Interview: Seth Godin on Squidoo

Posted by Miles Evans

Well the name is catchy innit? I heard Seth Godin drop his latest project in the video I posted the other day of his insightful speach at the Goggleplex. So what the frack is Squidoo? Squidoo is sort of social bookmarks manager but with a few twists, some of them can even make you money, or donate to charities. Daily Candy on Squidoo: ‘think Friendster meets Wikipedia’. Now I know what your saying ‘oh please not another social bookmarking content portal’. But Squidoo is quite different...

Let me explain a bit. A Squidoo user makes a lens. A lens is sort of like a focal point on a subject that interests you. I made a quick one on how to work towards a top ranking in Google. Keep in mind this is a sandbox and I am really just using Squidoo for the first time to get an idea for how it works. Anyways…

Right off the hop Squidoo is incredibly intuitive and it is dumb simple to start adding widgets to your lens like: RSS feeds, links to your friend's websites, or even a list of your favorite books (with amazon affiliate ID’s imbedded!). I imagine in the future Squidoo will have the ability to add affiliate id’s of other providers like Adsense, and YPN via some community brewed modules. The ability to make revenue from hosting a Squidoo lens is mentioned a lot in Squidoo’s mantra – it is certainly a sticky feature.

But it’s a bit more in depth than that. From the Squidu website (yes that is Squidoo University) on improving your star ranking:

• A lens's star rating is highly visible, but it's not the most important aspect of how Lensrank is calculated.
• Only Squidoo members and lensmasters can rate a lens using the star system.
• Five stars is better than four stars, which is better than three stars. Two stars is better than one star. Zero stars could mean that no one has rated the lens yet.
• The fewer people who have rated a lens, the more impact one additional rating can have.
• The more people who have rated a lens, the less impact one additional rating can have.

I see a lot of people are using Squidoo as a reputation builder. Using a lens for this end seems to offer a bit of a different approach than just shameless self promotion. To illustrate that point check out Learn to be an Illustrator by Gannon Beck who is a really talented illustrator recently on the front page of Squidoo. You can imagine the type of traffic, revenue, and reputation you could gain over being Squidoo’ed. Or is it Squided? Inked?

I learned recently that 25% of my traffic was coming from digg. And that is without every being dugg all that much or getting anywhere near the front page. I casually use pretty much all of the usual social networking/boomark publishing tools (forums, del.icio.us, technorati, freindster) to build chatter, but digg has been very good to me. So why is Squidoo different from all these other guys?

I spoke with Seth Godin, the man behind Squidoo and here is what he had to say about it:

Miles: Seth thanks a lot for allowing me to speak with you – you certainly don’t need any more marketing rockstar coverage or much of an introduction. First of all I have only looked at Squidoo for a short while but I already see the potential here for quality content publishers. You guys have been really busy - Impressive.

From a developers point of view Squidoo looks fantastic. How long has Squidoo been in development and how many real humans built the system?

Seth: We started in July. There are five on the team, if you count me. We also relied on an outside firm in the US, which assigned three or four folks to help us.

Miles: What programming platform was Squidoo built on? I see a lot of nifty AJAX. I am going to guess mySQL/PHP.

Seth: You would be right.

Miles: Why is the Squidoo model for achieving the Slashdot effect better than digg or other like minded content services?

Seth: It's not. That's not what it's for. But Slashdot is a needle in a haystack, and it's temporary. This is about building long-term assets that help users every single day. You can have 100 lenses, each helping people every single day. Each pointing to your other sites or your blogs. It builds.

Miles: What really seems to set Squidoo apart is the revenue model. Are there plans to build modules for other advertising services like Adsense, YPN, MSN and others? What other revenue sources are being considered?

Seth: We have adsense on every page. The ads aren't where the money is. The money is in affiliate stuff. $40 for a new ebay buyer. $20 for a netflix user. $5 for selling something expensive on Amazon. It adds up.

Miles: I can imagine how important a donation lens will be for events like the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Will the ability for lensmasters to donate their Squidoo earnings to charity be a continued trend in your business model?

Seth: That's the reason I did the project!

Miles: Do you guys have a name for achieving top lens status yet?

Seth: We have a few "bestseller" lists. Each has a #1, but it rotates pretty well.

Miles: Thanks for chatting Seth. I better get to work on my lens to get into the rotation ;)

The tools we have seen emerge over the last year or so help you put your message in front of people who want to see it. What’s more the system is geared towards allowing the cream to naturally rise to the top, instead of relying on an editor to come across it.

I never do much link exchanging. It’s exhausting and even humiliating writing to same themed webmasters trying to sell yourself when you could be writing articles. These guys rarely respond, and when they do they don’t usually say much. And seriously, why should they? If anything I will add good content to their websites via comments in a do unto others type of mentality.

Social bookmarking/networking tools like Squidoo have almost completely alleviated the getting seen process to a system of, if you deserve to be seen you will be. Instead of wasting your time emailing every webmaster in your niche for a link exchange, start building quality content on sites like digg and Squidoo and see what happens.

Thanks go out to Seth for answering my questions and being cool enough to fire me out some of his bestselling marketing books all the way to Bankok. Reviews forthcoming. You can check out Seth’s own lens or start your very own here.

My next post will be from Shang Hai or Nanjing. If anyone is out there attending the SES show in China give me a holler.

Posted Mar 13, 2006 at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!