Netalot

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages, which are also called lenses, on any subject of interest. The Squidoo site is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world and in the top 300 in the USA. It has close on one million pages or lenses in 2009.

This community website is all about sharing. It’s not about direct promotion of your products, services, training or affiliate programmes. Any direct promotion is considered spam.

To a certain extent it combines several aspects of social media. It provides a platform to offer information about something on a Squidoo web page. It allows the user to bookmark this page and to share it with other users.

It also has similar features to networking sites in that one can communicate with other users. There’s a user driven forum and a review facility. Both of these facilites are there to encourage interactivity and communication with other Squidoo users as well as the sharing of skills on how to use Squidoo to maximum effect.

What do people use these pages for? First of all a Squidoo page is in fact called a lens. The thinking behind this name is that you use the page to spotlight, zoom into a particular topic. That means sharing your experiences, knowledge or know-how.

The person who has uploaded a lens is called a lensmaster. The reasoning behind this term is that Squidoo’s idea is that everybody is an expert. It could be something small such as how to find the most cost effective tennis balls. Or it could be something big such as how to cure HIV/AIDS.

Where ever you may fit into the sliding scale of expert category, a Squidoo lens is available to you for free. You may upload text, videos, graphics or photographic images to enhance your offering and make it more interesting for other people to read.

Because Squidoo is a user generated website the entire focus is on what other people might be interested in. You write and provide material on a topic you feel somebody else might like to read about or even learn to do themselves.

This connection is what Squidoo is all about. It is a town hall where people can get together and share something with each other. What that is, is up to the individual and whether other people might be interested in it.

By offering this town hall or common space to contributors they are benefiting from the concept of the sum being larger than the parts or economies of scale. That means, Squidoo offers the user the benefit of visits or page views by other lensmasters and site visitors.

They benefit from this volume of visitors and users which is currently close on half a million visitors per day. Building a page in isolation on their own to be put somewhere on the internet would not be half as powerful.

With these benefits and the fact that posting a lens or page is free, it stands to reason that a Squidoo lens should become part of any internet marketing campaign.