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.”

Last week Google officially opened up the Adwords keyword tool to non-account holders with an external version of the research tool.

Thanks to recent updates, the tool now returns more useful keyword data than most others, including keyword popularity indicators and global search volume trends. Definitely one you want to bookmark.

There’s also a handy feature that allows you to generate keywords based on the content of any webpage. As far as I know (and I’ve seen many), this is the only free keyword extraction tool that can also optionally follow links found on your input URL to include other pages from the same site in the analysis. Alternatively you can paste a block of text into a form box to be analyzed.

Features of the keyword tool include:

• Search for keywords in three ways. Use keywords you enter, your existing high clickthrough rate keywords, or any webpage URL for your search. You can also expand your keyword search even further to include pages linked to from the original URL.
• Keyword performance statistics. See Google’s performance statistics for your keyword results. Views include keyword popularity, global search volume trends, cost, and predicted ad position.