A Squidoo Lens is a page on the Squidoo site or network. The user, also called a lensmaster, prepares content on a particular topic and uploads it onto the Squidoo site. This service is free.

But first, what is a Lensmaster?

A Lensmaster is a person or internet user who creates a lens on the Squidoo network. It is a Squidoo specific title. The title represents the concept that a lens has been produced by an expert and that everybody is an expert in something no matter what that could be.

A lensmaster is therefore the person who puts up a page on Squidoo, that page being referred to as a lens. All it takes to become a lensmaster is in fact to set up a page on a particular topic.

A page but by another name
A web page hosted by Squidoo on their site is called a lens. This refers to the fact that the content you as a lensmaster are uploading is going to show a spotlight or zoom a lens onto a particular topic of interest to you and hopefully to many readers.

Besides the fact that there is no cost involved, there are also very few skills required. Setting up a page is easy. You do not need to know any HTML and the instructions and guidance is fairly intuitive to follow. Besides this there is a lot of help available on the site with several types of resources at the lensmaster’s fingertips.

What content should you put onto your lens?

Your lens may cover a topic of interest in your personal life. It could be a hobby you practice or a fun activity that you have experienced and would like to share. You can upload a lens that deals with cooking, sewing, scrapbooking, fishing or playing darts just to name a few.

In other words you are able to share any topic that interests you and that you enjoy and in which you have some knowledge. And you hope that other people might like the information and even want to learn something new.

A Squidoo lens is of course also of use for businesses. You may wish to set up a review page on a product you are promoting, a service you are offering or an affiliate programme you are a member of.

There is no harm in using a lens to support and publicise your business. It is just important to remember that you have to provide value on your page. That means you need to share knowledge to offer some value to the Squidoo site users. You cannot just create an outright sales page. Your page will be considered to be spam.

You may also use a lens to support a charity with. You may sell a product where your sales benefit a charity. There may be a fundraising event that you wish to support such as a marathon. Use your lens to gather support and sponsorship to reward you for your efforts and to bring in money for the charity being promoted.

These are just some examples of what one can use a lens for. The power of the Squidoo site will ensure that your page is seen by many people and that you benefit from all of what this community can offer you.

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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.

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There are a few basic tips that internet marketers should take on board when starting a blog for their business. Here are some of these. By taking note of the following bits of advice internet marketers can save themselves some headaches later on.

Think business right away. Many internet marketers think that the money comes after everything else has been done. But that is not the case. You need to think making money from the very moment you start.

A blog is very easy to start. However, unless you monetise your blog immediately with advertising for instance, your visitors might resist advertisement at a later stage. Start off right at the beginning with adverts so that your visitors are used to them.

Have your opt-in box in a prominent place right from the beginning. You want to build an opt-in list right at the beginning. You might not get many opt-ins by just having a box there, but there’s no harm in having it prominently displayed on the right hand side of your blog.

As well as your opt-in box, you also don’t want to bury your RSS feed icon. Many readers will be happy to subscribe to your feed. They might hesitate to receive email from you, but they will be much more willing to subscribe to your RSS.

Get your readers involved in your story. Don’t turn off reader comments. Place your social bookmarking tools in a prominent place so that your visitors can participate in the content you post. You want their feed-back and participation. It creates a loyal following.

Most of all though, before you start your blog and your internet marketing business that will be part of your blog, do not overlook the all important search engine optimisation process.

Without your keywords that are attached to your marketing efforts you will not be able to induce that natural search engine traffic that can show ongoing visitor numbers without you having to do anything further.

Many internet marketers spend their time tip toeing around the idea of making money. They think that by commercialising their blog they are somehow going against the protocol of the internet.

Approaching internet marketing in this way will only lead to failure. You need to be as aggressive about your commercial interests as you would if you were opening a business in the offline world.

You would consider all aspects of making money if you were to open up a shop or offer a service. The internet marketing field is no different. You need to be aware that this is something that you want to make money from. So don’t be shy. Shy is not going to pay the bills.

You need to grab the opportunities and make the most of them. Your blog is the first part of your enterprise. This is where you can discuss your product or service that you wish to offer to visitors. Make sure that it is your shop window to the online world.

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Here are some invaluable tips for your opt-in page.

Always place the opt-in box above the fold. That means make it easy for your visitor to find the box where they can sign up to receive your emails. Don’t ask your users to scroll down to find the box.

Use the natural way that people read to your maximum advantage. That means that you need to put the opt-in box in the upper right side of the screen. People in the western world read from left to right. So the eye will automatically follow that path.

Don’t forget to include a strong headline with a really valuable benefit for signing up. Nobody is going to want to give away their private contact details for some small perceived benefit. They really need to feel that the benefit far outweighs the risk of giving a contact address.

Always use the word FREE. This is the word that gets the knee-jerk reaction from your visitors. It is the magic word that opens the clenched fist and pushes the person towards parting with their contact details.

Don’t be stingy. Offer a valuable free incentive for subscribing. Even though you might get some people to subscribe for no reason, or a not particularly valuable reason such as a pathetic report, at the end of the day you will find a dissatisfied person will sign out of the opt-in as soon as the bad deal is spotted.

On your opt-in page have an attractive graphic of your free incentive. People are visual beings. A picture is far more persuasive than hundreds of words.

Create a list to show the benefits you are offering to your opt-in list. You are offering a free incentive but over and above this you would like to provide them with other ongoing benefits such as advice on a particular topic. You want to be able to have a reason why you are mailing with information and product offers.

As with all effective advertising, don’t confuse your visitors with too many points, stories and offers. Your main purpose is to entice them to part with their contact details. Have one message for this. Don’t try to do too many things at the same time. You might just end up confusing rather than persuading.

Don’t be too forward. Just ask for the name or even just the email address. The less information you request, the higher your conversion. People are very cautious when it comes to parting with their private information. Think of what you would do yourself. Odds are you would hesitate to give too much information about yourself when considering an opt-in.

Do display a privacy statement or link to one on your site. It’s important to offer an assurance to your visitors that their details will not be given to outsiders and that they will not find themselves being inundated with spam from all sorts of arbitrary sales mail.

Working towards an opt-in list is part of every internet marketers task l

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In the offline world the company that has a list of loyal customers will inevitably be a profitable one. It has been proven over the years that the cost of finding a new customer far outweighs the cost of keeping a customer.

The same applies in the online world. Finding new customers is very expensive and requires a huge amount of effort and an investment of time. Keeping a bunch of people who are loyal to you is a lot easier.

This customer relationship process is often referred to as building a list or developing an opt-in list. This is a list of people who have allowed you to email them. That means you have a people who will be happy to hear from you and possibly even buy.

How do you get such a list of customers?

It’s the same process as in the real world. You offer value. If you offer value as a business in the offline world you will get customers and keep them. This could be the best mobile phone contract because the cost is reasonable and you have great service and reach.

It could be a clothing shop where the merchandise is reasonably priced and the service is super friendly and accommodating. It’s a place where you know you can take a faulty garment back for a refund without having to get into an argument.

What gets the customers to sign up to the mobile contract or to buy that garment? It’s either advertising or word of mouth referrals. How does this process convert to the online world?

It’s not that different a process. You need to persuade people to come to your site or opt-in page and you need to entice them to sign up to your emails. This means there are several steps that need to be in place.

Firstly you need to be able to drive traffic to your site. You can do this by advertising online through search engines or other sites. You can drive traffic by using search engine optimisation technique and you can post articles on other well read sites in order to get traffic back to you. These are just some of the traffic generating ideas.

The second step is that you need to offer an incentive to your visitors to opt-in to your list. This may be in the form of a promotion. It is the same principle that the supermarkets abide by when they offer loss leader products.

This means it’s a product that they practically give away in order to bring the customer into the store. They are hoping you will buy something else so that they can make up the loss on the other product.

Finally the opt-in page that offers the free enticement needs to be persuasive. It needs to provide information that makes the visitor want to sign up and get the free product. The page has to make the person want to hear from you and get the free product or service that is being offered.

All of these steps you have seen in the offline world. Have a look at the marketing tricks and tips that shops and businesses use to get you into their store and you will be able to use these very same ideas and concepts for your online business.

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One thing you will do as an internet marketer that is almost guaranteed. You will fail. You will spend months working incredibly hard for absolutely no return. There will be much advice that you will follow that will give you no return. Guaranteed.

Welcome to the world of business. The world of internet marketing is no different to the world of offline business. As many people work incredibly hard trying to build a business in the offline world. Many never make it. They often end up losing a lot of money and going back to work for a boss.

The same applies in the internet marketing industry. There are many internet marketers that never make any money. They spend endless hours working incredibly hard and have nothing to show for it.

What is the difference between the folk that finally make it and the ones that never do? It’s quite simple. The ones that finally make it have learnt from their mistakes and have taken the new skills and added further skills to them until they finally find their success.

What many people do wrong is that they either continue to make the same mistake because they think they are just not getting it right and that practice will help. What they really need to consider is that a different approach could be the required way forward.

Other people just don’t learn from their mistakes. They blame everything and everybody else for their failures. They didn’t have enough knowledge, they were advised incorrectly, they got lied to or they bought the wrong book and attended the wrong course.

This inability to see the real situation is something that internet marketers need to get past. Be honest in your assessment as to what went wrong if after many months your business is still not bringing in enough to cover the rent.

Make a list of what you have learnt and see what you can build on. You might have learnt how to design a web site. You could have learnt about autoresponders, opt-in lists, affiliate marketing, keyword search, copywriting, writing eBooks and making videos amongst many skills.

In fact you could find yourself with an impressive list of new skills which you did not have before. All of this is a positive and should be taken as such. What can you add to these skills that will finally make you a successful internet marketer?

Do you need better sales skills? Do you need to attend a respected online course? What about hiring yourself a business coach so that you have support and guidance as well as somebody who will keep you on track?

You might find that by adding some minor additional skills to what you have acquired over the months of hard work you could end up building a sustainable business that makes you a good living.

You could find that it won’t take that much more to actually get going. The most important step is to be honest with yourself and make sure you know where you still need help.

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The concept of a free society has been at the core of some heated discussions and a recent book by Chris Anderson, he of the long-tail theory fame. Why would the price tag of $0.00 be so powerful?

So should you offer something for free? If you are a new internet marketing business person the answer to that is a fairly resounding ‘yes’. You need to offer something for free. This could be a reward for people signing up to your opt-in list or just to create an awareness of your business.

What should you offer? Preferably something that hasn’t cost you more than just your time. Make sure that whatever it is has plenty of your branding on it so that everybody who gets hold of it knows who it is from.

Use it to not only build an opt-in list but also to spread your name and reputation. Pick and choose bits of your best stuff that you have written. Add some graphics and convert into a PDF for easy distribution.

A free guide or info book will get people to talk about you, admire you, check out your credibility and on the whole spread good vibes about you.

Why would the internet encourage a ‘free’ economy? The main reason for this is because you as an internet marketer have no street credibility. You have no history of delivering good products. You are an unknown quantity.

How are people going to know whether the content you produce is worth paying for if you are a totally unknown entity? They don’t. They have no yardstick against which they can judge you as they have seen absolutely nothing of yours besides a few articles on a blog or an online presence in social media.

How does the customer judge whether spending their money is the right move? With great difficulty.

Why would you require something to be given away for free? You would if there is other competing material available for free. This is what is happening to the online media. Newspapers are not able to sell subscriptions to their content because there is so much competing information available.

Why pay if there is all of it there for you to tap into at no cost to yourself? Wouldn’t make sense to anybody to pay for something that they can arrange to have delivered to their RSS reader for free.

What about other online marketers? Do they face the same situation? Only if they are a totally unknown entity. Then they need to offer their product for free. This is because they need to build credibility.

There are internet marketers who sell their books, courses, online content for a fortune. They sell it at close on a thousand dollars or for some quite substantial subscription per month. How do they manage this? Quite easily. They have built credibility and have become an authority in their field.

This takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish. It is the internet marketer who is dazzled by promises of instant wealth who thinks he is able to sell an eBook for much money without establishing his authority who finds the going tough.

You need to build your business. As in the real world, you have to earn your reputation and prove that your products are worth buying. Without this, you might as well give away your products for free. Nobody is going to buy them.

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Think of the internet as a shopping mall where the lights are out. No electricity is available. How do you find your way to a shop then if there are no lights? With great difficulty of course.

But what about the shop that puts out a path of candles to attract shoppers in and show them where to go? What about the shop that has banners all over the streets providing a graphic of the route to take?

And then there is the shop that has a radio frequency that you can tap in so that you can follow the sound to their shop door. In other words, use all elements to attract attention because the internet is a space where you can’t just see things.

Which is of course why the search engines are so important. How else are you going to find things? However, using the many media elements available to attract readers makes sense. Everything that could attract and entertain readers is important.

So what’s available to you? There’s good content in the form of articles. Add to it photographs and graphic images. What about video and podcasts? Great header designs? There are numerous forms of additional content you can use to attract more attention and interest.

The offline world has known this for many years. Time Square in New York, Piccadily Circus in London show off their wares with huge electronic advertising. Flashing lights, animated images and huge words attract the passers by.

What about fast food outlets that wink at you with their wonderfully presented photographs of meals? Display is important in supermarkets as well as in any retail outlet. Enter into a deli and your mouth will water at the copious display of delectable food.

Step into a music hall and the volume of sound will get to you. Smells of food attract you in restaurants or in open food markets. Clever retailers will bombard all your senses to ensure that you are attracted to their wares.

Women’s magazines have for many years benefitted from the popularity of Princess Di. Even many years after her death, her picture on the cover of a magazine can double the sales for the edition.

The internet works the same way. If the visitor has the choice between a dull blog and a well designed site with images and video clips they will spend more time in the space that entertains them more.

It’s not only your visitors that will take pleasure form the media rich offering you provide. Image searches can benefit you just as much. An image can add between 20 – 30% to your regular search result. Plus your images will show up when your post is tied into your Facebook feeds.

Take a page out of the experience of the offline world and bring other media elements into your online presence whether you are developing your blog, using Facebook or have established hub pages. Using photographic images and video for instance will add value to your presentation.

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Participation is a key element of most successful online ventures. In fact this is the same as in the offline world. Businesses do far better if they build relationships with their customers by listening to their feed-back whether positive or negative and showing that they care.

The online world is very much the same playing field. It is always slightly surprising to see the so called internet marketing gurus discuss the basic principles of business for internet marketing businesses as if they are totally new and have never been used before.

On the contrary, business methods are the same or at the least similar whether your business is operating in the ‘real’ world or if it is online. Participation, building relationships with your customers, listening and acting on feedback are all excellent business principles where ever you might be operating.

For the online business, making contact with your readers and buyers of your products is as important as knowing the names of your regular customers if you own a pub or restaurant.

As with customers who have enjoyed your service, think your product is great and tell their friends about you, in the same way your visitors that actively participate with you are just as important.

What active visitors do is comment on your blog or Facebook page, have conversations with you on Twitter, leave remarks on your hub pages and in general show interest in what you are up to.

These people link to your blog, they write about something you might have written, they spread the word about you and even link their sites to you which is of real value if their pagerank is higher than yours.

In other words you have an entire army of people who spread the word about you online. This brings you more traffic and search engines will take note of the links and reward you with higher search listings.

This is no different to the happy customers you have in the real world if you look after your customers well and make them the focus of your business. In the same way, making sure that your online presence is focused on your public, or your following, will ensure that you have a strong tribe of interested people who continue to come back for more.

There are several ways of getting this network of people to write for you and participate in marketing you and your products. You can post some controversial content to encourage discussion. You can consistently present well thought out points that are of interest to your visitors.

You may also provide content that educates and informs your visitors so that they find real value with every visit they make to your site.

Each one of these efforts can contribute to the buzz around your content and your online presence. In this way it helps to spread the word about you and your products or services that you are offering. Harness the power of other interested people to create more exposure for yourself.

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“There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.” Ian Hart

“Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks”

“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” Mitchell Kapor

“While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our “CONFIG.SYS” settings.” Dave Barry

“Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life” Andrew Brown

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” Emo Philips

“What, exactly, is the internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a ‘modem’, can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo” Dave Barry

“Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation.” Paul Carvel

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” Bill Gates

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” Eric Schmidt

“On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog.” Peter Steine

“Warning: the Internet may contain traces of nuts”

Source

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