What the Heck is Squidoo?
Squidoo is a hand-built collection of nearly 900,000 pages built by everyday folks like you and I — on topics that range from how to grow a perfect bonsai, to how to crochet a tea cozy.

Squidoo is the creation of the brilliant mind of marketing guru Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae, among other titles.

Squidoo is just another example of how you can harness the power of social media and use it as a tool to promote and grow your business. As a writer, you can use Squidoo to showcase your literary chops, gain instant exposure, and build your reputation as an expert in your niche.

Sites like Squidoo offer particularly good news for small business owners that may be struggling during these tough economic times — when you have more time than money, it makes good sense to focus your energy (and your creativity) on the resources that are available to you. If you aren’t using Squidoo, you’re leaving money on the table.

But What Am I Going to Do With a Lens?
Redirect a parked domain to your newly designed Squidoo lens. If you are less than impressed with some of the alternatives for parked domains, give this some careful consideration. Perhaps you purchased a few extra domains when you set up your main site — whether that purchase was simply to protect the names or part of a project on your never-ending “to do” list — these names are perfect candidates to redirect to your Squidoo lens.

Use your lens as a tool to boost your main site’s ranking.

* Create well-ranked pages in Google that can bring in even more traffic;
* Position yourself, your business or blog as an expert, and direct qualified traffic your way;
* Use your lens to promote news items that provide a tie-in to your business;
* Post original articles that illustrate the need for your product or service;
* Provide technical information or alternative uses for your products.

Use Squidoo lenses for cheap market research. Your only investment in Squidoo lenses is your time — so this is a great way to conduct a bit of research to see if there is enough interest to launch a full-blown site. You can test out niches to see how they’ll perform – with minimal investment and effort.

Promote collateral affiliate products and services. Squidoo offers an assortment of monetization methods to its lensmasters, and, as long as you adhere to their terms of service, you can certainly incorporate your own as well. Whether you choose to embed text links within the body of relevant articles or showcase an assortment of Amazon products — these are just a few of the options available. The key is to use your creativity to strike a balance between providing solid content and making a bit of coin in the bargain.

Earn money for your favorite charity. This last point may be a bit of a surprise, so let me explain. Squidoo encourages folks to designate a portion (or even all) of their earnings from their lenses, and donate them to charity. This isn’t mandatory, but Squidoo reports that over 50% of their lensmasters current donate some portion of their earnings. If you elect to donate a portion of your earnings to a particular charity, this is something that you could cross-promote on your main website, and get your current customer base involved in. In fact, launching a lens (or series of lenses) in support of a particular charity could be the basis for an entire promotional campaign — with press releases, promotional videos, flyers, sales, and other activities.

Not All Lenses Are Created Equally: The Importance of Rank
It isn’t enough just to get your page up on Squidoo — you want your page to actually be found. In order to do that, you must have solid content, good titles, and strong keywords. With over 900,000 pages, that is no small feat, but it is possible.

A Big Squid Teaches You to Swim With the Sharks
Thanks to a special agreement with my good friend Bob Jenkins (aka Bob the Teacher), you can get a leg up on your Squidoo competition, and implement some of his best strategies for gaining traffic and customers from your Squidoo lenses.

In case you aren’t familiar with Bob, he’s had a #1 lens on Squidoo (no small feat!), he’s been selected as a Lens of the Day on multiple occasions, and he’s been featured in the New York Times as an expert based on the content of one of his lenses.

Needless to say, Bob is one knowledgeable squid. Follow his example, and soon you will be, too.