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What the heck are Squidoo lenses and how can you relate them to online business opportunities? Squidoo.com is a web 2.0 website that specializes in hosting personal web pages for anyone who has 10 minutes to build one. They are referred to as “lenses” instead of website because each one focuses on a particular topic or idea.

You can create a lens for whatever reason. Whether you want to share your opinion on a particular online business opportunity or just complain about the electric company, Squidoo gives you a quick and easy venue for getting your message out to the masses. It it so easy anyone can do it.

Squidoo lenses are simple to set up, requiring absolutely no technical knowledge or programming experience. With a few clicks you can easily add youtube videos, Flicker photos, polling surveys, google blog searches, RSS and much more to your personalized lens.

In addition to providing a social outlet, Squidoo can also serve as a highly effective and risk-free marketing tool for your onlinebusiness opportunity. Below are the top 7 reasons you should create a lens to help give your online business opportunity a kick:

1. To increase traffic to your site. Squidoo lenses can include inbound links to your website, boosting your site’s credibility in the eyes of search engines and increasing your overall link popularity. Plus, the lenses themselves are indexed by search engines, so your personal page can achieve a high ranking with strategic keyword placement. Get a few links to your Squidoo lens and you can easily get your lens to rank favorably in search results for some competitive keywords.

2. To save money on advertising. Unlike costly print ads and direct mail campaigns, creating a personal Squidoo page won’t cost you a dime. It takes about 10 minutes to build a Squidoo lens and you can really boost your credibility and brand yourself as an expert in your industry.

3. To highlight multiple aspects of your online business opportunity. You can create as few or as many lenses as you want. It’s possible to have hundreds of different lenses focusing on different components of your business, all driving traffic back to your website.

4. To piggyback on other Squidoo pages. When your lens is nestled among hundreds of thousands of other interesting lenses, it’s more likely to benefit from the traffic generated by those neighboring pages.

5. To sell stuff. A great way to get your feet wet in the e-commerce arena, Squidoo lets you sell items from Ebay and Amazon and earn royalties from each sale. It also lets you have direct affiliate links to any of the affiliate programs you endorse.

6. To conduct surveys for your business. Squidoo pages are a great way to gauge consumer attitudes and reactions to new products and services. The Squidoo polling feature is really easy to set up and allows you to survey your customers.

7. To interact with potential consumers. Visitors to your lens can add their comments and links. Every time an update is made, it makes your lens that much more appealing and relevant to search engines.

If you’re still unsure about Squidoo, ask yourself just one question: what do you have to lose? It’s free and easy, which are two of the most desirable qualities for anyone promoting an online business opportunity! I highly recommend it!

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Jim Suzak is a professional internet marketer that utilizes several high quality online business opportunities and has achieved residual income success through this method. Check-out his website Residual Income Opportunities for more details and get your FREE online income opportunities newsletter, so you can also realize your dreams while working in the comfort of your home. –> http://www.DynamicInternetProfits.com

Tags: one way links, squidoo, Web 2.0

Many of you may have heard of Squidoo which is a competitor of Hubpages.com. Basically both of them are a “free-hosted community of content producers”. Both Squidoo and Hubpages can be “grouped” into the Web 2.0 movement - where user generated content rules.

If you are already familiar with Squidoo, the your entrance into working with Hubpages will be very straightforward. Both Squidoo and Hubpages SHARE REVENUE with their content creators.

What Makes Them Similar, Yet Different?

From HubPages.com: “Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and lead generation tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages.

Hubpages will split revenue with the content creator. The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website.

Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author. Hubpages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their income through content like many people do on eBay by selling goods.”

From Squidoo: “We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That’s direct out of pocket expenses like rent and servers and salary and benefits expenses (our CEO doesn’t take a salary, and neither does our board of directors).

Then, with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees.”

So, other than the obvious revenue sharing, is there any other reason to consider using Hubpages? YES! As Hubpages is considered an authority by Google, you are able to make money with the Google Adsense that is on your hubpage.

Developing content on Hubpages should become an important part of your overall web marketing / promotional strategies.

In addition to your actual ‘hubs’ ranking on the various search engines, you can link directly to your other websites! And guess what? These backlinks are being ‘counted’.

So Hubpages can help you strengthen your entire marketing presence and ‘network of sites’. One of the best things about creating Hubpages and Squidoo lenses is that it can be outsourced.

Outsource the writing, and by doing so, you free up your time to create more Hubpages. Another great aspect of any free content hosting site, is that they have already built-in traffic from other members, and if you are applying your linking knowledge to this, you will be creating tons of back links…Power Linking!

Web 2.0 properties such as Hubpages and Squidoo have become an important part of our overall traffic strategy and works well in any niche market.

Remember, your competitors are most likely NOT on Hubpages so it is still a ‘land grab’.

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Jack Humphrey is one of the web’s leading social marketing experts. He teaches his social media marketing tactics at Social Power Linking and blogs about social marketing and blog marketing at the Friday Traffic Report.

Tags: hubpages, social network, squidoo, Web 2.0