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.

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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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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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Unfortunately, because social bookmarking is freely available to just about anyone, it has become widely abused. Many social bookmarking sites are spammed by internet marketers looking to generate some quick traffic. Spamming the social bookmarking sites can easily result in the loss of your reputation and credibility.

Each submission you make to the social bookmarking sites needs to be carefully reviewed beforehand. Submitting articles laden with keywords is a common form of social bookmarking spam. Articles that are very dense with keywords have a tendency to not make sense. The articles and web pages you submit need to have real value to those who will end up reading them. It's next to impossible for keyword dense content to be of much value to anyone other than the person who submitted it.

The keyword density of your content submissions should ideally be between 6%-8%. If you constantly submit high quality and informative content you will eventually receive a substantial flow of traffic. To make matters worse, Yahoo and Google hate spam and are taking great pains to eliminate junk content before it can be widely distributed.

Creating and mass submitting junk content may seem like a great way to get free traffic but in reality you are just wasting your time. The extra time spent on creating meaningful and user friendly content is well worth the investment of time.

Purchasing private label rights content is a great way for webmasters to leverage their time and outsource their content creation. The trouble is that private label rights content has a way of being viewed as duplicate content. Using duplicate content can get you into trouble with the search engines and can even lead to the impression that you are a spammer.

If you purchase content that is available for other webmasters to use, it is absolutely imperative that you rewrite the content somewhat before you use it as web content. If you are pressed for time then consider hiring an article rewriter who will usually rewrite content at the cost of about $2 an article.

If you have desperately been seeking a means of increasing your web presence but lack the funds necessary for professional SEO, then social bookmarking may be just what you are looking for. But because social bookmarking is freely available to anyone it is very easy to abuse. If you are going to use social bookmarking as part of your overall marketing strategy then you need to take the time to create quality content. After all, the last thing you want is to become seen as a spammer.

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Viral marketing campaigns work in much the same way. The marketing piece spreads through word-of-mouth, as people tell other people about it. Viral marketing can come in many forms. On the Internet, viral campaigns are typically in the form of videos or reports, but they may also come in the form of audio or images.

Video is probably the most viral of the various media methods, because people seem to get more excited about videos. But text reports can also go viral very quickly if the information contained in them is exceptional.

The best forms of viral marketing give away extremely valuable information for free. If you promote a dog training guide, create a short precious video about potty training a puppy. You don't want to give away everything, but show one really good element that makes people realize you're not all about the fluff and filler.

If you're using text as your viral medium of choice, then it provides the perfect opportunity for you to profit through a freebie. Viral reports usually have links sprinkled throughout them, either to your direct offers or affiliate items, but they still provide real value to the readers.

If providing an interesting or informative marketing piece is the most important part of viral marketing, getting the piece in front of people who will spread it is the second most important thing.

If no one sees the piece, there won't be anyone to spread it around. You need to figure out a way to get your piece seen by enough people that it will go viral. If you're using videos, you can usually get enough views to a video to start a viral campaign just by submitting the videos to a few video sharing sites.

If your information is valuable enough, people will probably flock to it. But sometimes it takes a little more than that and you'll have to use social bookmarking, forums, and other methods to bring the initial wave of targeted traffic.

If you offer a really high-quality report or video for free, you'll usually have no trouble getting it to go viral. Post it in a forum as a freebie, send it out to your list, but make sure it states clearly that you encourage your readers or viewers to share the download link, or else they may feel like they're doing something wrong.

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What many people don't know about Squidoo is that lenses have a tendency to earn top Google rankings in the search engines. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that top Google rankings mean lots of traffic. Many webmasters pay a small fortune to get pages indexed within the top Google rankings.

Before you go crazy and start building hundreds of Squidoo lenses, it's a good idea to have a look at some of the more popular lenses. Whenever you are entering some kind of new market it's usually a good idea to take a look at the competition. Look at many of the top ranked lenses and see what the owners are doing with their lenses.

After all, lenses that are top ranked have to be doing something right. You should next take the time to write out a plan of what exactly your lens is going to look like. Decide who your lens will target and what kind of content you will provide on your lens.

The next step is to do some keyword research for your chosen niche and uncover some low competition keywords that you can use for your Squidoo lens. The low competition keywords you uncover will serve as the headline for your lens. Having Squidoo lens with the keyword you are targeting in the title will give you a huge head start in battle for search engine rankings.

The best keyword research tools available on the market right now are nichebot.com and Keyword Elite. I personally use nichebot.com and their research tools are absolutely top notch.

For your Squidoo lens to do really well you need to add as much high quality content to your lens as possible. You can actually use articles you may have written in the past to use on your lens if you are not up to the task of creating new content. Fresh private label rights content is a great way to get content as well but make sure that you purchase the freshest content possible. Adding some professional graphics can go a long way in making your lens look more professional. Consider hiring a graphic designer to create a few unique graphics for your lens.

The best way to use Squidoo to send traffic to your website is to use the RSS feed module. The RSS feed module is an option offered to you when you are first building your lens. All you really need to do to make the RSS feed work for you is to load the RSS feed from your website or blog and the Squidoo lens will then update automatically as you update your website. After you have started a few lenses you should start to notice a substantial improvement to your websites traffic.

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Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users will do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance – let's say you're in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let's say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, then you'd have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn't worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy – remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don't necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a "friends" list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn't go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. Keep it to ten or less per day and you should be fine.

After you've been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

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Social bookmarking emerged a few years ago as a way for internet surfers to find, save, organize, and share their bookmarks of different web pages. Social bookmarking is an alternative to simple browser bookmarking because with social bookmarking you can share your bookmarks with other people who can in turn share their bookmarks with you.

Because you are constantly updating and sharing your bookmarks with other people you are in effect being social with others, hence the name social bookmarking. Bookmarks saved to a social bookmarking site can shared within a network of others or can even be kept private (which is more like anti-social bookmarking).

Compared to other automated resource classification software, social bookmarking actually has many advantages. The big difference between resource classification systems and social bookmarking sites is that social bookmarking sites are arranged by humans based upon how they understand and interact with the sites content. In contrast, resource allocation systems are arranged by computerized algorithms.

Therefore, the tags that are achieved with social bookmarking are much more semantic and systematic. Additionally, because humans are responsible for the bookmarking of sites, sites with more bookmarks are perceived as having more value than their highly ranked search engine counterparts.

As an internet marketer, social bookmarking allows your websites to get noticed without the need for costly search engine optimization. The more people who bookmark your website, the more perceived value your website will have and this ultimately translates into visitors to your website.

Perhaps the easiest way to start getting traffic from social bookmarking is by submitting your website to stumbleupon.com. Stumbleuppon allows users who have downloaded their software into their browser to randomly explore websites based on their interests. By submitting your site to stumbleupon you can actually start to receive traffic within just a few days.

The world of internet marketing is fiercely competitive and to truly succeed you need to have a competitive advantage over the other guy. Social bookmarking as a form of website promotion is free and can easily deliver avalanches of traffic to your websites. In other words, social bookmarking is quite possibly the competitive advantage you have been looking for.

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The catch is that you often times have to be willing to put in some real work to make the free traffic generation technique work. One of the best ways to make money and build traffic is through the use of forums.

Online forums are places that allow for the free exchange of information like a chat room except conversations are not carried out in real time. People come to forums for all sorts of different reasons such as digging up information or networking while others come to vent their frustrations. Forums are really great places to promote your business because almost all of the people who are members of the forum are interested in the same topic. That means that the forum visitors are highly targeted traffic. There are forum search engines online which can locate a forum in almost any niche category.

In addition to having laser targeted traffic, forums are also great because they are almost always free. Professional forums tend to charge a membership fee but the fee is usually very small. You can find forums by going to Google groups and entering your keyword information.

Before you ever start posting in forums it's always a good idea to read the terms of service associated with the forum. Upon registering for a forum you will usually be shown the terms of service and will have to confirm that you have read the terms in order for your registration to be completed. Make sure to actually look at these terms before posting or you could get your account suspended.

The way you to get traffic from forums is by using a signature file located in the bottom of each post that you make. You signature file will contain a hyperlink that directs visitors to your website. If you are making informative and relevant posts within the forum you will attract a lot of attention and your signature file allows you to convert this attention into traffic. In order to really see traffic results from your forum posts you have to post several times a day and really get involved in the forum. Think of the time you spend at forums as money in the bank.

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