By Tina Hilton of Clerical Advantage

In this, our final fishing lesson, I’m going to talk about squid. Or rather Squidoo and how you can use it to make your virtual assistance (or other business) more visible.

What is Squidoo? It’s a network that allows you to build quick and easy websites for free, get noticed by people looking for information on what you know and even earn money from them for yourself or for charity. For free. Yup, you heard me right, Squidoo is free. The brainchild of marketing guru Seth Godin, Squidoo is a community website that lets users create pages ( called lenses) according to their interests. These lenses will have advertising placed on them that coincides with the content.

How and why should you create Squidoo lenses? In July of 2008 was listed as one of the top 500 most visited sites in the world. That means there are lots of potential clients and customers visiting Squidoo. That’s the why. The how? Start by creating a lens that showcases your business, who you are and what you provide. Then make another one on a topic you’re an expert in, linking of course to your website. Crazy about some of the applications you use as a VA? Make a lens dedicated to your favorites and showing others how great they are to use. The possibilities for lenses are as limitless as the number of potential clients that are out there.

The best part about Squidoo is how easy it is. In fact, before writing this post, I decided to make my own lens about my e-book. I created the lens “ How to Make Virtual Assistance Work for Your Business” in just 30 minutes. The front page of Squidoo says you can do it in 60 seconds, and you can, but I added my own pictures and links to my websites, so it took me a little bit longer because I kept tweaking it. Following the step by step wizard you can add news about your topic gathered from Google and the latest posts from your blog. By editing with a few easy HTML basics you can add hyperlinks to your website. And I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface in my brief 30 minute foray into the world of lenses.

Oh and did I mention that 5% of the profits from Squidoo are donated to charity? Or that you can choose to earn money for yourself or for a charity of your choice? Pretty cool huh?

So go ahead, make a lens. But I’m warning you, I bet you can’t make just one.

If you have questions concerning virtual assistance or have an interest in working with a virtual assistant you can contact Tina Hilton or visit her business website for Clerical Advantage.