The lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, fashions, people, places, sports, hobbies, pets, products, religion, philosophy, politics, and of course, business. People who generate lenses are known as lensmasters.

The main purpose of a Squidoo lens is to recommend, advise and point to more detailed content elsewhere on the web. You might think of Squidoo.com as a huge user-generated network or directory. It has the dynamic atmosphere of a lively online community.

Lenses are easy to create and can be made in as little as ten minutes, so it is possible for anybody, even people with no prior knowledge of building websites, to make a lens. Squidoo offers you a free and easy outlet where you can enthuse about whatever grabs your fancy. You can also add youtube videos, eBay auctions, Amazon books, surveys, RSS feeds and a whole lot more to your lens, all without having to leave the site.

Internet marketers can also benefit from the great range of free features that Squidoo offers. Here are just a few of the benefits of making lenses for Internet marketers.

One of the key characteristics of making lenses is that you are free to promote your own website on them by posting links to it. Squidoo is popular with the search engines, so you can easily improve your overall ranking by making a series of lenses and pointing each one to a specific page of your website.

Because lenses are also indexed by the search engines, the more lenses you make the higher your personal Squidoo page will rise in the rankings, especially if you learn to keyword-optimize your lenses.

Squidoo has a very permissive attitude indeed towards online marketing, so you can use it to boost your website traffic by adding website links. You can also link directly to your affiliate marketing programs.

As I said earlier, items from Ebay and Amazon can also be posted on your lenses. When someone buys something by clicking on one of your links you will earn a commission.

Visitors to your lens can also post comments and links to your lens if you wish, and they can also give your lens a rating of between 1 and 5 stars.

One more useful interactive feature is the option of setting up a poll to survey your visitors. Setting up a poll can be done in just a few simple steps; again, you don't need to possess a single iota of technical know-how.

It is these interactive features that make Squidoo such a good resource as they encourage visitors to your lens to interact with you and at the same time boost your Squidoo ranking, making your lenses more attractive to search engines across the Internet.

Squidoo is an enjoyable platform to work on and offers a free way to easily publicize your business and perhaps increase your income!