Do you Squidoo?
Squidoo, the cool site with the funny name, is the brainchild of marketing guru Seth Godin. Squidoo works a little differently from most social media sites in that it allows you to create as many pages as you want (on Squidoo, pages are called “lenses”) but it’s not a site that focuses on massive friending and following. The emphasis is on the content, and having a Squidoo lens can be a great way to increase your traffic and search result if you understand the community.
Squidoo calls its pages “lenses” because a lens focuses tightly on a particular subject, just like each page is supposed to do. The site celebrates the expertise of regular people, whether that expertise is business-related or pertaining to a hobby or specialized interest. Passion and knowledge are the driving factors. Squidoo lenses aren’t primarily sales tools, and too heavy of a sales emphasis will get you in trouble with the site. So will any kind of spamming, so Squidoo is a little more reserved than Facebook or Twitter on that count, but not quite as formal as LinkedIn. You can contact people you don’t know with a personal, relevant comment or email, but not barrage strangers with sales pitches they don’t want (which you’re not supposed to do anywhere). Lenses do offer links to products for sale, within the context of the content.
Good Squidoo lenses are simple. Write from your passion. Share information that actually helps someone solve a problem, or that provides content that’s perfect for a fellow fan of your favorite topic. Try to make your lens as useful and easy to read as you can. If you provide good content, the community rewards you by viewing your lens and making positive comments and recommendations. So avoid blatant sales pitches and the hard sell. Make the lens about your product, not about you or your company. And if your first draft of a lens isn’t perfect, don’t worry about it. Get some new ideas, read the Squidoo ebooks for inspiration, and do better next time.
Here are some ways you can live within the non-promotional culture of Squidoo and still have your business benefit from one or more lenses:
- Create lenses by topic. Instead of creating a lens for your business as a whole, write a helpful “how-to” lens on each of the different areas of knowledge that have contributed to your success. (Don’t worry; you won’t give away all your secrets.) You can start with the kind of information you’d use for an article or blog post, but then add features with Squidoo modules to make that information even more useful.
- Focus on solving a problem. This is another type of how-to lens, focused on a problem instead of a topic. Again, the magic is in making the lens as useful a resource as possible without turning it into a sales pitch. Don’t make the lens all about you and your company and your solution. Approach the topic fresh, with plenty of links to resources, including your own.
- Indulge your passion. People who have a passion, whether it’s for building model airplanes or building businesses often love to share their knowledge with others. Write a lens on something you’re passionately interested in, even if it doesn’t have a direct link to your products/services. Your bio will let people who like your lens find out more about you.
- Promote your book with free sample copy, links to online bookstores, a list of reviewers or bloggers who have mentioned your book, and some of the nitty-gritty details you didn’t get a chance to share in the book. Make it fun, make it personal and make it valuable.
- Show readers how to get more out of a product or service they already use. Maybe it’s your product, or maybe you have a related add-on to extend functionality. Create a site that shows readers how to do more with less, stretch a dollar, save money, or get more bang for their buck, and you’ll do well.
- Promote your podcast or blog. You can use RSS to embed your podcast or blog feed, and use Squidoo’s easy-to-build lens to make a great homepage at a fraction of the cost of most custom web sites. You can also promote your eBay site, or create a virtual online store focused just on products related to your topic.
- Share information other “topic nerds” will love. Have you ever heard a group of people who all share the love of an arcane subject talk when it’s just among themselves? The joy of sharing minutia with other people who really appreciate it is tremendously rewarding, whether your interest is academic, technical, or just compulsive about details. Squidoo lenses are the perfect place to share all that wonderful information that makes your friends’ eyes glaze over, and to find people who love those details as much as you do. A great lens that goes deep into a topic can create subject matter expert credibility among the Squidoo readership, and that can lead to guest blog or speaking invitations, or just great traffic!
Excerpted with permission from 30 Days to Social Media Success, by Gail Martin, new from Career Press in September, 2010.
Gail Z. Martin owns DreamSpinner Communications and helps companies and solo professionals in the U.S. and Canada improve their marketing results in 30 days. Gail has an MBA in marketing and over 20 years of corporate and non-profit experience at senior executive levels. Gail also hosts the Shared Dreams Marketing Podcast. She’s the author of The Thrifty Author’s Guide to Launching Your Book and 30 Days to Social Media Success: Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook. Find her online at www.GailMartinMarketing.com, on Twitter @GailMartinPR and check out her Facebook page at 30 Day Results Guide.
