If you’ve been online for any amount of time, chances are you’ve heard of Squidoo in passing or even been to their site.

Although it’s easy to pass off Squidoo as just another platform for traffic generation and revenue generation. (which I did for the longest time).

Upon closer look, the brainchild of marketer Seth Godin aims to achieve social good by focus the community’s efforts towards raising funds for charity.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Squidoo:

Squidoo splits its revenue with its “co-op” of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 45 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.

By the way, if you sign up with Squidoo, you become a lensmaster, maintaining a lens.

What’s a Lens?

It’s a single web page with focused content. The lens focuses on content in your niche, sort of a content aggregator if you’d like.

Revenue is generated from adsense revenue which is split according to the model listed above. At the same time, you can add monetization modules from the likes of Amazon and eBay into your lens.

Lenses are also given ranks, with higher ranked lenses expected to generate more traffic.

How’s the ranking system work?

Here’s the official word from Squidoo:

SQUIDOO.COM KEEPS TRACK OF MILLIONS OF LENSES. We host them and know what is on each one. Each lens is scored by our proprietary LensRank algorithm, which ensures that the best lenses get the most traffic.

And, like blogs, like everything in fact, there will probably be an A-list.

How do you get on the A-list?

• Start early.
• Update often.
• Listen to your Web surfers—they can contact you directly from your lens.
• Build an audience.
• Link hither and yon and back again.

Some background on Squidoo:

• It was launched in October 2005.
• It came out of beta testing in March 2006.

Besides role as a social community, Squidoo’s role as a co-op is “to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.”

It’s easy to set up a Squidoo lens and you can probably set one up in 10 minutes.

You have a lens builder, complete with modules which make it easy to:

• Provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic.
• A single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links.

What’s more, Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions.

I’ve heard too that some of the early lenses have high PR and traffic.

It can be another traffic generation source.

Interested? Sign up here: Squidoo Lens Setup

My Lens is located at: http://www.squidoo.com/andrewwee/

Also check out Seth Godin’s free Squidoo ebook “Everyone Is An Expert“