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.