Learning to Use Squidoo

Today I made my first lens on Squidoo.  So I thought I would add my thoughts on this social networking resource.

How I found out about Squidoo.
I had read a few things about Squidoo, mainly on a long REW forum thread about it.  It's a site where you can make your own pages, kind of like MySpace or Facebook.  The twist for Squidoo is that the individual pages are called 'lenses'.  And you can make as many lenses as you want.

I wasn't really interested in Squidoo, because every time I visited a lens, it was covered in ads.  It looked spammy and unprofessional.  I decided that while there might be some SEO benefit to it, it just wasn't worth my time.

Then the other day I found out that Joe Lane, who posts under the name 'Spoken Gently' here on REW, had created a lens and mentioned my website.  HitTail told me the rest- I had a number of referrals from the lens to my website the same day.  Could it be possible to build traffic using a Squidoo lens?  There was only way to find out!

Starting out with Squidoo
Before you can create a lens, you have to register and create a profile.  There is nothing to it, but make sure you leave a real email address because you will have to verify it.  From there you will find a Squidoo 'Dashboard' where you can create lenses.  There are several types of lenses, and Squidoo will suggest four types.  Basically you can choose whether your lens is intended to generate traffic for a website, promote a service or product, generate revenue, or just be an authority on a given topic.

In our niche, I think most people would want to promote their site, or generate traffic, so you probably want to pick one of those two types.  From there, Squidoo gives you a simple content system with 'modules' that you can use on your site.  There is a 'bio' module where you can tell the world about you, a 'RSS feed' module so you can put blog feeds right into the lens, a 'text' module where you can write out content, etc.

Figure out which modules you want to keep first.  In my instance, I wasn't concerned with the amazon.com module, or the blog search module, or even the youtube module.  Basically when I was done, all I had left was a 'bio', a 'description', a 'feed', and a 'guestbook'.  The modules can be moved up and down and around each other within the page using simple arrows.  I was pretty happy with the default, so I left it at that.

You can come back to the lens at any time through your dashboard, so don't think you have to finish the lens in one sitting.  For some reason my preview function didn't seem to work, so I ended up publishing the lens and then looking at it.  From there I just went back and edited the page from the dashboard.

Squidoo and SEO
The real trick is how to use Squidoo to promote your site in the search engines.  There seems to be a few things you need to be aware of:

• Link to your lens from other places, so the lens can be crawled
• Use outgoing links within your lens to promote your website
• Be conscious of link anchor text within the lens
• Use the lens tagging function so that people can find your lens using Squidoo Search
• Mix in appropriate keywords within your lens to lend your anchor text credibility
• Content.  Content is key so make each word count.

Most of these tips you should be aware of, but one of the hardest is putting links within your lens.  For the bio area, Squidoo gives you a small rich text editor that allows you to insert links.  That editor is not present for the main modules.  So how to get links in there?  For that, you need to use basic html.  It turns out all the html codes work, if you happen to know the conventions.

To insert a link within your text modules, use the following:
<a href="http://www.example.com" title="My website">Example dot com - your example Resource!</a>

Having fun with Squidoo - and making money, too?
After I finished my first lens, I couldn't believe how easy it was.  And guess what?  It was fun!  I realized that I could make a lens about anything.  A lens about blogging, real estate, a lens about fishing- whatever I wanted.  And the more I thought about it, I realized that is pretty neat.  It's like having your own blog, but in this blog, I could post about ANYTHING I wanted, and didn't have to worry that the topics are too far apart.

If you are wondering about all those ads on the lenses...well that's where the money comes in.  If you happen to roll that way, you can use ads on lenses to generate income.  Some of the money goes to Squidoo, but since you are the content creator, they let you keep the rest.  I have no idea what the income potential is, but it would be fun just to play with it.  For my lenses about real estate, it just doesn't make sense to cover them with ads, but hey, if I made a popular lens about how to format a hard drive, or give SEO tips, it might make a few dollars.

If you are wondering about that first lens I made, of course I named it the Augusta GA Real Estate lens.  Natch.

I haven't seen any traffic from it yet, but it's only a few hours old.  Strangely, no other Augusta area Realtors seem to be active on Squidoo.  That means (for a little while at least) the niche is all mine.  Yaay!

I hope you have as much fun with your Squidoo lens making as I did.  If you have a lens you'd like to show off, leave a comment- I'd love to sign your guestbook!  Cheers!