Squidoo is a collection of over 700,000 pages created by users about whatever they want the world to know – ideas, recommendations, interests, instructions – basically any topic that they know or care about.

Squidoo was founded by marketer, Seth Godin, in 2005 and is a free service where users, called lensmasters, select a topic and then create and publish a single page called a lens, which can be enhanced with photos, videos, links, feeds, articles, lists and text to support their efforts.

The pages are monetized with ads and items from Amazon, eBay or CafePress and the proceeds, if any, are split between Squidoo (45%), charity (5%) and the lensmaster (50%).  The lensmaster has the option of keeping their cut of the proceeds or donating it to one of a long list of charities (we chose the ASPCA).

Getting started:  Register with Squidoo and create a profile.  The profile includes a photo, bio, ability to add numerous links to blogs and websites (yours and those you recommend), and a list your favorite Squidoo lenses.

The Squidoo Lens:  Each lensmaster can create as many lenses as they wish and are encouraged to do so by Squidoo.   When completed, the lens is listed in one of 30 categories, tagged with key words, and if you’d like a copy, it can be easily exported with the click of a button.  Notification of the completed lens can be Tweeted with a click of a button.

Here’s our recently created lens called:

The Marketing Equation:  Time + Money + Skill = Marketing Success

Business Use:  If you read our lens content (recommended), we mingled content with self-promotion.   Squidoo lenses index well with search engines and can create traffic to your website  so, as we mentioned in our lens – here’s one of those free marketing opportunities and the only cost is your time in setting it up, so give it a try!