A Basic Understanding of Squidoo

Squidoo has been an extremely popular platform to launch as many free web pages as you can successfully maintain. However, there exist mixed feelings about the effectiveness of the site and its long term implications for a successful internet marketing strategy. Some people love Squidoo, some hate it, and some feel that it is so-so for a free service. If you are brand new to Internet Marketing, I would suggest that you definitely start some lenses (Squidoo lingo for a single web page). Why? Well the benefits are many, and below, I will list some of them for you to consider.

The biggest positive aspect of Squidoo is that it is 100% free. You pay no hosting fees, no domain registration fees, and you don’t have to deal with any server maintenance on any of the pages you create (That is all done by a guy named Gil, a very wise webmaster who works at Squidoo). This is a huge help for people who know nothing about web site management, ftp, mysql databases, and content management systems. While seasoned internet veterans will tell you that Wordpress is a breeze, and you’ll be up and running in a day, trust me, when I say- you won’t be. Many people suggest one click installation for Wordpress. However, this one click installation does not accept upgrades at many web hosting companies, and you will be bashing your computer when the day comes that you have to upgrade to yet another version of Wordpress (they upgrade quite a bit). If you are brand new to the guts of the internet, you will be trapped in a spider web of Wordpress for at least a month if you work 8 hours a day with it, for 1 month straight.

With Squidoo, setting up a page is extremely easy, and you can start driving traffic to it immediately. In fact, traffic will find you immediately, because you are creating a page that is part of the huge Squidoo website that has very good ranking power in the search engines.

Before we discuss how exactly to create a Squidoo lens (remember this is a page on Squidoo that you make), I want to discuss in more detail as to why Squidoo is a great place in general to learn Internet Marketing. If you are serious about Internet Marketing, and doing it full time, heed the advice in these next few sentences very closely.

The most beneficial aspect of Squidoo is learning. You see, Squidoo is like going to Internet College for free. It is like going to an Ivy League Internet College for free. Why exactly? Because some people who make money with their Squidoo pages are very sophisticated Internet Marketers. And they realize, that if they make some of their pages about the tools and methods for making money online, their pages will get tons of views, visitors, and clicks, because there are many beginners at Squidoo who want to learn. But, these pages about making money online are actually grade A work, because at Squidoo, you know who is “selling” you the information. This is because these wise Internet Marketers are branding themselves at Squidoo, because there are tons of people to follow the quality content back to their personal websites. Consequently, they know that if their information is not top notch you won’t buy their products and “brand”. This is much different than the selling of junk e-books, when you don’t know who is selling them to you, because their domains are set to privacy, and they are marketing anonymously.

It is very important to understand that Internet marketing requires many, many skill sets, if you do not outsource any work. At Squidoo, you can learn all of these skills from professionals. You can find this information elsewhere, but not as easily as at Squidoo. You want to use Squidoo to make your own pages, but you also want to use it to learn from other people (at Squidoo people are known as lens masters).

There are currently excellent pages at Squidoo, concerning each of the following subjects that are absolutely necessary to successful internet marketing: Rss, css stylesheets, html, SEO, and link building. And, as mentioned before, the people presenting this to you have a vested interest in giving you good information. If you think you are going to make a go at using computers, as your employees, to help you make tons of cash, you need to know how they work. Outsourcing everything technical is a nightmare, unless you pay premium prices for competence and honesty. Trust me when I say that you want to learn how to do all technical subject matter yourself (I am not talking about everything under the sun, but the core, fundamental computer language of the internet.) That means hosting, ftp, rss, html, and knowing how to fix php, and css stylsheets. At Squidoo, you can learn all of this for free.