Great site – How NOT to market with Squidoo

I got a really cool email this morning – my Squidoo Lens of the Day.

I have mentioned Squidoo in the past as a good tool to use for non-technical people who want to get started in affiliate marketing.  I’ve seen a lot of “lenses” from good to bad and the email today focused on “The Best Squidoo Lens NOT To Do.”

Yep – that’s right – a guy actually set up a Squidoo Lens to illustrate all the mistakes NOT to make if you decide to market with Squidoo Lenses.

What the heck is Squidoo?  From Wikipedia:

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses—single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommendations and advice than pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions. Squidoo has a Top 100 list by topic, by rank, by group and for Giant lenses. There are about 22 different topics like Health & Medicine, Food & Cooking, Business and many more.

In any case – the point the guys had is this – if your whole business plan of marketing with a Squidoo Lens is about setting one up, then slapping up links to every product you want to sell without contributing some content and point of view to the project – save yourself the time.  I have seen affiliates who do really well with Squidoo.  Their common trait is that they spend time and effort building out a great resource for the reader, and surround the resources with well selected products that are going to appeal to that audience and in best cases, the products themselves can contribute to the conversation.

So – newbies and experienced affiliates alike…. get out there and market with Squidoo.  Please do your audience (and yourself) a favor and contribute to the conversation.