In this lesson we give you a quick Introduction to Squidoo.

What is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a cross between a social networking site and an authority portal. It’s made up of lenses, which are basically content pages prepared on a wide variety of topics by enthusiastic members. Because Squidoo is focused on learning and valuable information, the site tends to attract a higher quality audience compared with traditional social networking sites.

Why use it?

• It’s free, which is always a bonus.
  
• It’s dead simple to use. You can create a lens in less than 30 minutes once you become familiar with how the whole thing works.
• It’s indexed by Google extremely quickly. Squidoo is well optimized for on-page SEO and its internal linking has proven to be powerful.
• Squidoo is an excellent source of incoming links for your other websites. By linking to your website from your Squidoo lens you are effectively borrowing some of Squidoo’s page rank to boost your own.

Ways to Make Money with Squidoo

Squidoo isn’t going to make you a millionaire overnight, but it can be an extremely useful way to earn further income whilst helping boost the importance of your other websites. There are three primary ways to make money from Squidoo:

• By promoting affiliate programs
  
  
• By placing Google AdSense within your lens
  
  
• By taking advantage of Squidoo’s built-in affiliate modules such as Amazon, eBay and Cafepress. These are very simple to set up, but it’s not exactly something for nothing because, in return, Squidoo takes a portion of all the affiliate income you earn. So to our mind it’s far better to promote affiliate programs and link to them through your affiliate link instead.
  
  
• Squidoo is also a great place for gaining incoming links to your own website. If you already own a website and want to link to it from your Squidoo lens with keyword optimized anchor text, this can help you build up the search engine ranking of your own website. Just be careful not to overdo this to the point of becoming spammy. We recommend no more than two links to your own sites per lens and don’t link every lens that you create to the same website.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we took a quick look at Squidoo and how it can be advantageous to an affiliate marketer. We looked at:

• What is Squidoo
• Why use Squidoo
• Ways to make money with Squidoo