When it comes to website promotion, Squidoo lenses are the darling of the social media sites. These lenses reside on the Squidoo website itself which is considered an “authority” site. Therefore, if you know how to Squidoo you can get yourself some nice links back to your website.
Why Social Media Sites?
Social media sites are sites where anyone can go and leave information that is of mutual interest. There are literally thousands of these sites. The great thing about a lot of them, like Squidoo is that they are seen as authority sites by the search engines. Therefore, if you can get a link back to your site from one of these social media sites that carries a lot more clout than getting a link form Joe Blows PR0 blog.
Why Squidoo Lenses
Squidoo itself has a PR of 8 in Google so it stands to reason that you want to learn how to make Squidoo lenses as part of your marketing strategy. Luckily, they are pretty easy to make!
First off, you need to create an account over at Squidoo.com – you can have many lenses in one account so don’t worry about making your account name match with a keyword phrase you would like to target (you can worry about this when you create the lens)
When you login at Squidoo, you will see all kinds of stats and interesting information for your Squidoo lenses. If you’ve never created one before, or if you want to create a new one, there will be a big blue button that says “Create a Lens” – click it and follow the screens to create your lens.
There are a couple of things to pay particular attention to when creating a Squidoo lens.
First off, you want to be sure to use your keyword phrase in the Lens title and the URL. Sometimes your exact phrase might not be available and you might have to get creative and add “tips” or “guide” or something to the end or beginning of the phrases in the title. For the URL, you might try adding dashes if the url you are after is taken.
When you start to add content to your lens, it is important to note that you need to add a hyperlink to your website in the text field. That’s because this is the only link that is “dofollow” and, therefore the only one that will pass along “link juice” to your website.
I usually add my article to the first text section with 1 hyperlink back to my website using the keyword I am trying to rank for in my anchor text.
Try to make your lens interesting and not too promotional. Try to put in a couple of text sections, a list if appropriate, some videos and you can add in the Amazon module with useful related products and even make a few bucks! Also, be sure to add the guest book module so people can come in and comment on your lens – it’s fun to get new comments but you might want to make sure you check the option to approve all comments first or you might end up with a bunch of spammy stuff on your lens.
Promoting Your Lens
Squidoo lenses can be promoted much the same as any other web property (articles, RSS feeds, Social Bookmarking). Of course, you’re probably pretty busy just promoting your website, so at the minimum, you want to do a little social bookmarking and add your RSS feed to the RSS directories. You have a feed that includes all your lenses and you can find that at:
http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lensmaster/YOURUSERNAME – just replace YOURUSERNAME with your actual username and you will see the feed. This is the URL that you can submit to the feed directories.
One thing that is a bit different with Squidoo lenses that can also help you promote them is that you can add them to different related groups. Check out:
http://www.squidoo.com/groups
Find some groups that are related to your niche and apply to join them – it only takes a second and will be more exposure for your lens.
Commenting On Squidoo Lenses
Just like any of the social media sites, Squidoo has a mechanism for user interaction and this is in the “guestbook” where you can leave comments. You can search Squidoo for lenses on your topic and leave an informative and interesting comment that has a hyperlink back to your lens or even your website. The link in the comments is “no follow” but a link could mean traffic and it’s pretty easy to leave a comment.
So, now that you know “How to Squidoo” – get going and make your first lens!
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