Are you looking for a way to create simple web pages to get started with income producing sites online? An alternative to going the ‘hosted WordPress site with your own domain’ route is to set up a completely free website on a third party platform. The very best choice for this is Squidoo. This free site is the brainchild of author, entrepreneur, and public speaker Seth Godin. In 2006 he and his team launched this site as a way for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection to be able to easily create their own websites at no cost.
Squidoo continues to be one of my favorite marketing strategies. This is where you can create a ‘lens’, which is a web page on a specific topic. This topic could be your local business, a course or eBook you have created, or a product available on Amazon you wish to recommend and earn money from. While I tend to set up my lenses strictly to promote my articles, my own products, courses, and books, and niche sites I create on a variety of topics, you can certainly do this to get the word out about a local business or to set up a site quickly based on your stamp and coin collecting hobbies you mentioned in your email to me. Anyone can become a ‘lensmaster’ on Squidoo, and this will give you a much better idea of how you want to proceed in the future.
Let us know when you set up a Squidoo lens so I can take a look. I recently set up a lens on baby monitors to recommend the one I believe is the best on the market.
One of my students, Tatiana, has an idea for a business on helping parents to teach their own children to swim. She wanted to know how to find out if this would be a profitable niche. My recommendation here is to create several lenses on Squidoo to see which keyword phrases are most appealing to your target audience. Keywords are the words people type into Google when they are searching for more information on a topic, and your target audience would be parents who have decided that their child needs to learn to swim. Your goal is to find out if enough parents want to teach their own children to make your business venture worthwhile, or if they would prefer to have someone else teach them. By setting up lenses with keyword phrases such as ‘teach your child to swim’ or ‘swimming lessons by parents’ you will be able to do your research at no cost. A Squidoo lens is made up of many modules, so be sure to add the module called ‘Guestbook Comments’ where parents will be able to share their thought with you.
I recently created a beginner’s course on how to get started with Squidoo with Geoff Hoff. This training is called ‘Squidoo Minisites’ and takes you completely through the process of setting up your first lenses and recommending affiliate products of various kinds on your lenses. During the first few weeks of release, many people have already begun to make great process as a result of this training.
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