selfpublishinghelper.com

As an online publisher I have a dozen Squidoo lenses on various topics that point to my main blogs. I use these as a way to get visitors and to get PageRank. Squidoo is free, it is easy, and it helps your sites. There is no reason not to have at least one Squidoo lens for each of your blogs.

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages, which are also called lenses, on any object of interest. The Squidoo site is in the top 5 hundred most visited sites in the world and in the top 300 in the United States. It has close on 1,000,000 pages or lenses in 2009.

The Squidoo community website is all about sharing. It isn’t about direct promotion of your products, services, training or affiliate programs. Any direct promotion is regarded spam.

To a certain extent it mixes many sides of social media. It offers a platform to supply info about something on a Squidoo internet page. It allows the user to bookmark the current page and to share it with other users.

It also has similar features to networking sites in that one can communicate with other users. There is a user driven forum and a review facility. Both these facilites are there to encourage interactivity and communication with other Squidoo users as well as the sharing of abilities on the way to use Squidoo to maximum effect.

What do people use these pages for? First off a Squidoo page is actually called a lens. The thinking behind this name is that you use the page to spotlight, zoom into a selected subject. That means sharing your experiences, data or know-how.

The individual that has uploaded a lens is referred to as a lensmaster. The reasoning behind this term is that Squidoo’s idea is that everyone is an expert. It could be something small such as how to find the most cheap tennis balls. Or it could be something huge such as how to deal with HIV/AIDS.

Where ever you will fit into the sliding scale of expert category, a Squidoo lens is available to you absolutely free. You can upload text, videos, graphics or photographic images to enhance your offering and make it more fascinating for other people to read.

Because Squidoo is a user generated website the entire focus is on what people might have an interest in. You write and provide material on a topic you’re feeling somebody else might love to read about or even learn to do themselves.

This connection is what Squidoo is all about. It is a town hall where people can get together and share something with each other. What that is, is up to the individual and whether people might be interested in it.

By offering this town hall or common space to contributors they are reaping rewards from the concept of the sum being larger than the parts or economies of scale. That implies, Squidoo offers the user the benefit of visits or page perspectives by other lensmasters and site visitors.

They benefit from this volume of visitors and users which is now close on half a million visitors each day. Building a page in isolation all alone to be put somewhere on the internet would not be half as dynamic.

With these benefits and the indisputable fact that posting a lens or page is free, it stands to reason a Squidoo lens should become part of any internet marketing campaign.