If you have an opinion (and don’t we all??) or just want to share facts about a topic you feel passionate about, Squidoo is the perfect format for doing just that. It’s a community website where members create free web pages called “lenses” for a variety of topics. These lenses can then be linked together so similar topics or authors can be found.

If you’re asking “What is Squidoo?” you may be in the minority. In fact, Squidoo is ranked in the top 500 most visited websites in the world and is in the top 300 most viewed by people in the United States. In 2009, Squidoo grew an unprecedented 91% with an impressive 900,000 people-built lenses as of February 1, 2009.

Squidoo is not published in an ezine format and it isn’t a blog. It’s just pages of information where you can spin whatever you want, about whatever you wish. The lenses are very easy to make with a menu-driven application. So even (or maybe especially) if you’ve never built a website or written a blog before you can have your lens up and running in a very short time and sharing your opinion with the rest of the world.

When you create a lens with Squidoo, you have the choice to add different modules to your web page. There are modules for adding content, photos, featured lenses, YouTube videos, Amazon and Ebay auctions, and others.

Links to other websites are allowed on the lenses so you can even promote products as an affiliate marketer…do I smell profits? Yes indeed, Squidoo offers you a chance to collect income from your lens. Squidoo earns money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and other sites and keeps track of the earnings of each module then splits the profits with you 50-50. Wow! As if that weren’t enough, here’s another cool thing about Squidoo: it can help you feel good about yourself. Yup, you not only get to say what you want while standing on the world’s biggest soapbox, but Squidoo allows you to set up your page to donate your profits to charity, if you choose.

So if anybody asks you, “What’s Squidoo?” you can tell them it’s a great website that allows you to create a web page about your interests, passions and causes for free. It also allows you to contribute to charity or make money for yourself. So, “share what you care about, get found, get followed and get influential.” (Quoted from Squidoo.com). What could be better?

By Deborah Munger

Tags: collaboration, communication tools, creativity, Trends

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response