Share Your Expertise

Squidoo. Funny name, entertaining site. At Squidoo you can learn from amateur experts and share your own knowledge. Here’s the underlying concept, directly from the horse's mouth:

"All by itself, in isolation, making a webpage about your interest is pretty worthless. You might as well just keep a diary or write poetry on the back of a napkin. The key is to build a page about something you’re interested in…that you think other people might also like to read. The benefit of using Squidoo is in the connections. Connections between your Squidoo page (we call it a lens) and other lenses. Connections between other sites and your lens. Connections between your lens and your other sites, your blog and your company. And most important, connections between you and the people who see your lens."

Like all good social networking sites, Squidoo relies on give and take:

Share your expertise by building "Lenses"
Learn from other peoples' expertise by reading and rating lenses
Use your lenses to interlink your sites, blogs, affiliate programs and other online efforts

Building a Squidoo Lens

When you build a lens you begin with a pre-defined template into which you plug information. Once you've built the basic lens you can add modules that allow you to expand the lens. There are modules for YouTube videos, Flickr photos, RSS feeds a feed from your blog and other popular media. Additionally, there are interactive modules for including polls, debates and discussions. There's also a bevy of licensed content you can include on your lens, including videos from Heroes, NBA fan widgets, and much more. And, of course, the underlying reason for even participating--make money by selling for Amazon, Café Press, eBay, Netflix and others. You can interlink you lenses with others in order to drive traffic to your lens.

Become a Master Squid

Besides building lenses, you can peruse and rate other peoples' lenses. The more lenses you make, rate and comment on the more influential you become. You can also mark lenses as "favorites," or bookmark lenses at your favorite social bookmarking site. There are levels of specialty that you can achieve, depending on how many lenses you create. All of these levels fall under the category of "Giant Squid." This rank gives you more exposure and customizable templates that are more flexible.

Examples of Great Lenses

Of course, I had to make a lens in order to write this article. I opted for singing karaoke, something I love to do (and am fairly good at). Check it out. Other cools lenses I found while researching are a lens for my favorite Celtic band, Capercialle, a lens for the bodhrán, a Celtic drum and a web site for Canadian glass artist Robert Held. All very nicely done.

Squidoo is brought to us by Seth Godin, an early advocate of one-to-one marketing via the web, and more recently a devotee of social media marketing. People are using Squidoo to market themselves, as Squidoo lenses are spidered by the search engines and show up in search results. With a little research you can learn how to get your name to the top of Google via your Squidoo lens. But be warned, Squidoo comes with a Netspeak time-waster rating of extreme! It's way addictive.