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.”

If you want to improve your website sales conversions — and I’m sure you do — have a read of MarketingSherpa’s new Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007.

This is not the latest, greatest marketing twaddle of some Internet marketer who’s been online all of 5 minutes, but no-nonsense, “just the facts please” information from people in the trenches that will help you:

• Raise shopper-to-buyer conversions and increase buyer lifetime
• Improve search engine marketing ROI, despite rising costs per click
• Reduce shopping cart abandon rates
• Increase email open rates, number of clicks received and conversion rates
• Compare your own marketing stats to those of your peers
• Ensure your marketing tests and site revamp ideas are approved by management

The completely new guide contains a whopping 223 charts & tables, with data from 1,913 ecommerce marketers’, and results from surveys of 2,449 online shoppers. There’s also “best-of” data from 30 independent research organizations, plus 6 brand new eyetracking heatmaps for sites like Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and others.