Black Squidoo Lensmasters

This free downloadable PDF guide will provide needed assistance to those internet marketers and business people who are new to Squidoo or curious about its use as a tool for building traffic, visibility, and expertise for their businesses and services. Squidoo is among the most popular and profitable of the social networks available for serious marketing initiatives. An understanding of how to use Squidoo to its fullest potential will distinguish your marketing efforts and pay both tangible (cash) and intangible dividends (visibility and search rankings) over the long term.

I want to create my own Black Lensmaster lens!

Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers. It's one of several interactive, multi-media web environments that is considered a web 2.0 site. The Squidoo interface allows users to create "lenses" which are individual pages hosted on the Squidoo.com domain that promote user expertise in a specific topical area.

You may be wondering what's so great about Squidoo, when thousands of other sites allow you to promoter your expertise or do your own thing with a weblog or simple webpage. Make no mistake-Squidoo is unique. Not only does Squidoo make it incredibly easy to create a web page-ripe with graphics, traffic-building content, interactive modules, and widgets-they allow, in fact the strongly encourage you, to use the page to make money (which is very different from the marketing ban that severely limits profit opportunities on sites like MySpace).

A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place; HubPages is an example. But they're far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other restrictive rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profit potential.

Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years. This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why so many ebooks and courses have been developed about Squidoo with an endless supply of guru marketers providing step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.

Squidoo provides savvy marketers with a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.

Of course, honest marketing potential can never exist in a vacuum and Squidoo has seen its share of spammers who have tried to exploit the value of the platform. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google with a corresponding sharp drop in traffic. This was called Google's Squidoo Slap.

Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. They also banned four major spam topics from the site. This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.

They also instituted some policies to ensure the quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself. This also helped to deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links in an effort to grab cheap traffic.

Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.

You can cross-promote your lenses. You can build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone to be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the search engine rankings for many competitive keywords and phrases.

People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers. Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. You can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly to your own domain.

Squidoo is a powerful tool that provides new marketers with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that also has enough flexibility built in to satisfy the most demanding veteran marketers. Add a few lenses to your marketing strategy. If you use Squidoo properly, you may see both an increase in your preeminence as an expert in your field as well as some nice revenue each month from ad sharing commissions based on visitors to your lens.

If you already have a Squidoo lens or multiple lenses, consider joining our Black Squidoo Lensmasters Group. If you want to get started making your own lens and becoming an expert, then start here.

Methinks I do. I've been twittering over the last few days thanks to TweetDeck and Twellow, finding new Black Internet Marketers to connect with and follow. I've also set up a search for those who are tweeting about Squidoo and found quite a few Black Lensmasters that I'm hoping will join my Black Lensmasters group.

In the process of making connections, I came across I.C. Jackson, a black lensmaster and Giant Squid. Giant Squids are an elite group of lensmasters who have 50 high quality lenses (I.C. Jackson has over 70 lenses) and are committed to excellence in using Squidoo as a method for promoting their expertise while providing valuable information to others.

I began a series of lenses related to Internet Marketing with the hope of eventually building over 50 such lenses as part of an inter-connected series that might quality me to become a Giant Squid.

Seing what Ms. Jackson has done in a relatively short period of time has been just the urging I needed to get back to completing that project--it's easy to create one or two lenses a day once you find a formula that works and balances good content and interactive features.

Who knows. I have a few lenses that make me $20 or so each month. If I make 50 quality lenses, that could easily become a few hundred in monthly residual income. I'm going to get busy. What are you waiting for?

As many of you know, I'm a big fan of Squidoo for building your expertise and sending traffic to your main sites while also making money from the revenue sharing program that Squidoo has in place for all of it's Lensmasters.

Once you set up a few good lenses, it doesn't take much effort to do some minor updating every few weeks and receive decent commission checks based on the traffic and click through revenue generated by your lens content.

Given the good results that I've seen with a few good lenses and my own lensography, I've decided to set up some other lenses using some basic internet marketing fundamentals that will allow me to establish excellent content and a broader target audience within my niche. If I do things right, this should become a pretty strong source of recurring revenue while also helping to build my blog readership, forum membership and business directory subscriptions.

Check out my Squidoo Internet Marketing Strategy Index. This lens is the main index for my Internet Marketing Strategy Seminar series. My Internet Marketing Strategy Seminar lenses offer individual topical overviews and lessons about specific online marketing strategies and tactics that you can implement for immediate marketing impact.