Get Satisfaction follows a similar strategy of holding company profile pages ‘hostage’, and has in the past been criticized for that behavior. Sure, there’s some truth to its claim that conversations are happening around the web anyway and they’re merely aggregating them, but I’m sure many will claim that the company is doing this for obvious SEO reasons. I’m not sure I like the fact that Squidoo takes the lead in creating pages for brands only to ‘unlock’ them for a monthly fee afterwards. Basically, it becomes a place where companies can both lead, monitor and respond to the online conversations about their brands, which Godin says is particularly helpful when shit storms brew on the Web (whether deserved or not). This will enable companies to post responses, highlight third-party blog posts, run contests and quizzes, and more. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. That all sounds super duper, and I have the highest respect for the man, but I also have mixed feelings about the way Squidoo is going about it. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can’t control what people are saying about you. In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it. Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about. It could have a link to your website, a video, links to your press releases, and an enticing description of your company and its offerings.Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. If so, your company’s page very likely has almost nothing on it. The better your page, the better it is for your company.Īt Spoke, a shot from which is at the top of this post, your company may already be listed. Any site that lets you share good content about your company is a good place to be. You should have a Spoke page, too, and a LinkedIn page, and a page at BrownBook, and a good Google Places page. Squidoo says that every business should have a Squidoo lens, and you should. Think of a good hub site as a good directory.That is, treat the opportunity to drop a link into a good hub page or lens just as you would any other linkbuilding opportunity: focus on the quality, the relevance, and the overall value. If you don’t have authority pages, a blog, whitepapers, or some other excellent stuff to read at your own website, don’t spend your time building other sites. Make sure you have plenty of good content on your own site first.After all, still probably gets more traffic than your domain. Hundreds of valueless pages clotted the search results for popular topics and search engines cracked down on the practice.ĭoes that mean that hub pages - user generated pages including good articles and curated content - are now worthless? Not necessarily. Unfortunately, it worked well enough that the web became infested with poor quality and even autogenerated articles thrown together simply to game the system. In fact, we ‘d create high quality content on relevant topics at a company’s website specifically in order to link to it from a high quality Squidoo lens, and often ended up with multiple links from other sources to both the pages. Making a Squidoo lens about your company, for example, allowed you to introduce yourself to potential customers via, a domain which is almost certainly more powerful than that of your small business, while also linking to your website as an authoritative source. In the heyday of article marketing, when a genuinely good article at EzineArticles could do wonders for a website, sites like Squidoo, HubPages, and Helium were often used for offsite optimization of websites.
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