Should You Worry About the Competition?

There are lots of lenses on Squidoo, and the number is growing every day. It might seem like just about every topic you could think of has been covered by somebody. If you pay too much attention to your “competition,” it might be a little intimidating. If others have created dozens of lenses on a given topic, does that mean there’s no room left for you?

Absolutely not!

Do you have a passion for the topic? Do you have first-hand experience with it? Then you have something valuable to contribute, even if a bunch of other people have already taken a stab at it. Chances are, many of your “competitors” have only made half-hearted efforts that will pale in comparison to a great lens made by someone who really knows their stuff.

Don’t worry about your competition. In fact, don’t even look at it as competition. Just focus on making the best lenses you can.

Tags: competition

Posted in Lens development | 2 Comments »

How Spam Hurts Everyone and What You Can Do About It

Squidoo still has a bad reputation in some online circles. Thanks to the spammers who flooded into Squidoo and made a bunch of junk lenses a year ago, links to Squidoo pages are banned from places like Digg, Propeller and Wikipedia. Even promoting Squidoo lenses on your blog is risky, at least if you’re having it hosted on a free network like Blogger or WordPress.com.

None of this means you can’t get great traffic to your Squidoo lens (Google still loves Squidoo), but it does mean that the more obvious options for promoting Squidoo lenses are limited. And if you’re not careful, someone will bite your head off for promoting “spam”–even if your finely crafted, very informative Squidoo lens is anything BUT spam. Some folks just won’t look past the Squidoo logo and see the content for what it is.

The only thing we can do about it is continue to build great lenses. Filling Squidoo with excellent content, reporting spam, and pushing junk down to the bottom where it belongs.

The other thing we can do is “behave” ourselves when we join other online communities. Don’t join forums or social networks like Twitter for the sole purpose of promoting your lenses. Become part of the community: Learn what is and isn’t acceptable, ask questions, join conversations, and generally be a contributing member. Once the community accepts you, people will be less likely to jump down your throat for dropping an occasional link to one of your Squidoo lenses.

Even if you only have one or two Squidoo lenses, you have a kind of power. Someone who has never heard of Squidoo before might see your lens first. Make it count.

Tags: spam

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Boosting Lensrank: You Need Traffic, Too!

So after writing about how important it is to update your lenses, I’m now going to say this: It’s important, but it’s not enough.

Since I’ve made a commitment to update a handful of lenses a day, I’ve been paying closer attention to lensrank. The kind of updates I’ve been doing range from fixing a typo, adding a new product, or writing more content. This is what I’ve observed over the last two weeks or so:

• The higher the lensrank, the smaller the boost for each update. My rubber ducky lens, for instance, is in the Top 100 list at rank 42 today. Although its lensrank has fluctuated since the 24th of April, it stays pretty solidly in the 40 - 50 range. It rises or falls only by a few points a day, at most. It gets some traffic and has been updated nearly every day.
• The lower the lensrank, the bigger the boost for each update. If you have a lens that’s languishing at rank 130,000, it will probably get something like a 60,000 lensrank boost. However, with no traffic or additional updates, it will drop again in a few days.
• The lenses with a decent lensrank get at least SOME traffic each week. My best ranking lenses are all at least in the double digits where weekly traffic is concerned.

Updating your lenses is important, but there has to be something more than that. Lenses need traffic to stay in good health.

Of course I’ve long known that it’s important to drive traffic to your lenses, but for some reason I’m just not very consistent about it. Partly I’m afraid of getting blacklisted on social bookmarking sites, and partly because doing article marketing or building websites/blogs to help promote the lenses takes more time away from Squidoo activities, writing articles for a client, and other things. But I just have to get over that and make lens promotion part of my daily goals.

Tags: lensrank, traffic

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Why You Need to Update Your Lenses

Making a lens is lots of fun. One of the reasons I love Squidoo so much is that it gives me a way to dabble in all my interests and passions whenever I feel like it. Unlike a blog, I don’t have to stay “on topic” every day. However, it’s easy to forget to give your older lenses a little TLC. Without at least an occasional update, lenses tend to sink in rank until they are wallowing down at the bottom of your dashboard. After a while, there’s a risk that they will go WIP and won’t show up in Squidoo search results. And they certainly won’t earn much money for you.

Building a lens is a little like building a house. Well, no, actually it’s not at all like building a house, but stay with me for a minute. Lenses need maintenance; houses need maintenance. If you don’t occasionally repaint your house, clean the gutters, or weed your garden, that lovely house is going to seed. Lenses may not grow weeds or need their foundations repaired, but they do need a little attention to perform well.

So for every lens you create, try to update some of your other lenses. The updates don’t have to be major: It could be as simple as adding a new tag, creating a new link, changing out a picture, or tweaking a title. Or it could be as major as writing new articles. It’s up to you.

Tags: lens updates

Posted in Lens development | 1 Comment »

Keeping a Squidoo Diary

Several lensmasters are publishing their Squidoo dashboard stats on a monthly basis. Basically it’s a breakdown of how many lenses they have, how many are in the top 100, how many are in the top 1,000, etc. Some of them even post their monthly earnings. It’s really interesting to see each lensmaster’s progress.

Why is it a good idea to keep track of your Squidoo stats? Well, for one thing, it can be inspiring. It’s hard evidence of your progress. If you ever get discouraged, you can glance at your stats and see how far you’ve come in the last several months.

Recording your Squidoo stats can also give you an idea of what you need to improve on. It makes it easier to set concrete goals. Maybe you want to work extra hard to get at least one lens in the top 100. Maybe you want to have ten lenses in top 1,000 by the end of next month. Maybe you want to create 20 lenses every month. Either way, a record of your monthly Squidoo stats can encourage you to set these goals and work towards them.

I finally created a Squidoo stats lens of my own using bdkz’s template, but I decided to take it a step further and create a daily Squidoo diary. This is where I’ll be posting updates such as how many lenses I created in a day, and which lenses I updated. I’ll also try to do lensrank reports, because I’m actually curious to see how minor updates boost a given lens’ ranking and how long the benefits linger.

Currently I have 85 lenses, and my goal is to have 100 by the end of May. However, I also have a goal to try and create at least one lens a day. At that rate, I should reach the next milestone about two weeks into May. So far, keeping a daily Squidoo diary is helping me stay on track!

Tags: earnings, squidoo stats

Posted in Lens development | 3 Comments »

How to Make Money with Squidoo

• Make a good lens
• Make a lot of them
• Rinse and repeat

I know this blog is called “Little Squid That Could,” but I think any ambitious little squid should want to become a big squid someday. When I created this blog, I think I had less than 20 lenses. Now I have about 70, if you only count the lenses in my main Squidoo account. This pay day, my lenses earned about $50. My Squidoo earnings have been steadily increasing these past few months.

Some lensmasters make a fair amount of cash after making just a few Squidoo lenses. But most people who make a few hundred dollars or more each month have a lot of good lenses. When I say “a lot,” I don’t mean 10 or 20 lenses. I mean 50, 100, and more. And these lensmasters are still churning out more. Believe it or not, they’re not churning out garbage lenses. They do good work and make sure their lenses are informative, or at least interesting.

So if you want to earn money with Squidoo, make a lot of lenses. But only do it if you truly enjoy it, because it’s not as if you’re getting paid by the hour.

Tags: making money with squidoo, squidoo success

Posted in Squidoo earnings | No Comments »

Consistent Online Identity

Lately I’ve been poking my nose into social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. I figure they may be useful tools for promoting Squidoo lenses, a tactic that has apparently worked well for other lensmasters. It’s also useful if you want to be connected with other lensmasters.

If you decide to go that route yourself and want to befriend other lensmasters on these networks, I recommend using the same name and profile picture you use on the Squidoo site. It makes it easy for the others to find you–plus, they probably won’t be so leery of you if you try and add them as a friend.

Tags: facebook, gather, myspace, social networking, twitter

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40 Tags for Your Squidoo Lens?

One of the best things you can do to help get more traffic to your Squidoo lens is to add lots of good tags or keywords. These tags should be words and phrases that people would be searching for, such as “dog training” or “how to clean a mattress.” And, of course, they need to be relevant to your lens.

Tags create extra links to your Squidoo lens. Click on one and you’ll see: It takes you to a page that lists all the lenses sharing that tag. The more links you have pointing to your lens, the better, because that helps your len’s ranking with search engines.

Adding more tags is a good thing. Definitely add more than three! You usually want to start out with at least 15. Many people believe you should add as many tag s as Squidoo allows you from the get-go– 40. That makes sense. More tags are better. Or are they?

I generally don’t use up my 40 tag allotment when I create a lens. There are two reasons for this: 1) It gives me an extra reason to update my lens later; 2) I prefer proven, high performance tags.

Squidoo gives you a way to check on your lenses’ stats, giving you a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. Not only do you see how many visitors are coming from Google or Yahoo, you see what search terms people used to find your lens. Often they are search terms that never occurred to me, yet are perfectly suited for my lens. So I add them.

Check out the screen shot below:

This is my rubber ducky lens, and this is a breakdown of the kind of traffic it’s getting. In the right column are all the search terms people used that landed them on my lens. If I wanted to add any of them, I just click the + sign next to each one.

(To see the stats for your lenses, just go to your dashboard, click Stats for one of your lenses, then click on the Traffic tab.)

That’s why I don’t recommend using up your 40 tag allowance in one sitting. Add maybe 15 to 20 relevant tags to your lens, then let your visitors’ search terms guide you along to the rest.

Tags: tags

Posted in Lens development | 1 Comment »

Have You Heard About Weebly?

Weebly is an online website creator tool that actually reminds me of Squidoo. It uses drag & drop functionality that makes it super easy to put together your own free website. You can even add a blog.

Although I wouldn’t use Weebly to create a professional website for a business, it looks like a great tool to use alongside your Squidoo lenses. You could create a free website about a niche topic, then use it to promote your lenses (and vice versa).

I’d give it a try. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it can’t hurt your Squidoo lenses any. If you’re curious to learn more first, I wrote more about it on a Squidoo lens about Weebly.

Tags: weebly

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Free Photos from Stock.xchng

One of the challenges of building a Squidoo lenses is finding pictures to use. Some people just grab whatever they find from a Google image search, but unless you’re reviewing a product, that’s usually not a good idea. You’ll avoid trouble if you use royalty-free, public domain images for your lenses.

I get a lot of my stock photos from a Stock.xchng for free. I don’t always find exactly what I’m looking for here, but there is still a surprising variety of pictures you can grab without paying a penny. The website also has some premium pictures you can buy for $1.

No clipart or funny cartoons here, unfortunately. But if you want free photographs of people, animals, or everyday objects, Stock.xchng is a good place to start.

Tags: pictures

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