I can just imagine a lot of marketers plastering random thoughts on copy paper all over the walls like Russell Crowe in a Beautiful Mind. Maybe they are just trudging around quipping “yeah, Content is King”, “SPAM sucks”, or “I’m an excellent writer” like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman.
Hopefully, I’m not nearly as neurotic as the previous examples, but the fact remains that you have to market your wares. Build it and they will come just doesn’t happen. So I started a Squid Quest to develop some fun and different content to advertise my blogs, websites, and other services. Squidoo has been around a while. In a wild spree just to explore different social media sites, I signed up some time back but never did anything with it until recently. Here are my initial impressions:
- Lenses are your posts and they should be unique and original across the service and on the web.
- Squidoo is addictive with inspiring lensmasters, monsters, points, trophies, and ranking.
- Bring your A-Game: appealing title, attention grabbing intro, eye-catching graphics, all important message, minor HTML knowledge, creative widgets, social interaction, and you can sell stuff.
- You are a nobody until you have 25 lenses – the really big boys and girls have over 500!
- Do that authorship thing with Google.
- Sure you can sell stuff, but you can’t pick just any old title or stuff your text with free, free, free as the SPAM filter will not let you start or publish.
- It’s a mostly a family place with no sex, hate, gambling, illegal downloads, or affiliate marketing topics allowed.
- Best case is that you have some content you can already include like videos and music.
- Graphics must be legit – don’t rip and burn from the Bing image search. The clearest format is PNG with square 150 x 150 pixel images.
- Play with all the modules as you get some dramatic presentation and feedback options not available in most platforms.
It’s early on and I don’t expect to make a ton of money from Squidoo. However, it’s definitely helping to up my marketing game and give more to my audience.