Extravaganza Guest Blogger:: Genesis Davies

Squidoo: How to Use It to Promote Your Business

I’ve been using Squidoo for years, but early on, I didn’t see the potential in it and really did very little with it. These days, I know better and the site has become one of my main methods of promotion. One of my lenses that was built over two years ago and has barely been touched since, brings in over 100 visitors a week to my main blog. That might not be a lot, but it does add up!

Why should you consider using Squidoo to promote your business? Well, there are a few great reasons, the first of which is that it is completely free . . . in fact you can actually earn money from them. For today’s purposes, however, we’re going to be looking at the promo value.

Squidoo is also very well liked by Google, so pages or “lenses” as they are called, are ranked quickly and quite high. That means great backlinks, as well as more traffic. Squidoo lenses are excellent sources of high quality traffic . . . people come across them while looking for information and click through the links to your business website.

Getting Started

Signing up for Squidoo is very simple. You’ll be prompted to set up your first lens immediately. Make sure to use top keywords in your title and URL and to select the “Do my own thing” option when setting it up. This will send you to a lens that has just an intro box or module.

To set up your lens, you can add modules, of which there are hundreds. Don’t get too fancy though! Just an intro module, a couple of text modules and a guestbook are fine for your first lens. You can tweak later.

Fill in the intro module first. This should just be an introduction to your business or the topic you’re writing about. Keep it short, about 100-150 words and keep in mind that the first couple of sentences are what will appear in search engines.

Write two short articles, about 200 words long, using your keyword. This is actually something that can be easily outsourced. Add these to your text modules and include a photo. You can use HTML within the text to create links to your site. If you aren’t sure how to do this, the code is easily found online. You can also link your photos to a site, which is an excellent method of boosting traffic.

Now, you can publish your lens and you have gone public.

Now What?

Once your lens is out there, it can take up to a week or so to get ranked on Google. You can speed things up by creating some publicity around the lens. Now that you’re a lensmaster, for example, you can go visit other lenses and leave notes.

When you leave a comment, your username is automatically linked to your lensmaster profile. Anyone can click through and find your lenses, so make sure your comments are eye catching and interesting enough to entice someone to click.

You should also start building more lenses! Link them to each other using the Featured Lenses module and build yourself a nice network of mini sites which will all help bring in traffic to your main business site.

Just a warning though . . . Squidoo is addictive. Once you start building lenses, you’ll probably find that you can’t stop!

Genesis Davies is a freelance writer and work at home mom of two. She blogs about Squidoo and everything else related to having a home business at At Home Mom Blog.