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.”

1. Publish A Free Ezine For Selling Products

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to promote your own or affiliate products, MLMs, etc. This is the most common format, and to work well requires quality — preferably original — content related to your business and products so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. Publish Free Ezine For Selling Advertising Space

You could publish a free ezine or newsletter to sell advertising spots and exclusive mailings to other businesses. Similar in format to the previous example, except that instead of using the ezine as a vehicle for promoting your own products, you use it to generate ad revenue. This approach is often favored by those new online and / or without their own product, using mainly contributed articles for content and combining the promotion of affiliate programs with ad sales.

3. Publish A Paid Subscription Ezine

You could charge a monthly or yearly subscription to your ezine or newsletter. Unless your annual subscription is fee is relatively little, you will probably make more money with a low monthly fee automatically charged to the subscriber’s credit card. Note that you need quality, highly targeted original to be successful selling ezine subscriptions like this.