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.”

Rob Sullivan sent me his latest article the other day. It’s an interesting write-up of the answers Google employees gave to questions put to them on a recent conference call.

Much of it you may already feel you “know,” but it’s always valuable to learn exactly what those with the facts say about your suspicions, and there’re some useful comments from Rob as well.

The Good and the Bad of SEO From Googles Mouth!

I recently had the opportunity to ask questions of some Google staffers. There were some questions I felt I needed to get verification on, so when I had the opportunity via a conference call I took it.

In this article I highlight some of the points made during the call so you know what Google thinks.

You know its bad when you take time from your holidays to come into work to attend a conference call. But that’s what I did a few weeks ago. You see I had to because I was going to have the opportunity to ask some Google employees specific questions on things that I’d been pretty sure about, but wanted to hear it right from the horses mouth.