Squidoo Guestbook Hints and Tips

Almost all Squidoo lenses have a guestbook. It’s pretty much expected. It’s an easy way for other lensmasters to leave a quick comment and tell you how much they enjoyed your lens. It’s a great way to get feedback from your visitors, because not everyone is going to want to contact you directly. Besides, it’s mutually beneficial: They’re hoping you’ll click on their name and check out their lenses, too.

Unfortunately, not everyone uses guestbook modules to their best advantage. Here are some tips to help you avoid the most common mistakes and make your guestbooks even better:

Rename your guestbook. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read a great lens, only to have the experience marred by the sight of a guestbook entitled “New Guestbook.” It might seem like a minor detail, but it matters. People notice these things. It’s like admiring a pretty woman with a nice hairstyle, wearing a beautiful dress–then you look down and discover she’s wearing ugly, dirty shoes. Don’t make the same mistake with your lens.

Put the guestbook at the bottom. Some lensmasters put a guestbook module in the middle of their lens because they want to use it as a discussion board for a specific subject, but most of the time it looks like the lensmaster was too lazy to rearrange the modules. Putting the guestbook at the end of the lens is a standard practice. In fact, many lensmasters will assume they’ve reached the end of the lens once they see the guestbook and won’t scroll down any further. Always put your guestbook module at the end of your lens. It’s OK to list a few extras after the guestbook, such as some extra Amazon modules, but make sure they’re nonessential.

Ask for feedback and ratings. If star ratings from your visitors are important to you, you can use the guestbook as an opportunity to remind them to scroll back up and rate your lens. Many lensmasters forget to rate lenses, so it’s a good place for a gentle reminder.

Invite people to promote their lenses. This might seem like a bad idea, since many lensmasters will do this anyway. But if you want to give people an incentive to leave a comment, you could announce that it’s fine to include a link to a lens that’s related to yours. This could be interpreted as an invitation for spam, though, so you might want to mention that you’ll delete comments that promote irrelevant lenses.

Add a guestbook image. This isn’t necessary, and in fact most lensmasters don’t do this, but it looks pretty cool. You can create a nice-looking image in Photoshop or GIMP, then upload it to a free image hosting site like Photobucket. Once you have it uploaded, you can display it in your guestbook by adding a bit of HTML: <img src=”http://hosted.image.url.example” alt=”Sign the Guestbook” /> - Just be sure to replace the stuff between the quotes with the actual URL of your image.

Decide on your guestbook settings. A new guestbook is set to automatically approve new comments from other lensmasters. However, it will block comments from non-Squidoo members. Be sure to look over these settings and decide what you want. If you’re worried about spam, you might want to set the guestbook to ask you first before approving comments. Or you might want to encourage more participation by allowing anyone to sign.

Tags: guestbook, modules