Using Squidoo as Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Social media is more than Facebook and Twitter, as surprising as that may seem. Perhaps your business has dabbled in other social media outlets, such as LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, or a business blog. But, have you tried to use Squidoo to promote your business? Squidoo allows you to create a portfolio of focused, single-topic pages, and can make a great addition to a content marketing strategy. Called “lenses”, the pages of Squidoo is kind of like a website or a blogging platform, except for a few differences.

The first difference is that Squidoo has categories. So, if you’re a small wedding planning business, it would be beneficial to create a few lenses under “Weddings.” Sure, a blog comes with categories too, but those categories are for organizing your posts. There are very few places for you to list your blog and place your blog or website into the category of weddings or wedding planning. But, on Squidoo, you can do that. If anything, these lenses you create will improve your online visibility and digital marketing efforts by providing additional pages for the search engines. So, someone who’s looking at lenses about weddings may be planning a wedding of their own, and would have an interest in what your business has to offer.

Another difference that sets Squidoo apart from a typical blog or web page is that lenses can come with a table of contents. So, sticking with the wedding planning example, you do a lens called “Top 10 Weddings Themes of 2011”, you can have a link to each of the 10 themes right after the introduction. An example of these contents at a glance is in this lens titled, “Best HDTVs for 2011”. This table of contents can enable you to utilize more search engine optimization in each of your posts, and reach potential customers who are simply searching for a particular television or ideas for a specific wedding theme. The contents listing also gives you a change to put together longer articles, something that isn’t as common in blog posts or in web content. The listing breaks up the lens, giving the reader the opportunity to look at certain parts quickly.

The third different between Squidoo and a regular blog or web site is that Squidoo offers a chance for you to talk about your business and what it has to offer in an informal setting, In fact, Squidoo actually encourages you to create a lens about yourself, your business and your blog. The self-centered tone is actually discouraged in blogging, as the people who read blogs are not looking for advertising or promotions, but for quality information. Squidoo is a good place for the advertising and promotion, without having to use marketing jargon to get it done. You can have a little bit more fun with your enterprise on Squidoo.

Not a whole lot of businesses are using Squidoo as part of their content marketing efforts, making the case that you ought to be using Squidoo. If you’re on Squidoo, and your competitors are not, then you’re reaching your audience in a way that they aren’t. Squidoo is completely free, so get started today and see if lenses work out for you.

Content Marketing Tech Tool of the Week: Squidoo

Social media is much more than Facebook and Twitter, as surprising as that may be. And this week's Tech Tool will expand your social media and content marketing boundaries just a little bit. Let me introduce you to Squidoo. I call Squidoo a cross between a blog and a website. It's like a blog where you compose a series of articles on various topics, whether their about you, your business, your specialties, your dog, whatever. However, Squidoo treats each article, or "lens", as more of webpage, where each article stands on its own and isn't necessarily kept in one place like a blog. Even if you have a blog, or a website, or both, I think that Squidoo can offer additional benefits to your content marketing strategy for several reasons.

First, Squidoo has you categorize each article, or lens. This is great since you often can't categorize your blog or your website with some directory, or with your web host. So, for example, if you're a freelancer who specializes in education topics, you can file your lenses under "Education", or even "Parenting and Kids", depending on the topic of your lens. Each category also comes with sub-categories, your niche lens is labeled according to what it's about, making it easier to find for others interested in education, parenting, or even the specific topic you wrote about.

Second, Squidoo is friendlier towards longer posts and actually encourages it. Although longer posts aren't unheard of in blogs, normally blogs posts are fewer than 800 words. If you want to do something longer, you can do so on Squidoo. Squidoo makes this easier by enabling a table of contents at the beginning of the article, after the section meant for your introduction. This table of contents is great for readers who may only be interested in certain parts of of your article. It's also great for search engine optimization, where each section could be titled with an appropriate keyword. Running with the education example, if you wrote an article called, "Most Popular College Majors," you could then have each title as keyword, like biology major, or communications major.

Third, Squidoo actually encourages you to write about yourself, or your blog, or your website. In blogging, particularly business blogging, it's highly discouraged to promote yourself or your newest product. Blogging experts say that readers are more interested in the valuable information you can provide them. However, in Squidoo, you can write about yourself or your newest product without being seen as someone who's just tooting your horn. Such lenses provide additional publicity for what you have to offer, and diversify your search engine results by adding Squidoo lenses.

Best of all, Squidoo is completely free to use and really easy to learn. There are even opportunities to earn money from your lenses, which is always nice. So, give this week's Tech Tool of the Week a shot.