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Squidoo is a remarkable resource for Internet marketers. It's what's considered a web 2.0 site that allows users to create "lenses," which are individual pages situated on the Squidoo.com domain that promote a specific topic.
You may be wondering what's so great about that, when thousands of other sites allow you to do the same thing. But Squidoo is unique. Not only do they make it incredibly easy to create a web page, ripe with graphics, content, and interactivity, but they allow – and even encourage you – to use the page to make money (very different from the marketing ban you face on MySpace).
A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place, such as HubPages. But they're far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profiting potential.
Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years. This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why Tiffany Dow penned the eBook Social Networking on Squidoo, which was endorsed by an endless supply of guru marketers thanks to its step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.
Squidoo has finally created a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.
Of course, with the influx of honest marketers, a wave of spammers came to try to take over. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, and a sharp drop in traffic to boot – known as Google's Squidoo Slap.
Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. They also banned four major spam topics from the site. This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.
They also instituted some policies with regards to quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself. This also helped deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links.
Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.
You can cross-promote your lenses. Build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the SERPs for many competitive keywords and phrases.
People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers. Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. But you can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly through to your own domain.
Filed under Social Marketing by 
Making money on MySpace isn't as easy as it once was. It used to be incredibly easy to make money on the site. A marketer could create a fake profile, add thousands of friends using an automated program, and then simply send bulletins out to all of those thousands of people.
Then people started complaining about the ridiculous amount of spam messages they were getting from marketers. Some people would receive dozens of daily spam offerings for everything from Viagra to ringtones to payday loans, and everything in between.
Those people started to complain to MySpace, so to salvage their reputation, they got a lot stricter about enforcing their rules. One of the first things they did was put a limit on the number of friends you could add daily. This seriously hampered a lot of people, who were used to adding hundreds or even thousands of people per day to their spam lists using those automated programs.
Then they started cracking down on bulletin spam, banning some users who abused the privilege. Users would find themselves banned within hours of sending out their first bulletin, which cause many marketers to simply give up trying to make money on MySpace.
But smart marketers found out you could still use MySpace to make a great deal of money if you used it properly. Gone were the days of sending out bulletin spam, spamming affiliate links on guestbooks, and spamming the MySpace forums. But you could still promote your offerings tactfully on MySpace.
You should offer MySpace users real value in return for being your friend. If they're just on your list for marketing purposes, make sure you provide them with plenty of free incentives to get them to stay.
Once you've made friends with people, you can direct them to your own websites outside of MySpace. You could ask them to join your forum, sign up to your newsletter, or visit your blog. Once you get your friends to start networking with you outside MySpace, you're free to market to them however you choose.
MySpace won't interfere with your marketing efforts off their site, even if someone reports you for trying to sell them something after they joined your email list from your own private website. Just keep in mind that there's always a chance you could be banned from MySpace for using any kind of marketing there.
Although you can greatly minimize your chances, due to their terms of service that prohibit blatant marketing, there's still that small risk that you should keep in mind. The financial rewards generally makes it worth the risk.
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Web 2.0 is a term that's often misused. Some people use the term to refer to a particular style of graphics design, but that's not what web 2.0 is really about. Web 2.0 is all about user-generated content.
This means the visitors to your site generate the majority of the content on the site, as opposed to the site owner or writers creating the content. A perfect example of web 2.0 is Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network, which is a type of web 2.0 site.
Although the site does post some of its own content, such as the lensmaster tip blog, the vast majority of the site was built by individuals creating their own pages within the site. When a user signs up to the site, they're allowed to position themselves as experts on anything from A-Z (they even have a separate section for R and X rated pages that are kept from the general G-rated public).
They create a unique page on the Squidoo domain, with all sorts of information about their niche topic. They can create or join groups and post in the SquidU forum to communicate with others in the community.
One of the oldest types of web 2.0 sites is the forum. Forums are almost as old as the Internet itself, and they were one of the first types of web 2.0 concepts. Other very old web 2.0 predecessors were guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and classified ad sites.
These days, web 2.0 sites are more complex. Rather than simply posting messages on a forum, users can typically generate their own profiles, create their own custom pages, and have more involvement in creating the site and its content.
There are many different types of web 2.0 sites. MySpace and Facebook are two well-known social networking sites. Blogger is a very popular blog platform, which allows people to develop a type of online diary or journal.
Twitter is somewhat like a blog, only users post very small snippets of content in each post. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to post their favorite links, and allow other people to vote on those links.
Squidoo and HubPages are two sites that let people create pages of information about specific subjects, a bit like a one-page website about a particular topic, similar to Wikipedia. The basic function of web 2.0 sites is to allow users to post their own content to the site.
Web 2.0 sites can be leveraged for marketing purposes if used correctly. The key is to immerse yourself in the community and become known as a real person rather than a nameless marketer hoping to cash in on their pooled traffic generation.
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