People send me emails full of questions all of the time, which I love by the way (so feel free to anytime).  I got a great question today asking me about all the places that I sell products online, or about places that I feel will actually do something for their business.  I have shared many places in past posts, but wanted to talk about one that I never have yet on this blog.  I want to talk about the money making potential with Squidoo (an amazing social network) for your dropshipping business.

What exactly is Squidoo?  Their about us information really does not explain what they are (in my opinion) -

"Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo's goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo's goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them."

Let me see if I can do a better job telling you what Squidoo is and how your dropshipping business can benefit from it.  A social community is built for members of the community to connect, share and find new friends.  You can join them to learn more, find amazing information and products that you normally would not have. 

Squidoo is a social community that you can build website pages promoting your products or information on the things you like, which they call "lenses", and they host the pages for you.  The main benefit that I can see from Squidoo is that they will allow you to name your own pages and they give you a static URL with your lens.  This is a great place to take advantage of brand and reputation management as you can use the keywords that you want to be found for (or your brand) in the URL.  They do a pretty good job or ranking too, as long as you can pass some links to the specific lens you created.  You can also create pages to test any kind of behavioral targeting for your products, and you don't have to waste a lot of time marketing the page to test them because Squidoo already has a huge following! 

Squidoo makes it easy for you add some pretty cool "plugins" to your lenses too. Here is a list of things that I use and that you can use to build up your lenses:

• Profile section where you can add as many anchor links as you want (within reason)
  
• Add as many RSS feeds as you want
• Flickr Photo plugin
• Del.icio.us tags plugin
• Amazon plugin (if you are selling your products on Amazon you can include them here)
  
• Add your own links
• Recommend Products
• Recommend and Sell Your Own Products
  
• eBay plugin
• Google BlogSearch plugin
• Add YouTube Videos
  

Not only can you add all of these things to promote your products, Squidoo will actually pay you for being a community member.  You see, Squidoo makes money from advertising, and they will give you a portion of the money made when ads are clicked on, or products are bought through their affiliates.  Its a good thing for you, and its a great thing for them.  I would keep using Squidoo just for the additional help it gives me on the search engines, but making money in a bonus, especially through a social community!

I have told you many times if you are only thinking about making money selling your products just on your website, then you are missing out on such a huge piece of the market.  You need to start thinking about shopping sites, social shopping sites, and social communities to get the word out about your products.  Getting started with Squidoo would be a great stepping stool into this other side of Internet marketing.

If you are new to Internet business and are looking for products that you can sell, and promote on social communities like Squidoo, The Shipper is offering a FREE 7 Day Trial membership to gain access to all of our dropshipping products that you can sell online.