The Cheap Revolution

10 Tips on Marketing your Squidoo Lens

In our 25 Nearly Free Ways to Market your Online Business, we discussed using Squidoo to increase traffic to your site. You may be asking yourself, “What exactly is Squidoo?”

For internet entrepreneurs and bloggers, Squidoo.com is an excellent tool that you can utilize to promote your website, your business and yourself. Created by marketing genius Seth Godin, Squidoo is a social media website that allows its members to create informational pages or “lenses” on topics that they are interested in or knowledgeable about. It’s free to use and members can create one (or as many as they want) on any topic of their choosing.  

Squidoo also allows its members to receive royalties on the lenses they create or donate them to charity. Currently, there are lenses covering everything from “Travel” to “Politics” and many more topics in between. The process of creating a lens is very simple and there are plenty of add-ons or modules that can be used to enhance a lens such as discussion questions, polls, favorite link lists, YouTube videos, quotes, lists of products from Amazon that relate to your topic, Wikipedia articles and countdown clocks, to name a few.

How Can Squidoo Help You to Market Your Online Business?
If you have an online business, you can use your Squidoo lens to showcase your core competency that relates to your business. For example if you’re a fitness equipment site, create a lens on how to lose weight without joining a gym. We created a lens on resources for entrepreneurs. What kind of lens can you create that will showcase your expertise? If readers find your lens valuable enough, it in return will drive traffic to your site.

How Can I Market My Squidoo Lens?
The more popular your Squidoo lens is among members and readers, the more your website  will benefit from increased awareness and traffic. The following is a list of 10 tips to drive more viewers to your Squidoo lenses:

1.       Visit Squidoo lenses that are similar to your own in content and provide your comments. Lens authors and readers that are intrigued by your comments will go to your profile and view your lenses and the websites that you link to.

 

2.       When you create a new lens, or update a lens significantly, send an update email to your friends/mailing list and your fans (people who tagged your page as a favorite). This will create a steady flow of traffic to your lens.

3.       Take advantage of the social media aspect of Squidoo. Join groups that interest you or that contain lenses similar to yours in topic to gain more visibility and network with other experts in your industry or area of expertise.

4.       Add links in your lens to other lenses that are popular or similar to your own. Send an email to other lens authors asking their permission to link to them. Most of the time these authors will link you back to you.

5.       Update your lens often to increase your rank. When members search for your topic on Squidoo, your lens will be in the top results displayed if you have a higher lens rank. Even a slight change to your lens, such as editing one paragraph or republishing your lens, is counted as an update.
 

6.       Use social bookmarking tools on your lens. Visit www.addthis.com for a free button that you can add onto your lens that will allow readers to bookmark your lens through sites such as Digg and Technorati.

7.       If you have multiple lenses, link your lenses to each other.  This is especially effective if the topics are very similar (your lenses are automatically linked via your lensmaster profile page, but you can make the connections more explicit in the lenses themselves). Also, you can link to your lenses from other pages you might have, like ezine pages or blogs.

8.       Actively rate lenses that you think are superior. Add a text module near the top of your lens and make a request to readers to rate your lens as well – the higher your lens is rated, the higher your lens rank.

9.       Create a new lens whenever you post a new blog entry. Use your new blog entries to create new lenses. As a Squidoo member, it is in your benefit to create a large number of lenses. You may turn into a Giant Squid (subject to review by Seth Godin and Megan –editors of Squidoo), you’ll get much more visibility, increased page ranks and more credibility on the content of your lenses.

10.   Start an argument or debate on your lens. This is a great way to ensure that readers will return to your lens. Simply add on the debate module that Squidoo provides and be sure to include a debate-worthy topic of discussion.

 

We hope these tips are helpful for those entrepreneurs looking to use your Squidoo pages to market your website or business.

 

For more social media ideas or straetgies, check out “Meatball Sundae” and “Tribes” by Seth Godin.

 

Quiz: Are you ready to launch your Web Business?

You have a great idea and you are ready to move it forward. You have your tech team lined up. Your web designer is ready to go. Your business plan is nearly finished and you're at the point where you're ready to launch your new Web business.

Are you SURE you've thought of everything?

We've found that there are a number of common pitfalls that Internet startups encounter when starting out. To help you determine if your business is ready to launch, we put together a quick 15 point Web Startup Readiness assessment to help you with some self-examination. (It takes about 15 seconds to load... so please be patient!)  The graphic shown here is an example of the quiz output, tailored to your startup. You can have your custom profile emailed right to your inbox.

If you don't have time to take the assessment, check out the fast five pitfalls we've seen below.  The more you answer "Yes!" to, the stronger your odds for success.

1. Have you refined your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to be simple enough for your mother to understand? Understanding your USP indicates how well differentiated your offering is in the marketplace.

2. Have you talked to at least three potential clients or suppliers/sponsors? Primary research provides a measure of how well you understand your customers, suppliers, and partners in your market. It is also important in building your product/service.

3. Can you point to others who have been successful with your business model? Researching similar models measures the intensity and appetite for your service in the market.

4. Do you know your top five competitors? This research can be instrumental in identifying differentiators, go-to-market strategies, pricing models, business models and much more.

5. Do you have an idea of how you'll make revenue? A monetization strategy - even if not implemented - must be understood before launch.

Take our full Ready to Launch Quiz (give it 15 secs to load) to test out the readiness of your startup. The quiz will further help you evaluate your team, business model, market, financials, value proposition and much more.

If you hesitated in some of your responses, join us in our first complimentary webinar, "Getting Ready to Launch." In this webinar, we'll focus on the "Ten Things to Ask Yourself Before You Launch" listed above and provide specific examples of tools and resources you can use to improve your chances of a successful launch. Space is limited – so take our quiz and register today. We have room for twelve entrepreneurs to participate live in our Webinar and we'll be selecting newly launched startups as case studies to profile. The webinar will be recorded and made available on our website for those who did not have the opportunity to participate.

"Getting Ready to Launch" Webinar Details:

• Date: Monday, October 27, 2008
• Time: 7PM Eastern
• Duration: 1 hour

SPACE IS LIMITED - SIGN UP NOW!

Google Promotes Social Entrepreneurship

Need one more reason to love Google?

They recently announced what they're calling the Project 10 to the 100th contest where they're looking for "ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible." Their reasoning is that helping other people is the one thing (besides material wealth) that increases an individuals happiness over time. As a result, they're looking for ideas that not only help people - but ideas that will help the most number of people. Not only will you get the benefit of helping others, they'll also invest $10 million (yes, $10 MILLION) to make it happen themselves.

How does it work?

All you have to do is submit your idea using this 20-question submission form. You can also upload a 30-second YouTube video to their channel explaining your idea in more detail. Google will select the top 100 ideas and ask the public to vote until 20 semi-finalists are left. An advisory board will select up to 5 final ideas and Google will use the $10 million dollar pool to implement it.The winners do not receive any of the prize money - but they will have the satisfaction of making a difference and the accolades to go with it.

Your idea can be submitted in 8 categories total - Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter, and Everything else.

To increase your chance of winning, keep these criteria in mind (as shown on the site):

• Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
• Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
• Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
• Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
• Longevity: How long will the idea's impact last?

The deadline is October 20th and more than one entry is allowed so start brainstorming right away!  Check out the current submissions here for inspiration.

How are you going to change the world?

By: Yasmine Mustafa

"Don’t Make Me Click!" - User Interface Tips

So you've learned how to build a successful landing page, now what? How can you make your website more appealing to users and attract more visitors to return to your site?

Let me start off my recommending you check out this great video YouTube by Aza Raskin entitled 'Don't make me click'.

It's about computer interface design, and how, given the limitations of the computer visuals and interactions, you should design an efficient user interface that allows users to do what they want, in the shortest time possible. Why? Because even though users go to your website for content, the amount of time they have to spend navigating through your site to find that content is a huge opportunity cost to them.

To retain visitors to your site or landing page, you need to present your content in the simplest manner possible without getting into the way of your visitors while utilizing the simplest interaction interface. If the interaction required increases, the users' information density decreases. When this happens, the content in your page decreases and users go away. Now, that's not what you'd want, especially for an internet web business.

The best interface is having no interface – If your user doesn't notice the interface that they're using, that's the best that can happen! If they do notice the interface, chances are they're not really noticing your product or service.