Web Marketing Strategy Update

Squidoo is the brain child of popular and latterly philanthropic marketer Seth Godin, who’s also the author of a small pile of marketing books containing some pretty revolutionary thinking.

The idea is that anyone can set up a “Lens” on any topic they choose, sharing information for the purposes of building reputation, drawing traffic to other websites, making money or just for fun.

Simply a web page with a hip new name, besides giving you space to write on your subject of choice, a lens has modules to optionally add stuff like RSS feeds, items from Amazon, polls, photos from Flickr, etc.

A lot of time has now passed, but if I remember correctly, the basic premise in setting up Squidoo was that search engines would never be able to deliver what people want, and that the people themselves would make a better job of it by voting with their feet as it were, from amongst Lenses created by others knowledgeable on a subject.

Here’s the Oct 2005 post on Seth’s blog with the free ebook download introducing Squidoo and explaining the concept of “everyone’s an expert.”

The Prince of Print, famous — perhaps infamous — as a larger-than-life copywriting genius, passed away in his sleep on Sunday, April 8th.

I missed this at the time, but if you haven’t heard of him, you need to. Gary was one-of-a-kind and nothing short of a legend in the world of direct marketing. A man whose reputation preceded him, he inspired marketers and copywriters everywhere.

For years now he’s been freely giving away all his old paid subscription newsletters he began publishing in back 1986 at The Gary Halbert Letter, which is where I first got to know of him.

His newsletters are packed with marketing tips and ideas — tons of real gems, which he was adding to every month as he shared his thoughts on Internet marketing. I’ve been going on and off for years now. The only thing is many are pretty long, and finding the time to read them all is why my visits always remained erratic, despite the best intentions.

He also published his, The Boron Letters on the site. Written to his youngest son, Bond, when Gary was imprisoned at Boron Federal Prison Camp or, “Club Fed” as he called it, he described this series of letters as “the most precious gift I have ever given him… and… the most precious gift… anyone else could possess.”