Squid... Who?

I've a confession to make - I've only just now made my first lens on Squidoo.

Till now I've kept away from social networking sites on principle, because I believed they were just that - social. It's not that I don't like being social, but there are more than enough distractions when you work online, and I'd heard all sorts of tales of how much time people can spend exploring them, so I thought I was being very virtuous in keeping well away.

Well, now I've found a perfect excuse. One of the very few people whose advice on Internet marketing I actually trust sent me an e-mail recently that gently told me off for having so far failed to recognize how good a social network site can be for getting your message out to the world.

(His name's Paul Myers, by the way, and if you have any interest whatsoever in marketing online his TalkBiz News e-zine is the place to be.)

So, I checked out networking... and found myself lens-building on Squidoo.

In case there's anyone else who hasn't tried this, it's great fun. A lens is just another name for a web page that's actually hosted on Squidoo itself. You start off with a template and add the modules that you want to use - and the words you want to say.

You can make as many lenses as there are subjects that you have an interest in, and you can link them all together so that in effect you have an extra website.

You can make a lens for pleasure or for profit, to raise awareness or to highlight a good cause. You can link it to your website. You can link it to your blog. You can link it up with Amazon, or show a video from YouTube. You can use it to get traffic - you can use it to make friends.

The folks at Squidoo even give you loads of advice on how to set it up to get the best results from it, and free tools to help you to promote it.

Well, my first lens is now up there with the others. It's about success, of course - what it really is, why it's so important to you, the process that you need to follow to achieve it, and the skills you need to make Supreme Success your own. If you'd like to take a look, it's at http://www.squidoo.com/supreme-success/ - hope you enjoy it.

Making Squidoo lenses is addictive. I'm looking forward very much to making more of them... and, of course, I can always tell myself I'm really working.