Learning the Squidoo ABC

Have you been looking for a simple start-up guide on how to Squidoo in a few easy steps? Here’s a good blueprint for creating lenses that have the potential to help you position yourself as the go-to expert for your niche:

First, register for a free Squidoo account if you have not already done so. This just requires you to enter your name and email address, and then pick a username and password before you agree to the terms of service for the site. You will have to create a lens to begin with, but don’t concern yourself about getting this to a stage to publish, perhaps youcan use it later as a lensography where you can showcase all your squidoo content or just a simple bio. So when selecting your url and title, use your username here.

Then you’ll get to learn how to Squidoo by building your first lens! You can use the new Squidoo Quick Builder page to help you do this where you have one screen to register your new lens rather than four separate screens.

It’s located at squidoo.com/build/quick, where you’ll enter your lens title, choose a URL, pick a category, let others know how it should be rated (G, R, or X), and add a tag or more. A good tip on how to Squidoo properly is to not use Quickpick to choose some modules from this screen because then you have to go in and reorder them anyway, so save that step for later. Enter your captcha code and click the Done button!

Try to get the keyword(s) into your URL and the title and make sure your tags are all relevant to your niche topic. Because of Squidoo’s new nofollow rule on tag pages, you don’t need to enter all 40 tags now – just use as many as you want in your content and it will serve you better in your quest to rank high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The next step in learning how to Squidoo is to build the layout of your lens! Start by clicking on Add Modules at the top. Here are some important modules that work well on lenses (and remember that all modules will have a built in introduction Text module):

1.) Text/Write – for all of the valuable content you plan on providing. You can hyperlink to your domain and add code to insert a banner ad here.

2.) Amazon and eBay – for those who want to sell tangibles from their lens. The description area can be hyperlinked to your domain, too)

3.) Guestbook – A very important part of the web 2.0 experience, a guestbook allows others to let you know how you’re doing as well as what they need from you in the way of more information. This is another module where you can hyperlink in the description area.

4.) Poll – Ask a question and post several answer choices for your audience. You can hyperlink these choices so that before or after their participation in your poll, they can link out to one of your sites.

5.) RSS Feed – If you have a blog on your domain, insert a feed for more traffic to it! It will post excerpts of your latest entries and update on a regular basis.

6.) YouTube Videos – if you’re employing video marketing techniques, then you’ll want to showcase your videos right on your lens using the one video per module rule so that visitors never have to click out and leave your lens to view it!

7.) Twitter – a Twitter module is perfect for marketing involved in social networking whose Tweets are followed by many people.

8.) Blackbox, StickyNote, Talk Bubble, or The Most Important Thing – all modules that allow you to make one link or message stand out on your lens.

After you add the modules that you want, click the preview lens layout button and order them any way you want, with the guestbook at the bottom so they can sign it after seeing all of your hard work.

Then click the Save button and it will take you back to your lens, where you can begin editing each module. After you edit it, make sure you save it and publish the lens after you’re done.

Free Stock Image

If you want to learn how to Squidoo and make a really good lens, you’ll also want to add images! You can find a free stock photo site or use iStockPhoto and buy the smallest versions available that relate to your niche. Personally I prefer 123rf.com for supplying images, the ones on this post are from their constantly updated Free  collection, and are of an  excellent quality for sprucing up your lenses. You’ll need one for your introduction and ideally one for each text module you include on your lens.

After publishing, join some groups on Squidoo so your new lens gets exposure! Then visit Squidoo and ask for a SquidAngel to visit your lens to bless it, though only do this if youthink it  worthy of a blessing as angels can ding your lenses too! If you’ve done a good job, the blessing will help your lens rise in the ranks!

Learning how to Squidoo can be intimidating even for the best writers or most prolific website designers. If you’d rather hire professionals to build your lens for you I would highly recommend Lewis and Tiffany at http://www.BuildMyLens.com Their lens design service is excellent and their finished lenses do extremely well conveying the professionalism that you want to be known for in your niche!

Lastly, have fun and leave a comment with a link to your lenses!

Squidoo Myths!

Why do people think squidoo is spammy? Why do people think it’s so easy  to earn money from squidoo? Why is it so widely promoted as a Get Rich Quick scheme by so many? I came across a Work-At-Home advice blog today promoting squidoo, and wasn’t very impressed by it.

There are a bazillion ways to make money on the Internet. But one of the easiest is creating Squidoo Lenses and profiting from the revenue generated from them. First of all, Squidoo is super easy; you can build a basic lens in about 15 minutes. And they rank high in Google’s search engine results, so they’re traffic magnets. – Work At Home Mom Revolution
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The article does cover a few basics, but gives no insight into how realistic earning more than the price of  a cup of coffee a month was. (I did leave a comment to suggest that  it wasn’t a particularly accurate of how easy it was to earn income from squidoo)

There are so many articles on blogs offering advice on Work at  Home Income, many of these that mention squidoo do seem to oversimplify it, resulting in poor returns and dissatisfaction among those that follow the methods given. Usually these articles state you <b>can</b> create a lens in 15minutes. Well, this is true to an extent if you use RSS modules and grab info from wikipedia, stick in a couple of youtube videos andthen fill the rest of the lens with product links, whether theybe to amazon, ebay, cafepress, netflix, to name just a few of the companies squidoo can help you  promote and will share revenue generated from them. It would be a very poor effort as the key to getting your lens ranked and receiving good traffic is actually having well written, well presented, interesting information and this is just not possible in 15minutes.
You can just write a quick blurb on the intro to a lens, then use the multitude of modules available to pre-fill the rest of the lens with content, what you will get is a spam lens, and search engines pretty much ignore these as there is no original content. If you look on squidoo, the number of these sorts of lenses is increasing rapidly, alomng with the dissastisfaction that squidoo isn’t what people have been lead to believe, it’s not easy money, it’s not guaranteed traffic, it’s what you put into it.

Squidoo works well for me, though it has been a long learning curve to get to the stage where the revenue share from squidoo is enough to pay enough for even my internet connection.
Having said this, I do have some success with promoting products etc through affiliate links and the income from this now dwarfs the revenue sharing from squidoo. It must be said though that  my earlier attempts following a similair model to what was suggested by the blog post quoted, creating a longtail lens with affiliate links in a short space of time, were an unmitigated failure and rarely earn more than a few cents a month, some not even that! So in essence a  very poor use of my time, I would even go as far as saying a comlete waste of time if it was not for the fact that I had learned what not to do!
What has worked well for me is spending time writing about subjects that  inspires me*, doing some research for it and in total spending several hours creating a worthwhile lens. Now I may spend 2-10hours on a new lens, but I  then can sit back and watch that lens earn me double figures a month. That may not be seen as a great return but what you have then got to take into account that over the course of a year the several hours you spent were a great investment as you recalculate your hourly rate for these each month you see your return on investment increase.

For people new to squidoo, or those fresh squids trying to find the ‘magic formula’ to get rich quick, I can only repeat – “You get out of it what you put into it!”. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, then good luck and be aware that many that are advertised as such are only getting one person rich – the person pushing the scheme!

The more of these type of blog posts that exist, and the number is rapidly increasing as bloggers turn to ‘wealth creation’ and visitors look for that magic formula that will earn them a fortune with little or no effort, the more squidoo will see of spam-like lenses and these new lensmasters will ‘damage’ squidoo’s credibility with search engines and visitors. The worst of these are those that spend 15minutes creating a spammy lens, and then spend an hour promoting on other social networks, directories and blogs by just posting a link and not contributing to the community or blogger they hope will help promote their lens. Squidoo is already a banned url on some social networks such as Propellor for this reason. Hopefully though, most newcomers to  squidoo will learn and improve the qualityof lenses they produce, those after fast results will drift away quickly and their lenses will drop like a rock to the regions of being out side the squidoo payout tiers and even below the threshold of quality for getting featured in search results.

I would like to add though that for those who do want a Quick Solution to creating a great lens to promote their products, businesses, websites, blogs, etc., You may want to have a look for professionals to create you a lens. There are a few services out there that will do this for you. Two full-time lensmasters offer their services to make a lens for you on any subject. BuildMyLens provides astoundingly professional lenses that work well in getting traffic to them and ranking highly on squidoo. Though the price at $249 a lens, or $799 for a group of 4, may seem a bit steep, if you have picked the right niche to market they will quickly return your initial investment.

*some subjects only provide me with fleeting inspiration, sometimes this is long enough to create a good lens, sometimes this means one stays as work-in-progress awaiting my inspiration returning. I often publish these incomplete as work in progress to see if they will fly, often they won’t, but if  they do start getting visited and climbing the rankings this is often enough to reinspire me to go back and polish it up a little

** Lisa, the creator of Work At Home Moms Revolution has visited to respond to my criticism of her blog post  and has apologised for suggesting it was simple to earn lots of money from squidoo. Her blog is actually very well written with lots of good and interesting articles about Work At Home opportunities and worth a visit.