Paul Duxbury

Yesterday I was interviewed about the features and advantages of using Squidoo by Krishna De of the PodcastSisters - the podcast will be available in the next few weeks and of course I will post a link here! We talked for just about an hour and I hope that I gave some valuable tips to the listeners.

Before the interview I had made myself some notes and I thought that ahead of the podcast becoming available I would share those with you here:

What Is Squidoo and Why Was It Created?

Squidoo is a social networking site that's the creation of Seth Godin. Seth is a best selling author, entrepreneur and renowned speaker.

If you aren't familiar with social networking, it's about people coming together in groups to act as a community around shared interests.

Squidoo was created to provide a unique social site that allows its members to build their own web page which is called a lens or indeed many pages/lenses. Members can build a lens about almost any topic as long as it isn't illegal.

How Do You Register To Create A Lens?

That's all very straightforward and you just need to go to Squidoo and create an account and follow the links that you will then receive in your email.

What's The Benefit of Having A Lens?

There are quite a range of benefits to having a lens or two depending on what you are looking to achieve. On the most simple level you can drive traffic to your other sites through embedding links into the lens, adding your RSS Feed from your Blog and writing lenses that review what you offer at your other sites.

Squidoo gives you the option to easily make your lens a cash generating machine, which is something that makes it unique among the many social sites online. As a lens owner, you have an option to add advertisements from vendors such as Amazon or eBay to earn a commission on sales generated from your Squidoo lens.

For Coaches and other business people it's a great way to drive traffic to the main site where you are offering your services or products. Let's say that you are a Career Coach - you could create a number of different Squidoo Lenses each of them focusing on a particular aspect of Career Development. This would be a chance to demonstrate your expertise in these areas and at the same time point your potential clients to your offering.

If you wish, you can create also lenses solely for charity. Then the money that's generated from commission sales and Google AdSense ads are go to a charity of your choice. Many people use this option to help raise funds for charitable organizations.

One of the major advantages of Squidoo is that the search engines tend to rank well-created, informative Squidoo lenses favorably in their search results, especially Google. This allows individuals to build lenses and get them in the search engine rankings fairly quickly. This is great for webmasters who can create lenses and point them towards other existing websites they own.

What Makes For a Great Lens?

This is much the same as what makes for any great website or article:

- Well presented and attractive to look at - without being overly fussy
- Interesting and informative content that the reader can engage with or learn from.
- Good mix of content and products - whether that be your own products or affiliate modules
- Not spammy! There are still some people who think that you can throw a page up and do nothing
but push a particular affiliate product. It just doesn't work!

How Do You Drive Traffic To Your Squidoo Lens?

In addition to all the welll used ways of driving traffic here are a few addtional things that I do:

- Joining Squidoo Groups in the category that your lenses are created in
- Posting links to Reddit
- Using a Blog/Lens Pinging service like Pingler
- Making extensive use of Social Bookmarking through a tool like SocialBot
- Tweeting about them on Twitter

I will keep adding to this list over the coming weeks as I share more of my own experience of driving traffic to my lenses.

How Can You Make Money From Your Lenses?

Well, in addition to promoting your own services or products and affiliate products Squidoo has a number of built in ways of earning money. These include Amazon and eBay modules where you earn a percentage of any sales made through your lens. There are also a number of other similar modules which focus on affiliate schemes for specific types of lenses that you can explore as you become more familiar with Squidoo.

Tips To Get Started

If you are looking to get started with Squidoo these would be my three top tips:

Decide on the niche(s) you are going to target and develop a set of niche keywords - this is where I use Find Niche Markets extensively
Look at existing lenses in your niche(s) and see what they are covering and how you can do it better. Or is there an area of the niche that could be covered in more detail?
Create great content or adapt your existing PLR materials so that they will engage and interest your future readers and visitors.

What Would I do Differently Now From When I First Started on Squidoo?

Looking back, although creating over a 100 lenses has enabled me to become a Giant Squid, I would probably have looked to split the lenses into different accounts for each niche. That would have enabled me to be more organised at times!

How Do I Manage Over a 100 Lenses?

It's something which takes probably a few hours each week. Once the lenses have been developed and the initial promotion done it's a case of tweaking and continuing the marketing effort. My Lenses tend to split into three categories:

1. Those relating to my main interest which is helping others through coaching and learning activity - whether that be people looking for business or career advice or me exploring some new developments.
2. Interests which I am passionate about such as caring for pets or something like the recent Gurkha Campaign for Justice which I am trying to support.
3. General Niches which I can explore at leisure without all the normal messing about to set up a website. Squidoo allows me to test out the level of interest and how interested I really am in a particular niche.

How Can People Contact Me?

Well there are a number of ways:

1. Through the email address on this site
2. Through Twitter
3. Through Squidoo Itself using the "contact me" on any of my lenses.

Do You Build Lenses For Others?

I have built a number of Squidoo lenses for others and if there is a level of interest over the next few months I am looking at working with a limited number of people to help them with their lenses and marketing their services.

I am especially looking to work with Coaches in a number of coaching disciplines. The service offered will include Lens Building and a lens maintenance service at a reasonable price. As I say I will really be limiting the number of people I work with on this to ensure that they get my full attention and that I don't end up working with Coaches who are competing with one another!

When I first started looking at how to make money through the internet I read what felt like thousands upon thousands of websites. I am sure that I have not been alone in doing that and to a great extent ending up feeling totally overwhelmed by the plethora of "opportunities" which appeared to exist. But how was I to distinguish the "bad" from the "good" when it was all so new to me. Like you I read those pages that promised me that I would be earning £'000's by the time I came back to my computer from the bathroom!

Here is probably the most important lesson I learnt very early on and that was to heed those wise words "if it looks too good to be true, then it is!" Like so many people I have read so much but instead of remaining overwhelmed by it I decided to rely on my gut instincts and those experiences I have had both in the real world and in running a very successful Genealogy membership website. I started to filter what I was reading into something that resonated with me and made sense in the light of my experiences in other areas.

I have made some mistakes and I am sure that we will continue to make them. I am sure that there are things that we are doing wrong but we are trying to learn and put them right as we go.

So I would summarize it as:

1. you are not going to get rich overnight or even in months - it is going to take time and dedication and hard work (despite all those people who try and tell us you only have to work for 30 minutes a day!)
2. You need to want to succeed and you need to have a clear picture of what success will look like for you. Here I drew on the experiences I have had when working for hours with Senior Management Teams Vision Planning! You must be able to picture what success will look like for you. As someone once said if you cannot tell me the colour of the Front Door of the house you will own when you are successful then you have not yet truly refined your Vision!
3. You need to have a clear focus on your markets and know what you want to sell - hopping from one thing to the next in the hope that "it" will be the thing that works is not the way!
4. You need to be big enough to say "I got that wrong - help!" and wise enough to truly listen to the advice you get.
5. You need to be your own "Guru" and by that I mean that you need to do what you do because it is the right thing for you.

You can be successful online and make money. The power to do it lies in your hands and in your will to succeed!