoo Lenses.
In fact, it would be quite easy for you to go out and do a much better job at this than I have! Just make sure you have the time to devote to it–that’s always the crux: time. My priorities mean I spend my time on other things than my Squidoo lenses, like working for clients and putting together Gateway Blogging. But for the person who wants to take the time, creating great Squidoo Lenses will supply the important benefits I described above, plus something else.
One More Thing
When you create a Lens on Squidoo, you can set options for getting paid a share of any advertising revenues from clicks on ads in your Lens. Squidoo is basically paid for by Google AdSense. Squidoo is, in fact, a giant money-making AdSense machine for Google. Whether you will see any of that money or not depends on how many popular lenses you have and what their subject is.
While true you can make money from ads on Squidoo, the main benefit of Squidoo is not ad revenue, but to extend your online presence, drive traffic, and create backlinks.
22 Comments
I know a lot of people who use Squidoo but I never knew what it was before now. I thought it was similar to social bookmarking, but it’s actually quite different.
Hmm… not that you asked, but here are my Squidoo thoughts:
I’m still up in the air about Squidoo. I love me some Seth, and I’m interested in the model; it just doesn’t seem to be catching on the way I figured it would.
I’m told HubPages uses a similar model, but I haven’t explored that just yet.
I’ve got something like 150 lens names reserved, in case it ever does take off. Does that make me a squatter? Maybe.
I did put up one particular lens on the Beat Poets. I don’t really have (or want) another medium to do that. I could start a blogspot blog on the Beats, but I have no desire to update it. Squidoo lets me explore some writing areas I might not otherwise have opportunity to explore.
Beyond that? Not sure I have much use for it.
@Robert - there are social components to it, but as you can see, it is an “everyman” web page creation space.
@Bob - When there is a comments section on a blog, you ARE being asked!
Thanks for sharing.
As a backlinks/promotional tool, Squidoo is great. Personally, I find HubPage’s editing interface to be far more elegant and pleasant to work in. Squidoo’s is kinda clunky.
To get some real mileage out of it, consider treating it like guest-posting. I think that using services like Squidoo can give you some of the same advantages as guest posting on another blog, although guest posting is still a much better tactic.
@ MM - Very true. I started out writing a very opinionated comment, which is why the disclaimer. I toned it down, but left the disclaimer.
Meh. It’s early.
At any rate, I’m going to have to check out Hub Pages now, I suppose. I agree with you about the clunkiness of Squidoo’s interface.
I signed up for a Squidoo lens a while back, but admit that I have yet to actually use it. As you say, basically a time issue of needing to put my real blog, main site, clients, etc. first.
I had intended to use it by duplicating some of my more popular blog posts - obviously in an attempt to generate some more traffic. I didn’t think about being penalized by Google, though.
I’d be willing to bet that I just sit on it a while longer before finally deciding how (or how not?) to utilize my lens…
@Robert - No problem! You need to lower the blood levels in your caffeine system, is all.
@Selene - The Google punishments I mention had more to do with what happens when you try and game them. There is a search optimization issue with duplicate content that is a completely separate issue. In short, having the same content in more than one place presents an issue for Google. It can’t always tell which is the source and which is the copy. And because this is a tactic employed by lazy spammers, it can punish duplicate content in search rankings and in PageRank. Which sounds awful, I know, but Sometimes Scrapers are Funny.
I have a bunch of lenses that I created to generate extra traffic and provide focused info on some of the things that I do. There is a bit of traffic to my main site from them, but it is really the value that the lenses provide, in and of themselves, that makes them important in my overall scheme.
BTW, I also need to schedule some time to update them…
I was a major Squidoo junkie, did a stint as a volunteer moderator for their forum, and I help a friend market his series of more advanced Squidoo tools.
Squidoo is, in my experience, 10,000 times more effective than Hub Pages. It probably depends on the topic, but once you get how Squidoo works it’s not that hard to generate 300-500 hits a week for very niche keywords on a lens, while I’ve never been able to crack 50 on HP for the same keywords. I like Squidoo’s tools better and there are a lot more ways you can put content together in the way that works best for your topic.
Even if you don’t plan on putting much into it, I think it’s smart for everyone to create a couple of lenses and point them back to your blog just for the backlinks.
@Stephen - sounds like you have a good overall plan!
@Sonia - Really, you like Squidoo’s tools better? That means you are just plain weird.
Squidoo gets way more traffic than HubPages, and therefore will drive more traffic to your blog and give you better quality backlinks, for sure.
Thanks for your comment, it’s great to hear from a Squidoo expert on this post!
I love me some Squidoo! I see so many benefits - targetted exposure, targetted traffic, and targetted back links. I also have to add the the traffic I get to my blog(s) via Squidoo has the just about the lowest bounce rate of ALL referral sources.
I have one niche blog (not my main bog) that has ONE squidoo lens promoting it. The lens has links to the blog and links to related products that I see directly from the lens.
In the last SEVEN days, that ONE lens has had 1348 visitors (1088 of those are from organic Google traffic!).
256 of those visitors clicked thru to my niche blog and many, many clicked out to product offerings.
That is ONE Squidoo lens.
Squidoo is a free resource that pays YOU to create content there. When a lens is made properly, and has targeted, high-quality, and well-optimized content, it can help the exposure for your blog IMMENSELY.
Just my two cents!
Great blog you have here…glad I found it!
Jennifer
I will never deny being just plain weird.
The Squidoo tools get a little buggy and weird, but that’s because they do much more complex stuff than HP does. I probably should say that I like them better when they work.
I have three squidoo lenses (I started in March of this year). Two of them get little traffic (I think they’re beautiful lenses but I guess I haven’t picked the right keywords). The third is ranked 157 overall right now and I get between 90 and 100 visitors a day (most from google searches). Of those visitors, about 5 to 10 click over to my blog every day, so that’s a nice little stream of traffic. Plus, I had a lot of fun putting the lenses together. Squidoo makes it really easy to create lenses by providing all sorts of different modules you can use. Also, there’s a lot of really friendly people in the Squidoo community.
Michael,
You are so good at what you do and so helpful to us all. Now I have a request.
Would you please tell us in easy terms about no-follow, backlinks, anchor text? I read and read but still don’t get it.
Why would you have no-follow from Squidoo? I thought that was the reason to have a lens.
My problem is I have absolutely no programming experience at all, and am trying to understand these things, like where exactly do we put certain code and how.
I know, it’s a tall order.
We respect you a whole lot, that’s why I ask. If you are not able to get to it for a while that would be fine too.
Thanks for what you do.
Rich
@Rich - Sorry for the confusion! I didn’t realize this until your question, but there was an error in my post. I wrote “no-follow” when what I meant was “followed.” So, yes, Squidoo backlinks are followed by Google and count towards your PageRank.
Your suggestion is a most excellent one! I am more than happy to explain these in an upcoming post. Thank you for solving my “what do I write next?” problem!
@Jennifer - Those are some impressive numbers! Now you make me feel even worse for not keeping up with my lenses!
I will update them soon and add to them, I promise!
Thanks Michael.
I’ve never really checked out Squidoo and so haven’t really known what it’s all about. Also I’m naturally averse to marketing of any kind (which doesn’t help in a whole range of ways).
My question: it seems that a lens is just another blog. What are the advantages of a lens compared with setting up another blog (if any) - it seems like you need to be writing content in the same way?
@Evan - that’s a great question. How much traffic does a new blog get? About none. So the big difference with something like Squidoo is that it already has a lot of existing traffic. This is a case where competition isn’t a bad thing because you know people are searching on those keywords.
By the way, the best kind of marketing doesn’t look like or seem like it, such as building genuine relationships with people and giving with no expectation of return.
“By the way, the best kind of marketing doesn’t look like or seem like it, such as building genuine relationships with people and giving with no expectation of return.”
Well said! The power of recommendation…. permission marketing… what ever you want to call it. Stop selling and sell more.
@Evan, Squidoo is more like a very-easy-to-update static Web page than a blog. It’s not really intended to add article-style content to regularly, it’s more static than that. (Which is nice because you can ignore them for quite awhile without doing major damage. Within reason, and obviously they do better if you put more into them.)
Also, the squidoo.com domain has tremendous credibility with Google (the Squidoo Google slap is long gone, IMO, since Squidoo got very tough with any kind of content that smells like spam), so you can get a first page listing surprisingly quickly and easily depending on what keywords you’re trying for.
I should have added: Evan, I think you would like Squidoo. There are a lot of folks there who purely want to share information about what they care about. Yes, there are plenty of more obvious “marketers” too, but it’s a very friendly space if you primarily want to share your enthusiasm and expertise.
Actually I’ve joined squidoo for year but I still don’t use it for anything, may be from now I can start using that as you suggest
I’ve been on Squidoo since last May and I’m really pleased with it so far. One thing that I have noticed is that unless you have some serious link juice going inbound, you really need to work your butt off to promote them for a while. It takes about 3 months for a lens to really be able to be sustainable as evergreen content.
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