I don't get what all the hype is about...you create a page FOR THEM, and get a commission on advertising. Why not just create your own free page with WordPress or something? I spent a good deal of time writing a lens, put it up there, and only got like 3 visitor for the weeks it's been up...if your not getting traffic, what makes it different from creating your own page and using your own advertising and taking all of the money??
If you SEO your page...Chances of hitting the search engines are higher as compared to wordpress etc.
I gave up on Squidoo too.. I didn't see the point just like you - got much better response from Diig & StumbleUpon. I didn't do much SEO but wrote some good content and spreaded it around by word of mouth. So far, after 4-5 weeks, it's sent me 8 visitors that stayed on the site for an average of 3 secs.. wasn't really targeted!
basically you are able to make a lense with lots of content and link BACK to your site from squidoo. Now, the purpose of that is you are not only getting links back to your site, but they are contextual links which are loved by google. Secondly google had a one night stand with squidoo and squidoo got pregnant. since google is rich it hides this fact by giving everything on squidoo some kind of edge. Squidoo seems to rank well and you are getting links back from PR6 (maybe PR7?) backlinks. This is really no difference from blog comments. You are adding content to someone elses site for a link back to yours from a completely different site and you look for high PR blogs too!
Squidoo USED to get a lot of love from Google up until a couple of years ago, so it used to be that building a Squidoo lens was a farily easy to rank on the the first page of Google for your keywords. They can still rank well now, but not as much as they used to. You can still use Squidoo as a traffic source if you have a popular and useful lense that gets a lot of visitors from within Squidoo (and search engines as well), but it usually takes a bit of time to build them up.
Squidoo allow you to build as many pages as you like for free and they provide you with lots of cool modules and tools to do so. They have very few restrictions as far as topics and affiliate links go. You don't have to pay for hosting or domain names. Squidoo pages can bring in plenty of traffic and sales when you find the right niche. This lens http://www.squidoo.com/nano-chromatic is ranked on the first page of Yahoo Search for the term ipod chromatic.
In the past when i used squidoo i could almost certain get 1st page ranking for niche keywords. Nowadays its very hard and Google dont seem to favor them as much due to the spam.
Hey its not squidoo itself that I think most people are focusing on, squidoo to most marketers is just a promotion and traffic driving tool. If you have focused keywords using squidoo can boost your google rankings.
Interesting little input there, dimmakherbs! Nice! I enjoyed reading that and it made sense. Except for what really does "got pregnant" mean in this story? Does that maybe mean got rich? Or went highly main stream? LOL Or maybe it means as I like to say it, "Hit The BIG Time!" On a side note; dimmakherbs... I just clicked through on your blog feed link here (up ^^^ there) and would like to say, that site where it went is so nice. That is one of the better of sites I have seen, or looked at in a while.. That is a nice looking site I dig what you have done with that, the color combos, the full great content, the structure even.. NICE work there. Boulder
Thanks alot man! Im gonna make a small change to the site by having a real header rather the way it is now, but pretty much keep the rest the same. I was up late last night and thought i would make an analogy rather than saying google loves squidoo, lol To the OP, again I would also like to sort of reiderate my post. Squidoo still gets lots of love from google, but not in the form of first page rankings. But who cares, i don't want my squidoo lense to rank #1 I wand MY SITE to rank #1, therefore I write a nice lense and put back links to my site. Squidoo will pass on some some good authority links to your site! Plus you can social bookmark the squidoo and such and nobody gets mad at you for 'spamming' you site or anything!
I love Squidoo. For small competition keywords i can rank pretty high with Squidoo Lenses AS LONG as they are filled with unique content. And those backlinks come handy these days.
Hey guys, I understand what it's like to join Squidoo at someone else's recommendation just to create some lenses that didn't perform well and then not understand why. I did that in 2005, and didn't come back until 2008! The truth is that Squidoo is a marketing tool, and like any other tool, if you don't read the instructions and learn how to use it properly, you won't yield the promised results. You don't become successful at anything by just trying your hand at it once or twice and then giving up without thoroughly educating yourself on why it should have worked and what you did wrong. So, here are two quick resources that will give you an overview on why Squidoo works and what it is designed to accomplish: http://cobrand.squidoo.com/EveryoneIsAnExpert.pdf - The ebook by Seth Godin himself, explaining what Squidoo was created for in the first place. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEEZshEY77g - My YouTube video, "What Is Squidoo Supposed To Do?" Hope this helps - and don't give up
Thanks, Elite I hate to see internet marketers give up on Sqidoo prematurely. It's such a valuable resource, you know? But if you don3 "get it", it can be frustrating. Here's to "getting it" in 2009 :-D
The main point about Squidoo is that it has a WYSIWYG editor for newbies and also that it has a lot of PR so you get a better SEO benefit than doing it on your own however long term I agree with you, seems pointless lol