Using Squidoo to Build Your Business

We have all heard that when it comes to getting your website ranked high in the search engines “content is king”. While that statement carries a lot of truth, there is another very important piece to that equation. Having backlinks to your website, more importantly backlinks from sites that carry a high page ranking from the all important Google is a critical component in your SEO equation.

While marketing strategies such as Social Networking sites, Article Marketing, PayPerClick Marketing, Social Media (YouTube) sites, etc, many online marketers still do not take advantage of content sites such as Squidoo or Hubpages. Imagine being able to establish yourself as an expert on a topic of your choosing with a wide range of control over the page design, layout, content and of course links back to your site.

Many of you may be thinking that the point of article marketing is to establish yourself as an expert as well as creating backlinks to your site. And, you would be very correct in that statement. However, the major difference here is that with most article marketing sites you are limited to one or two links in your signature block. Additionally, you have no control over the layout of your article, you cannot add images to your content, and you certainly cannot make any money directly from those articles. Do I have your attention now?

In case you did not catch the last part of that statement Squidoo and Hubpages actually encourage you to make money as a direct result of your content which Squidoo calls “lenses”.  While there are thousands of other sites that allow you to publish your content (articles) Squidoo is unique in that they allow you to easily create web pages, packed with graphics, content, and interactivity.

Hubpages, among some other Web 2.0 sites allow a certain amount of marketing to take place, but they have stricter rules in place about what you can do with your pages which make it harder to use the site for generating a profit. As you can imagine a content rich site such as Squidoo attracted a large number of true marketers, but as with anything spammers soon joined the ranks. Have no fear as Squidoo was quick to take action by removing some of the features like iFrames that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. Squidoo also went so far as to ban four major spam topics from the site.  This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, what became known as Google’s Squidoo Slap.

As a direct result of these problems Squidoo also instituted policies regarding to quality of lenses that required a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself.  For spammers that simply wanted to put up a page with minimal text packed with keywords combined with multiple outbound links, this was a death sentence.

With all of that behind them we need to look at the real reasons for using sites such as Squidoo.

Generate traffic to your website or blog
While you can create links on your Squidoo lens to channel people to your own website, blog or your affiliate URL, don’t forget that you can add images, banners and text ads. For those of you who have an MLM business make the most of this by sending people to your own site where you can build a true network of contacts. Do NOT send people to a replicated website where you are marketing a company/product and not yourself.

Establish yourself as an expert/leader
Squidoo was designed to enable you to provide your readers with information about a topic of your choice. As you develop your lenses, you establish yourself as a leader and expert in your chosen profession.

Quality Backlinks
Google has given Squidoo a high page ranking which means when you place your website link on your lens you have just created a very valuable Backlink to your site at no cost.

Cross Promotion for better Rankings
You have the ability to cross-promote your lenses. By building a master topic lens and then building a number of more targeted lenses you increase your contents visibility and chances for higher rankings in Google.  With Google and Squidoo once again on good terms lenses are able to achieve page 1 rankings for many competitive keywords and phrases.

As we now know Squidoo, developed by Seth Godin, is based on the principle that everyone is an expert in some area. You now have the ability to create a Squidoo lenses (Squidoo website) on topic of your choosing and more importantly you can create as many lenses as you would like. Squidoo has now achieved a critical mass and will continue to grow exponentially by using the momentum, information and technologies created by other major Web 2.0 providers such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

If you have an online business, you are an internet marketer or you simply need to breathe new life into your MLM business now is the time to catch the next wave of internet marketing. To Your Success!

Tagged as: Article Marketing, facebook, hubpages, leads, marketing, mlm industry, myspace, network marketer, prospects, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media, squidoo, YouTube