Squidoo is the brainchild of the well-known marketer Seth Godin. Squidoo is a multi-user site where, in a very user-friendly structured way, you create web pages on any topic you like. The web pages you created are called lenses. You don’t need any technical knowledge to create a Squidoo lens.

Why Create a Squidoo Lens?

If you already have a blog, why would you create a Squidoo Lens? One reason: backlinks. Backlinks are links back to your site from other sites. They are a measure of your site’s authority and popularity to other people, and to Google.

When you’re a new blogger, almost nobody is linking to you (except maybe others in your blog pack), so you can create links to your blog from Squidoo Lenses. These links are a portal for traffic, but they are also crawled by Google and added to its search index. You can put many links back to your blog in a Squidoo Lens, and you can create as many Squidoo Lenses as you like.

Legit Content or Gaming the System?

Squidoo has been in trouble in the past for being a haven for spam content, and it’s easy to abuse it in order to create a slew of backlinks to your blog. But think about what you’re doing, and what happens to people who try to game Google: your reputation may suffer, and Google is constantly improving in the fight against junk links and spam content. Remember: think Jedi blogger, not Sith. Think about what you want to achieve, not what you can get away with.

If you’re going to use a tool such as Squidoo as part of your blog marketing strategy, use it for the reason it has been created: content creation. Your strategy should be build a miniature empire of satellite content to the main “mothership” of your blog. That satellite content needs to be as carefully considered and useful as the content you create for your blog.

Even My Pitiful Lens Helps Me

I have a handful of sad little Squidoo Lenses, all of which are badly neglected and need updating. But the one I created for blog consulting has a Google PageRank of 3 and contains several followed links back to here. Do I get traffic from it? Almost none. But it is one more backlink with the anchor text I want, and that counts for something. Yes, I am nearly a complete failure at Squidoo, and I’m using that to teach you something valuable. That’s kinda cool, when you think about it.

I have tried to create legitimate content that isn’t just duplicative of Remarkablogger, but I know I could do better. Much better. Why haven’t I?

You Get Out What You Put In

Because I simply haven’t taken the time to bother with it. If I made this lens (and my others) into little powerhouses of great content, updated them often, and participated more fully in the Squidoo community, there is no doubt I would see even more benefits from my Squidoo Lenses.

In fact, it would be quite easy for you to go out and do a much better job at this than I have! Just make sure you have the time to devote to it–that’s always the crux: time. My priorities mean I spend my time on other things than my Squidoo lenses, like working for clients and putting together Gateway Blogging. But for the person who wants to take the time, creating great Squidoo Lenses will supply the important benefits I described above, plus something else.

One More Thing

When you create a Lens on Squidoo, you can set options for getting paid a share of any advertising revenues from clicks on ads in your Lens. Squidoo is basically paid for by Google AdSense. Squidoo is, in fact, a giant money-making AdSense machine for Google. Whether you will see any of that money or not depends on how many popular lenses you have and what their subject is.

While true you can make money from ads on Squidoo, the main benefit of Squidoo is not ad revenue, but to extend your online presence, drive traffic, and create backlinks.