Squidoo Lenses

Squidoo is a website launched in October 2005. It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions. Read the full Squidoo Definition from Wiki.

Creating a “lense” is a very simple process.

Head on over to http://www.squidoo.com/

Click on the link that says “Build your own lense”

Tick the appropriate box and click “Get Started!”

Step 1: So, what’s your lens about?

Place the subject of your lense. This will serve as the title so you want it to be as target as you can make it. One of the major benefits of creating Squidoo lenses is that the search engines pick these rather quickly so it’s important to choose a phrase we believe will be a popular search term.

To be sure we are choosing a keyword phrase that should bring us traffic from the search engines, we will use a keyword tool.

There are many keyword tools to choose from, if you are just getting started and don’t have the money to invest in a good one, you can use Googles free keyword tool. If you were building a lense on socks, you could enter the search word “socks” and it will show you the most popular search terms involving that keyword.

For this keyword we get (trimmed list)

socks
mens socks
women’s socks
wool socks
slipper socks
toe socks
cotton socks
knee socks
men’s socks
wholesale socks
tube socks
knee high socks
argyle socks
diabetic socks
baby socks
black socks
cashmere socks
ankle socks
sport socks
dress socks
womens socks
running socks
gold toe socks
ski socks
crew socks
athletic socks
smartwool socks
soccer socks
kids socks
heated socks
wigwam socks

So, if you were selling socks, you would probably want to create different lenses for men’s socks, women’s socks and kids socks. Notice that men’s and mens are shown as different searches here. Keep these lenses as targeted as you can. You will want to use the primary keyword(s) frequently throughout your lense as well for proper search engine optimization.

If at all possible, Wordtracker is one of the very few tools I would strongly urge you to invest in if you are all at serious about building your online business. One of the most critical components of being successful online is getting traffic to your website, the most targeted, least expensive traffic comes straight from the search engines where people are looking for exactly what ever it is you are promoting.

Using a tool like Wordtracker enables you to come up with these targeted keyword phrases that puts buying customers right on your website. The other methods of marketing you will learn here, like article marketing, social networking, etc.. will all rely on targeted keywords to drive the right traffic your way. You can learn more about keyword optimization for free at the Wordtracker Academy.

Step 2: What do you want to do with your lens?

You are now faced with four choices, let me make this easy for you… Tick the “I just want to do my own thing” box and click “Go to Step 3″

This will start you out with a bare bones lense where you can add the modules (discussed later) that you would like have included and not start out with the 10 or more that would automatically be inserted if you chose another option.

Step 3: Title and URL

Give your lense a title, refer to Step 1 above.

Pick your url. Use your title if at all possible. If you Title was Mens Sock Reviews, they enter your url as MensSockReviews , if that is not available, try Mens_Sock_Reviews, or Mens_Sock-Reviews or some other combination.

Select the correct category. If you are unsure, just do a quick search of Squidoo in a new browser window for whatever it is you are creating your lense about and see what categories others are listing theirs under. If you see the same subject listed under multiple categories, then you should also consider creating lenses under the other categories yourself, maybe with slightly different variations of the keywords.

Step 4: Help people find your lens

Enter some popular keyword phrases and click “Go to Step 5″. You will have the opportunity once your lense is created to add additional “keyword tags”.

Step 5: How do you want to get paid?

This is entirely up to you. Squidoo allows you to place their advertising modules on your lense and commission from any sales generated. Honestly, if you are looking to make money from your lenses then you could place your own advertising and earn the total commission without having to split it with Squidoo. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll select “I just want cash” and click “Go to Step 6″

Step 6: Almost There!

This step is pretty self explanatory. Enter your email address, password, choose whether you want to receive their newsletter or not, etc.. and then select “Done”

You will receive an email conformation link at the email address you entered on the previous page, you must click it to confirm your account.

You should have your first window still open and we will continue working from there. If you clicked the link in the confirmation email, you will be at your Squidoo admin panel. If for some reason, you closed your primary window with your newly started lense, just click on the edit link to get back to where you were and we’ll pick up from there.

Congratulations, you’ve created your first lense! Well… almost.

Now it’s time to start adding content to it.

If you were building a lense about your passion for photography, you could spend a lot of time adding content and making sure everything was just perfect but for the purposes of this tutorial, we are trying to make some money, funnel some traffic to our own websites or affiliate programs so we are going to get right to the point here.

The first thing we will do is add some modules. Click the big orange button on either the top or bottom of your page that says “Add Modules”.

Click the word “add” next to “RSS: Add Your Own Feed”. The “add” link will change to “add another”. Click again three more times.

Now “add” a guestbook and a linklist. Later, after you’ve completed the “Create YouTube Video” tutorial, you can add these right into your lense as well but for now we’ll leave it as is and continue.

Scroll down and click the orange button “Save”.

You should find yourself back at the back where you will now see all the modules you’ve added. We’ll start with the first one which should be a RSS: Add Your Own Feed module, click the orange “edit” button.

RSS feeds pull content from other sites and is updated automatically right on your page so you will always have updated content on your page which the search engines love. By focusing on RSS feeds from related content sites, you are able to better target the keywords and subject matter you are interested in achieving good search engine placement for.

If you had your own websites with similar content, you would want to add it here as it provides a link for surfers to follow and leaves a trail for the search engine spiders to follow and index.

For now, we’ll assume you don’t have a website of your own with similar content so we will find other content to pull in.

Ok, your lense is probably not about socks, so let’s assume you are promoting a music download affiliate program, one that pays you for each person that signs up to download music.

Assuming this, we want to focus our lense on music but maybe we want to be even more targeted and create numerous lenses with various genres of music. For this lense we’ll assume we are trying to promote Rap music.

Let’s go to Google and do a search for…

rap rss

This should give you plenty of choices but if you find the results aren’t very good, just enclose in quotations.

“rap rss”

Ok, now we are looking for rss feeds to add in. Generally you can glance through the descriptions and see the word “RSS” bolded. These probably have rss feeds you can use, now you want to look for site titles and see if there is any well known sites there like “Rolling Stones Magazine” or similar.

I didn’t see anything like that here for this search and I went ahead and refined my search using the following phrase

rap music artists rss

This gave me a few other options, one of which IS Rolling Stones. You may have to do this several times until you get the feeds you want. Why I usually like to use larger, well known sites for feeds is I know they will update their content frequently and will probably be dishing out content next week, next month and next year.

Click through to the site and look for an rss icon like or a text link somewhere that says “rss”. Sometimes, especially on the big sites that may offer many feeds for different categories, you will need to click on it to get to the page where a list of available feeds are offered.

If you click on the link and see a page that looks like this…

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

- <!–

 generator=”wordpress/2.0.2″

–>

- <rss version=”2.0“ xmlns:content=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/“ xmlns:wfw=”http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/“ xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/“>

- <channel>

<title>Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily</title>

<description>Up to the minute breaking news from the world of music, from the editors of Rolling Stone.</description>

<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.2</generator>

… then this is the actual feed in it’s raw form that will be pulled into your site. Just copy the url from the browser address bar. For this tutorial it is…

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/feed/

and go back to your Squidoo lense and paste it into the “What url would you like to pull RSS from” box. Show at least 10 headlines, for excerpt select “everything available”, set it to update once daily, (your choice really), No to the display html, unless it is from your own website feed or one with affiliate links from a sponsor which would earn you a commission.

The title, subtitle and description are exactly as they sound and will be displayed on your lense so pay attention to keywords and keyword phrases here. When you are finished, click save.

Do this for the remaing Add Rss modules you have. If you can’t find enough feeds because your niche is too targeted, you can just click the x in the small orange circle and delete the extras.

Next, you can add links to your link list.

Click on edit, complete the title, subtitle and description fields.

Paste a url into the “Type or paste your link here” field.

You can use this to link to your other lenses, blogs, classified ads to help cross link for the spiders to index all of your other pages or you can add product links, etc.. here.

One way is to use this module to trade links with other sites. Link exchanges will be covered in another tutorial but to quickly cover it, you can search Google for sites related to yours, add their link to your lense and then contact them requesting they add a link to your site in return.

Ok, you’re ready for your main module which is the introduction section. Click on edit and enter your main ad copy here. You may write your own or any affiliate program you are promoting may have some ready made ad copy in their associates area for you to use. When using content that is available to so many others, it would serve you much better to rewrite in your own words.

Rewriting content is much quicker when you use a tool like Wordflood. It’s a content rewriter that will take an article, sales letter or any other text and replace words with synonyms to make the content unique which is what you want so Google doesn’t see duplicate content on your pages. Using it is simple and this is another of the tools that you really can’t afford to be without, especially when you get into the Article Marketing and Creating Your Own Product tutorials. Watch a video of Wordflood in action!

In the Introduction section and and any Text/Write modules you add, you are able to use some html and create links to your websites or sponsors.

To create a link, just click “html” underneath the text box where ever you would like your link to appear. The following code will create a hyperlink.

<a href=”http://www.somelink.com” mce_href=”http://www.somelink.com”>CLick Here</a>

Alternatively you can highlight the word you want to make into a hyperlink, and then click on the little chain icon.

To add an image, the following code will work

You have to use the correct path to the image. If you are unsure, just right click on any image in your browser and select “properties”, it will show the path to the picture and you can even highlight and copy from there.

If you want to make your picture clickable such as a banner, use the following code

When you get your lense set up and are happy with it, click the big orange “publish” button. This will make it live for the world to see.

Now that your lense is live, you will want to spend a little time promoting it. You can do this by visiting other lenses and posting a comment. In the comment box you are able to use the html above for a link to your lense so you might say Hi, you enjoyed their lense and gave them 5 stars (do this by clicking on the stars on the top of their lense). Ask them to drop by your lense, leave the link here, and let you know what they think.

The more lenses you can get your link on, the more opportunities you will have for people to visit and see your offers.

You can also join groups.

In the blue bar towards the very top of the page and right below the search box, click the link “Groups”, you can find like minded lenses here and look for the “Join Our Group” text and under that, click “Add an existing lens”.

Ok, that should get you started. Remember to make many lenses for different keywords and be sure and get out there and leave comments. They best lense in the world won’t make you a penny if you aren’t marketing it.

Premium Guides & Resources

Social Networking On Squidoo. A Web 2.0 Marketing Guide On Using Social Network Squidoo To Help Brand Your Business. Learn the advanced techniques necessary to truly generate income from your lenses, taught by the highly acclaimed Squidoo expert, Tiffany Dow.

Tiffany give a quick Squidoo lesson on Social Bookmarking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpBxXUCATWY

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.