What is Squidoo?

Squidoo, Seth Godin’s brainchild, is an online social encyclopedia made up of lenses (user-generated pages). Lenses are little authority sites, much like Wikipedia and About.com. Anyone can create a lens for free on any topic of choice and the creators are called “lensmasters.”
Unlike most Web 2.0 creations, Squidoo is about what you know, rather than who you know.

Why should you create lenses?

• You are an expert on something. Why not share the knowledge?
• Traffic! You can include backlinks to your website. One way to use Squidoo to increase your blog traffic is by using the RSS feed tool. You simply load the RSS feed from your blog and the Squidoo lens will update automatically as you update your blog.
• Google loves Squidoo. The lenses often rank very high in search engines. Each page gives crawlers another opportunity to find you.
• Money. You have the option to donate 50% the money Squidoo makes from ads and affiliate links on your page to charity. Or you can keep it. Of the other 50%, 45% of it “covers overhead and stuff” and the other 5% automatically goes to charity.
• It is free.

For an example of a lens, check out Bolt’s ‘San Diego Public Relations’: http://www.squidoo.com/sandiegopr

By: Anne Carr, anne@boltpr.com