Founded in 2006 by author Seth Godin, Squidoo is a community based website which allows the users to create pages which are called lenses for subjects of interest. Squidoo.com is one of the fastest growing websites on the internet which grew at a rate of around 91% in the year 2008 and had around 900,000 lenses by the month of February 2009.

The Squidoo lenses are much like blogs but the difference lies in the fact that these pages are dedicated to only one subject matter. It also let the users earn a income by referral links to sites like Amazon, eBay and such. Furthermore what is more notable is that Squidoo allows its users to get free online traffic.  It does not matter if you have a silly website name… as long as there is a potential to drive large amount of traffic to your website, who mind joining Squidoo?

The people who make lenses on Squidoo are called “lens masters”. These lens masters don’t necessarily have to be experts. In fact this website allows the users to make the lenses without much knowledge about HTML. These lenses often get an inherent increase in popularity as they get linked with other lenses on this website. Squidoo has a large number of lenses related to various subject matters like health care, medicine, cooking, business, and even pets and also about philosophy.

Squidoo has a lot of benefits which it provides its users. Google really puts high preference on Squidoo lenses and they are included and in fact rise to the top of Google searches really fast, actually at times it takes less than 48 hours for them to do so. This is something which even websites cannot manage even after a number of months or even more. Squidoo and article marketing go hand in hand and this is an important plus for this website.

It’s free, it allows the users to earn money and also more importantly it seriously helps the lens masters to increase their online traffic without much hassle. Further more it is pretty good to note that Squidoo donates around 5% of its total revenues for charity.

Now that we know a lot about Squidoo, let us see how to get started on this website. This is really easy to do as there is a template which we can use. The most important and arguably the most difficult part of getting started is finalizing what topic to select for our lens. Once our lens is made, the lens master has to write down his content. Following that, a judiciously selected title allows the lens to be high up on the Google lists.

What more do we want when we have a website which allows us to have post our opinions, earn a little cash and at the same time contribute to the society. It is thus safe to say that Squidoo has a bright future. Sign up now!