Marketing genius Seth Godin has come up with a unique new idea: Squidoo.com. Actually, in his intial weblog post about Squidoo, he admits that there are lenses all over the Internet. But Squidoo provides the tools you need to create a lens quickly and without any coding, beyond a tiny bit of HTML.

What are lenses? As Seth puts it, they're views of a topic, not web pages. They are not necessarily containers for content, but rather they point to content.

In his free ebook, Everyone's An Expert (available from his original post about Squidoo), he describes the purpose of Squidoo and lenses. In short, lenses are a categorizer of websites and weblogs, a way to share your knowledge of a topic, a way to generate traffic and increase your own website's pagerank, and a way to earn some affiliate revenue.

You can quickly and easily plugin a variety of revenue-generating modules which display items from Amazon, EBay, and SuperStore. (This is in addition to content modules.) They also run Google Adsense ads. Squidoo earns the money, then pays you a royalty. They donate a goodly portion of the overall earnings to charity (50%, after expenses), and the CEO doesn't get a salary. The other 50% goes to lensmasters (anyone who creates a lens). If you want, you can give a configurable percentage of your take to one or more charities. You can view your earnings and web statistics in your Squidoo dashboard.

Now the part about web feeds. One of the modules available allows you to add one or more feed boxes. You supply an RSS or Atom feed URL, indicate whether you want excerpts (no, partial, as much as available), how many headline items, and a brief description. Squidoo pulls in the configured feed and presents it all gussied up.
I think that this is an interesting way to promote your own web feeds.

As for the value of setting up Squidoo lenses, Problogger Darren Rowse has written several articles about the service. I don't want to speak for him, but my feeling is that since the service is still new, the ROI (Return On Investment) is still building up. It'll take time. But I can see the value, especially in regards to sharing knowledge and helping categorize groups of websites.

Disclaimer and shameless plug:
For a trial run, I created a bunch of lenses, including this one on web feeds. It's still under construction, but I've started with a small list of sites about content syndication, and incuded two feed boxes: one for RSS Cases and one for Rok's RSS Diary. You can see at a single glance what's new on both weblogs from the feed boxes. I've also added some "entrepreneurial" modules for podcasting and vodcasting books, software and gear. I'll expand it later to include links to podcast directories, and to sites specifying RSS and Atom formats.

By the way, Squidoo is still in beta. But today they announced that they are starting royalty payments a lot sooner than they expected. That is, starting today. If you plan to sign up, you can do so via my affiliate link or right from the main page.

The way the affiliate program works is that if you sign up through my link, we both get US$5 when your royalty payments reach $15. I'm planning to donate ALL of my referral income to JDRF - Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund. I'm also donating 20% of my earnings to JDRF and two other charities. Hopefully they add more charities to the list.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, squidoo, content syndication, feed boxes, site promotion