How to Get the Word Out About Squidoo?
One thing I’ve noticed in my short lifetime as a Squid (since April, 2009) is that most of my lenses are visited primarily by other squids. Occasionally when I post some of my personal lenses that people who know me or live in my town are interested in, I will get a surge of non-Squidoo visitors. Most of the time, though, my links come mostly from within the Squidoo Community. I think a large part of that may be because the general public still doesn’t know that we are here and what we have to offer them as either writers or readers. I have two blogs and a few websites and have been selling books on the Internet since 1996, and I had not heard of Squidoo until this year.
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Image by Steve Thompson
Many of us tweet about our lenses and post them on Facebook, and it was though some tweets I found out about Squidoo. But I was interested in the writing end of it when I joined. By participating in Squidoo Ning groups such as Squidoo Club, Senior Squids, and RocketMoms, I was exposed to more and more lenses I might never have read otherwise, since we read and critique each other’s work and help each other out when a lens needs a boost up. Gradually it began to dawn on me that Squidoo has a lot to offer those outside the community of squids.
If someone outside Squidoo sees the default tweet “I just updated my _____________ lens,” a natural reaction might be “So what?” First, many Tweeple have never heard of Squidoo and many who have think it doesn’t have much to do with their lives. In order to get the traffic we need, we have to change that perception. We have a lot to offer those outside of Squidoo.
My little contribution to this effort is a series of two blogs I have just published. The first, Squidoo, Part 1, is aimed at people who write and shares what Squidoo might mean for them. Last night I published Why Squidoo Is Useful to Readers. I featured the work of three lensmasters with links to their lenses to illustrate how Squidoo can be useful as a search engine and as a shopping site. I hope it will help to get the word out to non-Squidoo members that there are good reasons for them to search Squidoo for information first. I think I’m going to use it as a tagline in my emails. I hope we can all work together to get the word out to those one the outside. The more people that start to search Squidoo, the more targeted our traffic will be and the more likely we all are to have our links clicked on.
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