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Many of you know I am a real fond of squidoo.com it allows you to create a page about anything to market your products, to sell affiliate products, donate to charity and to get your ideas out there.  With it’s internal linking srtucture every page there links to every other page and leverages all of the link juice brought in by people who use the platform as their only income source.

Here are some amazing facts about Squidoo:

• As of this writing it has an Alex rank of 428 which places it in the top .01% of all websites.
• There are over 11 Million inbound links to the site.
• It has over 460 Thousand Indexed Pages.

With Google’s push for universal search it some other amazing things on how Squidoo shows in the search results.  Seeing how we are in an election year you would thing that terms like Sarah Palin would be untouchable, a  squidoo lens is outranking the New York Times for that search query!!

I have used squidoo to rank for some competitive and long tail search terms in the automotive industry.  One even caused the manager for Golden Isles Nissan to come and try to cause me problems because I was ranking number two for their name and selling all of our used Nissan inventory from it, the rankings have slipped some because I have not worked on maximizing that account as much because I am no longer a dealership employee.

Another good exampl of taping competitive search terms is when I made a lens for a dealer tha was trying to get some of the search traffic for Kansas City Suzuki Dealer, it now ranks very well for KC Suzuki dealer and is just a matter of time before it rises on the Kansas City Search term.

Squidoo coupled with other sources of user generated content can help a car dealership or any business control the SERPs for their money terms.  As an example I created a lens about bad credit car financing in Tulsa Ok that ranks really well for “Special Finance Tulsa” I am not sure how valuable that keyword is but it does show the power of the platform.

Ok enough ranting about the platform time to get back to things that pay the bills, like working on a Car Dealer Social Network.

When I was working as an Internet Sales Manager I made several lenses at Squidoo.com that ranked well for competitors names in my market area.  That is one of the benefits of understanding how to present things to the search engines.  I had a lens that got a lot of traffic when people searched for Golden Isles Nissan.  I would sell every Nissan trade in that we got off of that lens.  It was pure magic.  It gave people what they were looking for a great deal on a Nissan car or truck.

I was still getting calls almost daily from it even though the cars that were featured there were no longer available.  It was kind of comical actually.  I even had the manager from Golden Isles Nissan complain to my former employer a few months before I left because he realized I was stealing some of his web traffic when people were looking for them online.  What is going to be time consuming is changing all of these lenses I made while working at Carl Gregory Chrysler Dodge (<< another one needing to be edited) unless a dealer in my area wishes to take them over. $$  I am not actively seeking someone to buy them I will just turn them into affiliate lander and monetize the traffic that way.

I am making squidoo lenses for a dealer who sells a lot of Suzuki in Kansas City and am working on optimizing those lenses for him now.  As we see how this project turns out I will be offering some content for Car Dealer Reputation Management and use squidoo as one of those levels.  Please keep in mind the last thing that Suzuki of Wichita was worried about is reputation management.  Scott Pitman and the gang stand out with their reputations online and other wise.

I love doing things differently and using User Generated Content Sites to move a marketing message is high leverage if done effectively. I use several different UCG sites for different purposes.

Affiliate Marketing, Selling Cars, Branding - Personal and Business and Reaching out to families of children with a cleft lip and palate.

I do have one page that has caused me some mild amusement today. I have a squidoo lens that I list used Nissan Inventory on and it ranks well for a competitive car dealers name. Some unintentional optimization. Search for Golden Isles Nissan in the G and you will know what I mean.

The General Manager for Golden Isles Nissan did take the time to complain about it to my current employer but it fell on deft ears.