As those that know Priced Nostalgia for our eBay and Priced Nostalgia Press areas only may not realize, PN is also one of the few approved service providers on Lulu.com. In that capacity, we offer services to help self-published and independent authors promote their books. In the spirit of that, we wanted to offer the following free marketing advice to anyone with something to promote.

Squidoo is a free way to promote items online and is particularly useful for authors or eBay sellers who want to drive traffic to their webpages, books and items. The service is free and takes only a few minutes to set up.

Squidoo allows people to create a lens (or several lenses) on the topic of their choice. These lenses are content and link heavy websites of the type favored by search engines. In other words, they help you to create a website that will generate a lot of traffic and be highly placed in search engine results. In addition, they offer modules that make it easy to feature your blog (Lulu hosted or otherwise), books on Amazon, items on eBay, YouTube videos, CafePress items and even your Netflix queue if you want as well as guest books, polls and other interactive features all on your lens in only a few quick clicks. Even if you know nothing about webpages, you can have a content heavy site in a few clicks.

Priced Nostalgia made a few lenses as examples to illustrate the steps below. All links will open in a new window so you don’t have to worry about losing this page.

  1. The first step is to create an account on Squidoo and then set up your profile. Your profile is the general info that will show on all your lenses.
  2. Once you have created your profile and account, you can start making lenses.

    • If you are an eBay seller, you’ll want to make a page that promotes your items. (See Priced Nostalgia’s eBay Store page as an example.) You will also want to make lenses that relate to the items you usually sell. (See Priced Nostalgia’s My Little Pony page as an example.)
    • If you are an author, you’ll want to make a SquidWho? lens about yourself as an about the author page (See Priced Nostalgia’s lens for PN Press author Summer Hayes as an example), a lens about each of your books (See the lens for No Secret: a parody of The Secret by Rhonda Byrne as an example):, and then several lenses about topics related to your book.
    • The more lenses you have, the more traffic you’ll draw so try to create a lens for each approach to your material.
  3. Once you have created your lenses and they are approved and active (usually takes about a day) you can join groups of similar topics on Squidoo to bring in even more traffic. Or, in turn, you can create groups yourself on topics similar to your work and interests.

Other pluses

  • Within your Squidoo account, you have access to full traffic stats to your pages including search terms, referring websites and other info so you know who is seeing your site, how they found it, and where they are coming from.
  • Squidoo gives you a percentage of any income made from your site (whether from purchases of items you featured, like your own book or eBay items, or from clicks to the ads on your site). You can opt to either have this money paid directly to you, to a charity of your choice or a combination of both.
  • Your Squidoo page will be syndicated via RSS so interested parties can subscribe if they wish.
  • According to Alexa, Squidoo’s traffic has grown more than 40% monthly beginning in the spring of 2007. It is now in the top 500 of all websites tracked worldwide.

That is a lot of features for a free service!

The best way to learn more about Squidoo is to just start trying it out yourself and start clicking around.