Sunday, May 2, 2010

5 Ways Squidoo Can Benefit Your eBay or Other Online Retail Business

I am delighted to have a guest blogger today. My friend Susan is so knowledgeable about Squidoo, and she has wonderful ideas about Squidoo and eBay. Hope you will enjoy her article as well!

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5 Ways Squidoo Can Benefit Your eBay or Other Online Retail Business


Online sellers need all the help they can get these days; the competition is fierce! Squidoo is easy to use and it's free, and it's a perfect place to help you gain an advantage over your competitors. With that in mind, here are five ways that your business can benefit from having a presence on Squidoo.

1. A Squidoo lens can help your customers get to know you. Make a Squid Who lens about yourself. Include pertinent details about your business, but feature interesting information about you: your hobbies, your background, even your pets. I like to shop with someone I feel that I know, don't you? Keep the presentation on a professional level, but let your customers get to know the person behind the business.

2. A Squidoo lens can help you educate your customers about your products or specialty. Present lessons or interesting articles about the type of items you sell. Share (and offer for sale) the reference books that you personally recommend. Make a fun educational lens using the “Quiz” module to test your customers’ knowledge about your specialty or related trivia. Try to elicit an “I didn’t know that!” response from the lens by keeping it informative but light.

3. Squidoo's a perfect place to display the products you have for sale. Use an eBay module to feature specific listings (be sure to keep it updated) or show your current auctions by category (this will update automatically). Use feeds to show items from Etsy or Bonanzle or other online selling venues.

4. Use Squidoo to interact and communicate with your customers. Conduct opinion polls and surveys, even start debates comparing two hot topics within your specialty. Always include a guest book for customers to leave comments that might not fit elsewhere.

5. Squidoo can help make it easy for customers to find you online. Social networking is hot and likely to remain that way for some time to come. Make a lens using an RSS feed module to showcase your blog. Use one of several Twitter modules to display your most recent tweets. Point readers to your LinkedIn profile, your HubPages articles, or any other places you hang out online. There's even a Squidoo module to showcase your Facebook fan page.

These are just five ways Squidoo can benefit your business, but you’ll think of others. Remember that it's important to generate a widespread online presence so that search engines will honor you with higher rankings of all your related pages. Squidoo's page rank and respect from the search engines will help to build your online reputation faster. To get started, just go to Squidoo.com and click on the "Start Building!" link. It's easy! Hope to see you there soon.

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You can find Susan in various places around the web including on
Squidoo, on her Online Selling and Auction Tips blog, and on Twitter