If you enjoy writing as a form of hobby or indeed use it to promote your business or other activities, you will love Squidoo! I recently discovered it and quickly became addicted. I certainly find it much more rewarding than plain blogging, which can be disappointing if nobody reads your stuff or bothers to comment. Squidoo is far more interactive in a community sense.
According to Wikipedia, Squidoo.com is a community website that began in 2005 and allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects that interest. them. Squidoo now has nearly 2 million hand-built lenses. The creators of lenses are called “lensmasters”.
What I particularly like about Squidoo, is that it also allows content creators to earn revenue from referral links to sites like Amazon.com and Ebay, and several others. These advertising links are primarily under the lensmaster’s control. Some Google Adsense links are also added by the Squidoo people and 50% of the revenue shared amongst all lensmasters under a payment tier system based on ranking. Some experienced lensmasters claim to earn significant monthly incomes from Squidoo. Some voluntarily donate part of their earnings to charity.
Squidoo uses the concept of a lens (“shining light on a subject”) as its primary feature. Lenses are much like blog posts, except they're on a single subject chosen by the lensmaster. Squidoo contains lenses on dozens of different topics, including Food and Cooking, Green Living, About Me, How to Do It advice, Photograhy, Travel and Places, all kinds of Small Business Ideas and topics like My Favourite Films, TV shows, Music, Stars and Musicians etc. The list is endless and the possibilities are infinite.
Squidoo is very user-friendly and is notable in that it allows users to create multimedia pages without learning HTML, though some knowledge of this can be useful in adding extra enhancements to the content. The pages often achieve built-in popularity due to their association with thousands of other Squidoo pages, and can rank highly on search engines like Google and Yahoo under the Squidoo influence.
As an encouragement, Squidoo engenders a real sense of community spirit by awarding points to lensmasters for almost every small activity in building their own lenses, and visiting, liking and commenting on other peoples lenses. Voting in polls and taking part in quizzes also earn points. Extra points are suddenly awarded for runs of continuous activity, as are Squid Trophies.
All in all, participating on Squidoo is great fun and potentially very rewarding. I recommend it to both budding and experienced writers.
