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Should You Create A Squidoo Lens?
-- We answer the questions: What is a lens and how can one help your business?
(The following article is a recent post from the MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog.)
Squidoo.com is the creation of Seth Godin, known for his popular marketing blog and books, and for coining such phrases as "Meatball Sundae." According to Godin, meatballs are the things businesses need, the foundations which their businesses are based on. The sundae toppings are the marketing opportunities-the social networks, the blogs, viral video and all the other things people engage in to shuttle online attention to their websites. A meatball sundae results when people try to mix the two things: Their attempts often fail.
One thing Godin believes every business should do is create a Squidoo lens, which is simply an easy-to-build single web page about any topic of your choosing. Squidoo lenses are free to build, customizable, and contain links to your official business webpage, your blog, your Flickr account, your hobby pages, eBay auctions and anything else you want people to find. Check out MightyMerchant's lens for an example. I've included an RSS feed with blurbs from recent blog posts, articles I've posted to the MightyMerchant site, and a MightyMerchant Site 'O the Day with a link to one of our customers. [While you're there, please take a moment to rate the lens and leave a comment in the guestbook :)] You can think of a lens as a mini-page that highlights the best your site has to offer or the most interesting information you have to share, and directs people on where to find more.
Squidoo lenses are crawled and indexed by search engines and appear in search engine results pages. There is no limit to the number of lenses you can build, so the idea is that when Squiders create many different web pages that relate to their field of expertise, there are that many more chances for people to find you.
Lenses rank highly in search engines based on the same principles of other web pages, so having incoming links helps your lens ranks higher. Updating your lens frequently helps too, because, as I've said, oh, a thousand and three times now, search engines love changing content! I have seen Squidoo lenses ranking highly on Google in certain competitive searches. Search for 'laptop bags' and see how highly it turns up on the search engine results page. LAst time I checked, the lens was number 1 on the first page!
Because the lenses are free, Squidoo does run AdSense ads on the lenses, and Squidoo keeps a portion of the profits. You can choose whether you want to accept the AdSense earnings on your lens or donate them to a charity of your choice.
The only negative I can think of to Squidoo is that it does take some time to set up and maintain, however, it's minimal and Squidoo is designed to be easy to use. Our MightyMerchant lens took about one and a half hours to set up, and now it only requires ten minutes of time here and there as I update it.
Bottom line: Yes! Create a Squidoo lens. Why not? They're free, fun to make, and can highlight your business in a more casual manner and with a different personality than you might put on your official page. While I can't guarantee that your traffic will quadruplezillion if you make a Squidoo lens, I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't try, and if even one customer finds you because of your lens it will be worth the price you paid to create it-nothing.
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