The Power Of Squidoo.. For YOU

Soooooo….

Web 2.0

I was browsing elsewhere today and saw a question about the power of squidoo and what it can do for YOU, because let’s face it… the majority of us only want to know WIIFM when it comes to tools, I understand some people may do squidoo lenses for themselves personally for no business purpose at all… but what we really want to do is know how to utilise this amazing web 2.0 tool for our own gain…

First off, allow me to say… Squidoo is POWERFUL, one for ranking, and two for getting very high authority backlinks to YOUR website, consider your time building a lense(s) as an investment that you can update and add to over time….. Think of it as a glorified article directory, without the editor breathing down your neck for clean writing…lol

I will proceed with a small squidoo tutorial here maybe?…

Your squidoo lense is created wiht “modules” in what is known as a lens, which is basically a one page extension of squidoo, focusing primarily on YOUR topic of choice and totally under your control, except for the few advertisements that squidoo serves as a means of revenue generation to keep their service free..

So… Adding Modules

Adding Modules

Here I will focus on the most useful modules for marketers, network and affiliate’s alike. These are the Introduction, the “Text / Write” module and the RSS Feed Module.

When you open a squidoo lens, it may be already setup with modules introduced… you want to get rid of some of these as they may distract your visitors…. You can choose to keep these, or simply delete them and start from scratch. I suggest you delete all but the following:

* The Introduction Module
* Some Text / Write Modules
* Definitely an RSS Module - You’ll see why later..

Or if they aren’t pre-populated… then you want to add these… maybe even 4 or 5 text/write modules

Like so….

The main modules to be left in and can be moved up or down depending on how YOU want to structure your lens…

Introduction Module:

This module will be present on all of your lenses and is very important. The Introduction Module alets you whack a picture in there right from your desktop. Hit the “Browse” button to add a product image or something that compliments the lens. Products always fit in well here

Text / Write Module:

The Text / Write module is the most common module that you will use as an article marketer. It allows you to have a headline, text, images, and to add HTML links.

Optimization Tip: I suggest that you use multiple Text / Write modules to build your lenses, rather than using just one. The main reasonbeing that it helps readability for your visitors and segments the page into easy to read snippets and sections…. It will allow you to utilize Optimized Headlines to grab the attention of the visitor! Squidoo also expects mltiple text/write modules now due to the increasing use of squidoo by spammy marketers…the more the better to increase your page rank and quality of your content.

RSS Module:

Adding an RSS feed to your lens helps it get noticed on a more regular fashion by the search engines…. This provides updated content on a regular basis and can really help with your search engine rankings, the spiders see fresh content everytime the blog from whch the RSS feed comes from has new posts…if it was my blog it would see 2 or 3 fresh internet marketing posts and ramblings a day.. content is content is content you know…

Here’s how to add an RSS feed:

1 – You can use any RSS feed from any Blog or feed site online, but if you want your lens up in a flash, visit Google Blog Search:

Then proceed to do a search for a relevant keyword or phrase in Google Blog Search

You will then find on the results page you’ll see an “ATOM” link to the left of the results.

Right Click, and copy this link:

Like so:

You should then use this link in your Squidoo RSS Module where it asks you where to pull RSS from…

Like This:

Which then allows you to use your own blog RSS feed on your lense, so everytime you make a new blog post, it will also populate the RSS module on your squidoo lens adding extra quality snippets of updated content to your lens … you can find your own feed on blogger.com blog right at the bottom left in a box, just right click and copy the location of the link that looks like:

To optimise your lens for better indexing, there are certain things you can do to ensure a better quality lens in the eyes of the search engines… checkout these tips…

1) Use relevant headlines and sub headings for each write/text module

2) Plenty of call to action points with YOUR links included in anchor text forquality backlinks as an added bonus

3) Use plenty of relevant images to help your lens look better, and be a more pleasant read for your visitors.

4) Avoid using looooooooong paragraphs, break up your text with bullet points and short paragraphs for the readers to browse at their own pace and leisure.

5) Be sure to add the RSS feed for constantly updating content and freshness for your lens.

Tags For Your Lense:

Squidoo allows you to use something called “Tags” to describe your lens, these are what the search engines first look for when deciding what your lens is really discussing or what topic it comes under. In many cases, you can get a listing under a keyword that you have in your tags, and not even within the lens content itself. Adding tags is one way that you can utilize the power of Squidoo.

Using all 40 available tags is a must for squidoo lenses, maybe not right away becauseyou may find new keywords in your squidoo stats..but use as many of the tags as possible and be sure to keep adding more until you get to the full 40, take a look below for a l’il pic to show you:

In my opinion the tags section is a hugely important part of your lens and should never be overlooked at all…

To Max or Not To Max… that is the question…

There is an option with squidoo lenses, to “max” th lens which allows for squidoo to selcet their own ads and content and pretty much litter your lens with whatever they choose, this is for me a bad idea and I would always advise against it for sure… I’ll show you below how to change it:

There is no question about how powerful squidoo is for YOU as a marketer, whether you choose to use that power and use it properly is totally up to you, but if we like it or not, squidoo is part of the web 2.0 storm and it can really be a great tool tohave as part of our arsenal…Marketing with Squidoo will allow you to gain backlinks, exposure and great search engine rankings without having to input extra SEO…. look at the pagerank of Squidoo… it has tremendous power in the search engines…

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