How I thought up my new Lens

I have a domain and website about knitting. I decided today that I wanted to create a lens that would link back to that site, to send it some traffic.

I’m writing this and it’s about 24 hours until the Oscars. All the entertainment shows are building the celebrity hype. We seem to be obsessed with celebrity. So that’s where I started, Googling around with celebrity knits, celebrity knitting, pictures of celebrities knitting.

Oh, wouldn’t a picture of Julia Roberts knitting be nice. She started off the celebrity knitting thing a while back. She has babies…oh the possibilities. Julia is America’s darling…

Then I found it. Julia is producing and starring in the movie adaptation of the book “The Friday Knitting Club”, scheduled to come out sometime this year. This gives me time to add as much content as I can dredge up, be it about celebrity knitters, Julia and her babies, the “trendiness” that knitting currently claims, and so on.

On my main website, at the same time, I need to put up a page for every affiliate program I currently promote. Then I change my links on my Lens to all go back to content pages on my domain that presell the affiliate products. There, visitors also have the option of subscribing to my website, so they can be notified when there’s new content, and I can capture their email addresses.

So go visit “Friday Night Knitting Club”.

Lensroll: another tool for promoting our group

This is simple; visit a lens in our group, click on Lensroll in the sidebar, and you’ll be led through the steps. This puts a link to this lens into the Lensroll list in the sidebar on your lens.

I really like simple.

Optimize your tags

In the sidebar of your workshop, click on edit tags. Try to expand your tags to at least 30 words and phrases, the more the merrier. When someone does a search on Squidoo, they’ll get your page on their results list if your tags match their query words and phrases. You can expand the list as you add text modules.

For example, if you review the book, “How to Tune Up Your Mazda” by Tom Taylor, add the tags “auto mechanics” “do-it-yourself” “Tom Taylor” “Mazda tune up” “Mazda” “book review Tom Taylor” and so on. You get the idea.

You can use these keyword tools to grow your list.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Monetizing your Lens and keeping your content fresh

Squidoo adds Adsense ads to your Lens automatically, a source of a bit of income or a lot, depending on your traffic. Ebay and Amazon modules can do the same. They can also help keep your content fresh. Here’s how.

Let’s start with Amazon. You can use the Amazon Standard module if you have a good set of relevant keywords; you can let Amazon choose the products, and you can ask Amazon to refresh your products list daily, weekly, etc. Google will recognize this as fresh content on your page and this will help you maintain a good Page Rank.

I am using both Amazon modules on my page. Why? Because the Amazon Plexo gives your visitors more ways to interact with your Lens. They can rate your Amazon products, add their own products to it, and even put your list on their own lens (earning you money).

So hopefully the Standard module will keep my Lens fresher even when I can’t update that often, and the Plexo will help my Squidoo rating and make my Lens a little “stickier”. Ditto with the eBay module; enter your keywords and let it refresh its content on its own.

Remember to not only check out these modules for your own Lens, but look for them when you’re browsing Squidoo. This is a community, make your name a household word.

Think of Squidoo as yet another search engine, use it to research and learn.

Adding the 2 essential Modules to your Lens

Modules are how you add content to your lens. The text module is pretty obvious, that’s how you add your, um, text. Yes, you will want to add content, and how often you do this is part of the equation in boosting your Lens rank both within Squidoo and on Google.

We’re going to focus on doing a few set-and-forget things that will boost your rank, popularity, traffic to sites you link to from your Lens, and hopefully money too.

To get started, click on Add Modules at the top of your Lens. From the basic modules, add Guestbook and Links Plexo. Then click Save. Now you’re back in your workshop and you can customize the content of your Guestbook and Link Plexo. I suggest leaving the word Guestbook and Link in your titles, for us newbies at Squidoo that aren’t used to what everything looks like yet. You might want to leave instructions for your visitors, like what sort of feedback you’re looking for in your guestbook, and what kind of links you want in your links list.

You now have in place the 3 systems we will be using to support each other – we can rank each other’s Lenses by making sure we are first signed in to Squidoo, then clicking on the stars at the top of each other’s Lenses. Then we can add our links to the Links Plexo if they are related to the topic of the website, or we can leave a message in the Guestbook, with links to other websites or products. I haven’t gone into anyone’s guestbook and tried this out as of yet, but I think I’ve seen it done.

I had a long day yesterday, didn’t get much sleep, and may not be making sense. Your feedback is much appreciated.

Welcome to the Squidoo Club

The purpose of this club is to gather people to share the benefits of having a Squidoo website (called a Lens). Squidoo Lenses are an excellent way to send traffic to any website, whether it be an affiliate merchant site or a personal site on your own domain.

Read this before creating your Squidoo Lens

You can edit your Lens title and everything else but you cannot change your Lens url, so choose it carefully. Plan your naming strategy before you even click to Squidoo. Decide on the keywords or keyword phrase that searchers will most likely type into a search engine. Put these in your title, which can be as long as you want, and choose the most important words to include in your url.

When you’re ready to Squidoo, click on the link below or the banner in the sidebar. The banner is linked to my brand-new, very first Squidoo Lens. You will see the three areas where we will be supporting each other’s Lenses: you can rate a Lens in the top left corner, you can add the url of a topic-related Lens or website to the Links list lower down, and you can leave a message in the Guest Book. I haven’t checked out the Guest Book yet, but I’m imagining that you could leave your unrelated ulr there.

Squidoo has been having some growing pains today, if you can’t connect right away, keep trying. You can find a signup link in the top right corner of my page.

Once you sign up and have a Lens built (depending on how fussy you are, this can take you from a few minutes to an hour or two), come back here and leave a comment with you email address and Squidoo url. I’m moderating comments, so no one’s emails will be published. I’ll update this first post to include a list of club member’s urls, so be sure to subscribe to this blog so you’ll know when new urls are added.

Don’t worry if this doesn’t all make sense to you. Come back often and leave a comment with your questions and suggestions in it. We can all learn from each other’s experiments and results.

I’ll start off the list:

http://www.squidoo.com/build-an-easy-website/

http://www.squidoo.com/earningathome/

Feb. 19th
http://www.squidoo.com/working-fromhome/

Feb. 24
http://www.squidoo.com/friday-night-knitting-club/