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.”

Building Your Site Rule #1 Always have a strong headline.

No matter how great your sales copy is or how great your content and information is no one will stick around long enough to read it unless you grab them with your headline.

Make sure you have a compelling enough headline to make the person want to stay and read your information.

Building Your Site Rule #2 Make your home page a strong sales letter that combines elements of an article and an endorsement.

The best way to have a sales letter that is not hyped up and can still do a good pre-sell? is to have a form of a product review? or endorsement.? What most people are interested in is reading the pros and cons about a product. Spend some time and dedicate the home page to a good product, write a good endorsement? article.

Building Your Site Rule #3 Stop hiding your links. Let your visitors read your articles

Some advocates of the old mini-site strategy advised you to have NO other links on your site. There was supposed to be just one other link the BUY NOW link. And I think this still works, but for merchant sites not affiliate websites.