Do You Squidoo?

The popularity of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga is phenomenal. Social networking sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves and use it to create a virtual network of their offline friends and to make new friends online.

Another social networking site called Squidoo is based not on personal profiles of individuals but on people's expertise in a niche subject. Squidoo is another way for marketers to build an online presence easily and for free. Squidoo, headed up by "original squid" Seth Godin—the founder of Yoyodyne (which he sold to Yahoo! in 1998), creator of "Permission Marketing," and best-selling business author of Purple Cow and Small is the New Big—is built around online lenses, which are a way to filter a person’s expertise on a subject onto a single page.

With Squidoo, interested people check out a lens on a topic and quickly get pointed to useful Web sites. A person who makes a lens is a lensmaster, and he or she uses a lens to provide context. "Everyone is an expert," the Squidoo site says, and Squidoo helps everyone share that expertise with the world.

A lens is not a destination, but rather like a guide that sends visitors to other places. The Squidoo FAQ says, "It's a place to start, not finish." Lenses provide detail on a topic and point to other content such as blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, or Amazon books. I've created (at this writing) five lenses and for a lensmaster like me, the effort is minimal (each lens, such as the one I created on Web Content only took an hour or two to create), yet my lenses are consistently one of the top ten referring sites to my blog and Web site—only the search engines such as Google and the magazine and marketing sites I write for generate more traffic for me.

Auto Repair on Squidoo

Vince Ciulla, a professional automotive technician with over 30 years' experience, has created a popular Squidoo lens called Auto Repair – Trouble Shooting that points to content on his main site. A part of the All Info About network, this main site offers over 20,000 pages of auto repair content, including some 9,000 questions and answers. "A lot of people want to do their own repairs, and finding information about specific vehicles on the Web is difficult," Ciulla says. "Fixing your car is easy, the hard part is figuring out what's wrong. My Web site and links from my Squidoo lens is how people can get the information they need for free, such as how to replace a brake master cylinder. I also explain things like how the cruise control works."

Most of the traffic to Ciulla's site comes through search engines, but visitors also come from Squidoo. "The last time I checked, there were 210,000 search terms pointing to my pages," he says. Ciulla makes money from advertising on his site and also from telephone consultations with people who want to discuss specific auto repair issues with him. He's conducted some 2,500 paid telephone consultations as a result of people finding him online and wanting to tap his expertise. "To get more exposure for my content, I do a regular guest appearance on America's Car Show syndicated radio show and I have the Squidoo lens, which I use to funnel people to my All Info About site. There's not much maintenance required in Squidoo, and it drives traffic, so it is worth doing. I also started a Squidoo group with other people who have auto repair lenses, and we’ve got some people who provide information on hybrid cars."

Squidoo is not just for companies and independent consultants. Consider Global Action Foundation (GAF), a nonprofit organization started by a group of young professionals who work to eradicate extreme poverty. The GAF promotes their efforts (such as a project the group has begun in Sierra Leone to support amputees and their families) via the organization’s Squidoo lens. The GAF lens includes photos depicting the extreme poverty conditions that GAF helps to eradicate, links to the blog written by young American medical student John Daniel Kelly (who is a driving force behind GAF), and links for making online donations. This lens successfully portrays GAF work via the comprehensive content, and it encourages people to contribute.

Comments

[Dianna Huff]

David,

I've tried to use Squidoo a few times and each time I came away frustrated because I could not easily find things -- such as your lens.

That was last year. Has the site changed since then?

[David Meerman Scott]

Hi Dianna,

Yes it has gotten easier to use. And like any Web based user interface there are little quirks that take a few tries to understand, but once you get it - the interface is really easy.

David

[Marla Evans]

Dianna,

I just signed up with Squidoo yesterday and spent the afternoon building a couple lenses - and have a list of several others to finsh. I found it very easy to figure out, although there were some glitches in the process. Nothing terrible though.

Overall, I found Squidoo easy to learn and I'm looking forward to building the rest of my lenses.

Thanks for the article, David!

Marla
Marla & Mike Evans
Be a Mentor with a Servant's Heart
Our Blog
Our Web Site

[Michael A. Stelzner]

David;

I have been using this service for some time and frankly saw very little results.

I think folks might be better off in the B2B space doing their own blog.

My thoughts.

Mike

[David Meerman Scott]

Hey Mike, thanks for stopping by. I agree that a blog is much better, but it requires a hell of a lot more work. A lens is a create once thing. While I don't get tons of traffic from my lenses, the traffic is certainly worth the minimal effort that it took.

Take care!

David

[Ken]

The concept is similar to that of oondi (http://www.oondi.com) except that oondi will pay out 100% of the advertisement profits to the authors. Their hosting costs are covered by clicks which occur on non-author owned pages like the index but I suppose it's basically a non-profit organization similar to Wikipedia rather than a commercial one like HubPages or Squidoo.

[Simon Taylor]

David, you list the UPS IR site in your lens - their site looks competent but pretty standard in terms of disclosure, have you seen IR sites that are using social media and thought leadership effectively?

Simon

[David Meerman Scott]

Most IR sites are lame. The problem is they have been hijacked by IR people who only see one narrow audience for the content, rather than understanding that the IR pages are read by many people.

Another problem is that consultants such as Dominic Jones perpetuate the myth of the IR site as a stand alone set of pages rather than part of an entire corporate online publishing effort. http://www.irwebreport.com/index.htm

I like when companies have seamless links from the media room to the IR site and also to other content, but very few do that. Most box the various sites in the naive thinking that people only go to one part of the site. The truth is, people go to many aspects of a company site. Potential investors check out the media page, they look at the company's products and so on.

IBM's "IR viewpoint" is good. There are some podcasts and other things there. http://www.ibm.com/investor/viewpoint/index.phtml

But the IBM IR site doesn't seamlessly link to other pages on the IBM site (such as the media page or the IBM employee blogger page).

Assuming people don't want to go from one part of a site to another is like publishing one chapter of a book at a time with no easy way to flip back and forth to other chapters.