How Can Squidoo Help You to Dominate Your Writing Niche

Many writers focus on a niche but fail to recognize the benefits that a site like Squidoo can offer to help enhance the writer's domination in that niche as well as helping them to profit from it financially.

Writing articles that are in a niche has been proved to give a writer a big advantage over those who just write the occasional article that is in that niche, in that the regular writer will develop over time a following of people that are interested in that niche topic, and who will return regularly to see what new articles the author has written.

Having read one article by an author in a niche, visitors are more likely to then read other articles that have been written by that author on the same subject matter, than they would be to read other articles by an author who has only one or two articles in that niche.

In other words, by writing regularly in a given category, a writer is more likely to dominate that category than a writer who publishes the occasional article.

Having said that, I am now aware that as a reader of this article, you may be asking yourself "What is Squidoo ?" and "How is it that Squidoo can help me?"

Squidoo is a unique web site that was created by Seth Godin, a name that many writers and other entrepreneurs will be familiar with. I have added links at the end of this article should you wish to look further into Squidoo and what you can achieve with it.

Having been a member of Squidoo for just over 3 years, I have been able to create a few lenses that have definitely helped to improve traffic to my original articles. I have also written articles that have helped to gain exposure to my Squidoo lenses, so the process does work well both ways.

What makes Squidoo unique is that it allows it's members (known as "lensmasters") to create "lenses", which are web pages that are focused on a specific topic.

Can you now see the connection maybe? A niche is a specific topic; therefore creating a web page about this on a popular site like Squidoo can be a beneficial thing to do.

Whereas published articles, especially those on the Yahoo Contributor Network, are purely text, and once published expected to remain static and to never change, Squidoo lenses are always begging to be enhanced and updated, and can include images, video clips, as well as RSS Feeds that allow the latest articles and updates to be included from different sites.

A writer who has a number of articles that are in a niche area can create one or more lenses on Squidoo about that topic, adding links back to their original articles, as well as further information that is not in them, for example images and videos.

The following are examples of lenses that I have created, that were built around articles written for the Yahoo Contributor Network:

Limericks For Saint Patrick's Day - this features a number of Limericks that were written by myself and other writers on YCN, with links back to the original published articles. It's currently riding high as it's Saint Patrick's Day today, and ranked 870 out of over 1.5 million lenses.

One Hundred Years Ago - this lens features the digitized articles from 100 year old newspapers, each of which was originally written about on YCN.

News From A Weird World - which is my weekly publication on YCN covering some of the unusual stories in the news from the previous week. This lens has a summary of as well as links to all of the previous editions of News From A Weird World.

It should be fairly obvious that there are opportunities to be had by utilizing Squidoo to help increase dominance in your niche, but what about quality and reputation, both of Squidoo and also your work.

Squidoo has a good reputation with Google, even after the recent algorithm changes, and is continually reviewing lenses to make sure that they do not contain spam, offensive or illegal material, do not plagiarize other works, and are of a high quality.

There are a group of lensmasters called "Squid Angels" who are each responsible for their own categories within Squidoo, and they have the power to "ding" lenses that do not conform. Any lensmaster can also report lenses like this, and HQ are quick to remove them if they are shown to be undesirable.

Creating lenses on Squidoo does have other benefits too, since you have multiple ways to earn additional income there.

This is not a topic that I will cover in great detail here, but just to give you an idea of how you can earn from Squidoo: (a) sharing in the advertising profits (based on the rank of your lens), (b) selling products on sites like Amazon, eBay, Zazzle etc from your lens, (c) other affiliate links that you include in your lens (the scope is limitless).

Three years ago I joined Squidoo hoping to use it to promote one of my web sites. Within weeks I began using my web site to promote my new lenses on Squidoo, and began blogging about them. more recently I have been writing about my lenses, and creating lenses about my published articles.

One thing that I have found to be very clear is that some topics lend themselves very well to being written as articles, whereas others work best as lenses. Examples of great ideas for lenses are Travelogues, Recipes, Fashion, Gardening and Crafts, all of which I know are close to the heart of many writers, who have niches in these areas.

So am I right, and is Squidoo a good way to help gain additional dominance in your niche area? Please feel free to leave a comment and let me know, and if you find this article helpful, sharing it is always appreciated.

Sources:

My Lenses On Squidoo

Join Squidoo