Squidoo: Fad or Fab?
From authors pushing their books and seminars to webmasters promoting everything from their e-books to their external websites, Squidoo is much more than a simple hobby site for people wanting to create small Web pages to earn a few bucks here and there. Squidoo is a marketer’s magnet because of everything from backlink potential to search engine visibility. But is Squidoo really a “fab” marketing tool, or just another Internet marketing fad?
How it Works:Â
Squidoo essentially offers one-page websites to anyone that wants to create one. These pages are called “lenses,” and can be used to promote products, services, or websites, share information and resources about a niche topic, and more. There are several marketing benefits that people are finding with Squidoo, including:
1. The ability to promote anything from their company, to a book they’ve published, to their own website (through RSS feeds, and similar tools).
2. The ability to create a content-rich niche page, based in the same niche as their main website, in order to gain quality backlinks from a relevant page.
3. The ability to get incoming links from high Google PR pages, because Squidoo lenses tend to rank well in search engines and pick up pagerank quickly.
Fad or Fab?
FAB – Here’s Why – Say hello to our first “fab” find in new marketing tools and tactics! Squidoo is a definite fab marketing tool, and it’s got staying power kiddies. So forget about Myspace marketing and other crap tactics whose ROI just can’t compare, and get on over to Squidoo.com to set up a lens for your marketing efforts. Here are some of the reasons why Squidoo is a FadMarketing “fab find” in the marketing world:
1. Most importantly, and what sets it apart from many of the fad Internet marketing tactics out there, is that Squidoo actively encourages you to use their lenses for various promotional purposes. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about being labelled a “spammer” of sorts, and having your marketing efforts on Squidoo cut off at the knees.
2. Squidoo isn’t about creating some crappy promotional page. It’s about using the context of useful information to promote something else. If you do it right, you’ll rank well in the lensrank system, get a bit of traffic, maybe earn a bit of money, and get some backlinks if you’ve included them. The system setup on Squidoo encourages promotion, but also encourages “responsible promotion,” and creating real value for readers.
3. Squidoo lenses tend to rank well in SERPs and gain Google PR quickly, which makes for a worthwhile backlink resource. Because Squidoo actively encourages good content on lenses, there doesn’t seem to be a reason in the world for Google or other search engines to eventually devalue those links or search placements (as long as you put at least a little SEO effort into your lens content, and work to maintain it).
4. It’s easy! Creating a nice-sized lens on Squidoo doesn’t take an enormous amount of time or effort, which means that even if you don’t get a huge marketing benefit, you’ll often end up with a decent ROI for the time and cost (or lack thereof) put in.
Related posts:
Ive created a number of lenses on related content and found it actually takes just as much time and effort to get your lens to rank well as your website. However, for a few niches, I was able to rank well on Google. Of course, it only took about 15 minutes to make each lens, so the opportunity cost was quite low.
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