How do you Squidoo?

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I wrote this post because i have been meaning to for a while now and recently a Blog Angel wrote to me telling me that she had created a Squidoo lens and would I help her by tweeting it and liking it. I happily obliged and when I actually saw the page I thought ‘no, this lens is so incredible, I will use its promotion as an excuse to finally write that (THIS) post’.

The beauty of Squidoo is that you can do… whatever you want!

For those unfamiliar with Squidoo, allow me to give you the quick ‘I’m not 100% sure myself but let me sound convincing and give you my version of what it is anyway’ explanation.

Squidoo.com is the brainchild of Seth Godin , who is an Internet Marketing King in his own right, and the whole concept and idea of the site really reflects the genius behind the man, because what Squidoo does is allow you to create a page (called a Lens) on just about anything you want, for absolutely no cost to you what-so-ever, and the perks are just awesome!

Why would you want to create a Squidoo Lens in the first place?

Squidoo.com is setup in such a way that when you create a new page, called a lens – the URL for this page will be squidoo.com/thenameofyourlens, which is fantastic if you want to optimise a certain key phrase (the most powerful place to put a keyword in relation to SEO is the URL). Squidoo is also a HUGE site with a lot of authority and excellent PageRank.  In Search Engine Optimisation and Keyword Optimisation speak this is like striking GOLD because what you have is a site with very good PR that is saying ‘hey come and give yourself as many relevant and high quality backlinks to your own site or offer as you like – free.’

Want to make some Squidoo Dollars?

Squidoo also offers you the ability to make money from your Lens because you are able to promote Amazon products and share the profits of Adsense revenue generated from your Lens, provided of course you are an Amazon Partner and Adsense publisher. So whilst you struggle to get your own site ranked in order to generate revenue, the lens which you built in order to get a backlink for it in the first place is quietly earning more!

So why wouldn’t you create a Squidoo Lens then?!

If you want to create a Squidoo Lens, or thirty, with the idea of creating a lot of quality backlinks to your niche site or sales page then you had better make sure they are really good quality lenses because nine times of out ten your Lens is going to rank before the actual page it’s linking to and even though you can still make money from your Lens, do you really want to share the profits with Squidoo? For that reason you need to make sure that your Squidoo lens is genuinely valuable and contains unique information that urges the reader to click through to your site. This becomes a win win situation because not only are you creating quality backlinks, you are also creating new destinations to leverage your content and spread your brand.

Tips for Building your Squidoo Lens

As I stated earlier, there is no right way to build a lens in Squidoo, but if you are a blogger with at least ten posts under your belt then you will already have a good idea what works and what doesn’t. Like any piece of information that you share, your lens needs to be broken up into chunks that make it easy to read and digest so adding images and creating lists and subheadings is definitely advisable. This is an easy task because when you create a lens with Squidoo you are given what are called ‘modules’ and all you simply do is add them as you require. I usually have an Amazon module so that I can use my Amazon account to link to products that either relate to or are what the lens is about, and then I will have 3 or 4 text modules, adding an image to each and then making sure I have a keyword rich link pointing to the page I am trying to get ranked.

This whole process takes about 5 minutes because you can literally take articles you have written already and just cut and paste them into your lens.

Squidoo Marketing

Technically you don’t have to do anything once you have created your lens, but like any piece of information that you put out into the world wide web –promotion is king (sorry content, you are nothing without him). If you do choose to promote your lens then you can simply do what Joella did (yep, that’s the blog Angel) and ask people to visit it and ‘like it’ through the Squidoo tool or a Facebook interface. Obviously the more ‘likes’ a lens gets and the more visitors it receives, the more it is promoted through squidoo itself. If you can manage to create a lens that is popular enough and makes Squidoo’s ‘Lens of the day’ you can receive 100,000 hits in 24 hours easily!*

*The last lens of the day I remember was ‘How to crochet Bacon’ and was a guide showing you how to knit various items like a bacon scarf and a fried egg pillow, so don’t expect your ‘how to make money blogging’ lens to make ‘lens of the day’ anytime soon.

Submit to RSS Feeds/Bookmarking directories

Part of the off page optimisation process involves creating quality backlinks as well as submitting various pages to feeds and directories through bookmarking services. Now that you have created your lens, even though it is there to provide a quality backlink why not submit it to the RSS directories as well and help it on its way. We utilise Squidoo to Market our wares but always remember to Market your Squidoo too (I am beginning to feel like Dr Suess writing this post, if I say Squidoo one more time?!?!)

The Show and Tell

I have recently started creating lenses under a pseudonym because of the fact that I only want the ‘Alex Whalley’ Brand associated with ‘making money online’, so I felt that having 100 lenses on everything from pool chlorine to foot warmers would perhaps muddy the waters a little, but before I did that I created a few lenses under my own name. I have attached a link to one of them here so you can see how I created it.

http://www.squidoo.com/thebumbobabyseat

FREE BLOGGING EBOOKS!! (this is what a real lens looks like)

The reason this post exists is because Joella A.K.A ‘The Blog Angel’ wrote to me and asked me to help promote her lens by Tweeting it to my followers. Once I saw the lens I thought a simple tweet would not do it justice because what Joella has done is create a resource for bloggers that is beyond anything I have ever seen before!

Here it is here at http://www.squidoo.com/free-blogging-ebooks and I strongly recommend that you go and have a look because if there was ever a decent ebook written about anything to do with blogging, Joella has listed and linked to it for your convenience.

At the very least go and ‘like’ this lens and help a fellow blogger promote a resource that she must have worked on tirelessly. While you’re at it, go and like my lens too. I know you probably don’t ‘like’ baby seats in any way shape or form, but just pretend that you do … for me.

The Squidoo Summary

Setup 100 Lenses that provide incredible value, use keywords in your anchor text, promote them to RSS feeds with bookmarking services – you just created an amazing army of pages that not only leverage your content and spread your influence, but also combine to help your overall site rank higher, AND they all quietly earn income for you as well.

Brilliant.

Alex Uses and Highly Recommends:

Tagged as: leverage content, quality backlinks, share content, squidoo lens, squidoo marketing