An Introduction to Squidoo

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space page. Squidoo calls the sites "lenses" and the people who produce the sites are called "lensmasters."

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of "modules". Squidoo has dozens of modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens. Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50. You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it's a great chance to build some backlinks to your primary company website.

One of the best ways to use Squidoo to build traffic to your primary blog is by using the RSS feed module. You simply load the RSS feed from your blog and the Squidoo lens will update automatically as you update your blog.

The Amazon module is also very easy to use for people that are new at Squidoo. For the case of Amazon products, you simply enter the ISBN number of the Amazon product and Squidoo will pull it directly off the Amazon website, complete with the photo and the price. You can also have the module pull directly from keywords if you don't want to take the time to find ISBN numbers on Amazon.

Another great Squidoo module is the Ebay module. With the Ebay module, you can select products by keyword or by seller. If you sell a lot of products yourself on Ebay, this is a great way to get free traffic to your auctions.

As you can tell, Squidoo is a great free and easy way to build traffic and make money online. So get Squidooing!