Promoting Your Squidoo Lens!

Promoting Your Squidoo Lens! — by Moshe Morris & Stephen Mahaney

In last month's special Squidoo Report, Part One introduced you to the Lens (squidoo-speak for a Squidoo web page) and explained how Google likes Squidoo pages. We also told you how they can be used to help your business' main site rank better in the search results. Part Two got you started building a high quality Lens. Then, our Squidoo Intro Video showed you how to get started Squidooing. Now you are ready to start promoting your Squidoo Lens which, as you will see, is fairly easy to do.

Niche Marketing with Squidoo

Up until now we've been talking about building and promoting one Lens—but it's time to fess up...

You don't really want to build a Lens on Squidoo.
Rather, you want to build Lenses - lots of them!

The larger number of topic related Lenses you create - the better chance you have to dominate a particular niche within Squidoo. Let me explain...if your site is about Hiking then you will want to build a variety of Lenses relating to Hiking (Hiking trails, Hiking gear, Hiking tips, etc.). Then you'll want to break each of those sub-topics down into their own Lenses. For instance, from Hiking Gear you can build Lenses on The Best Hiking Boots for Women, A Guide to Buying Hiking Poles, Essential Hiking Clothes, etc. Building numerous, related Lenses will make it easier to promote all of your Lenses (as well as provide greater value for your customers at the same time).

The Three Fundamentals of Promoting Your Lenses

Before you begin promoting your Lens, it's important to understand that creating a successful Lens revolves around three important factors:

1. Ranking well in the search engines.
2. Ranking well within Squidoo's LensRank system (also known as your LensRank score).
3. Getting direct traffic to your Lens (regardless of your rankings in the Search Engines or within Squidoo).

As you'll soon see, the strategies we use to achieve each of these goals individually are similar and will complement one another.

Promoting Your Site in the Search Engines

Chances are, as a member of SearchEngineNews.com, you probably already have a good idea of what causes your pages to rank well in the search engines. Therefore we'll just briefly cover the basic principles in this article.

One of the most important keys to ranking well online is getting a large number of high-quality incoming links. Well, with Squidoo you already have a HUGE head-start. As the screenshot below indicates, Squidoo is what we would call a "high quality" site based on the fact they've already earned over 2.7 million (yes, that's million) incoming links!

That means you can ride on the coat-tails of this already successful website and rank well solely by getting some quality incoming links to your Lenses.

Building Links to Your Lens

There are two main sources of links for your Lens—links from within Squidoo and links from outside of Squidoo. Your goal is to quickly get as many high-quality links to your Lens as possible from both of these sources. Here are some ideas of how to do that.

Getting Links from Within Squidoo – The 6 main techniques you can employ to get links from within Squidoo:

1. Naturally interlink your Lenses
   One of the main benefits of creating numerous, related Lenses is that it allows you to naturally link all of your Lenses together. Since you have total control over your Lens, you can easily place your keywords within your links and your links within contextually relevant text. The search engines in general, and Google in particular, love these types of links.

2. Leave comments in the guestbooks of other Squidoo Lenses
   There are two ways to benefit from leaving feedback on a lens. The first, and most obvious, is that you can leave a keyword rich link back to your lens or anywhere else on the web that you wish to link to, such as your website. The second way is through your Squidoo username. Your Squidoo username automatically links to your Squidoo LensMaster page (your bio page with a link to all of your Lenses).

   
   
   

   In regards to commenting - don't spam the system. Leave either a useful or, at the very least, appreciative comment. It's fine, though, to say: I really liked this Lens, go check out mine.

   If you notice that your feedback is not getting approved by various LensMasters, then try adding something positive in your feedback about the actual Lens that you are leaving feedback for. For instance, "I never knew about that software program - I plan to try it out soon."

   Alternatively, you can also refer to the fact that you too deal with this issue on your Lens. For instance, "I like the point about how to do keyword research, but I recommend a different keyword research tool. Check out my Lens to learn more details."

3. Join or Start a Squidoo Group
   Squidoo Groups make it easy to group multiple Lenses together in one spot. Like Lenses, the subject of a Group is determined by the GroupMaster. The only difference is that the content of the Group usually consists of an organized list of related Lenses and LensMasters. For instance, here are a few of the groupings of Lenses on the Everything Photography Squidoo Group:

   

   Groups are great ways to get internal links within Squidoo as well as to meet other people within your field. Joining a group is easy, simply click on the Add an existing lens link. Alternatively, you can click on the Make a new lens button and create and submit a new lens.

   Furthermore, if you have a particularly good Lens, you can contact the GroupMaster and ask them to feature your Lens in the Group.

   

   Even better, you can create your own group and feature your Lenses in the Group.

   Either way, you should aim to get your Lens on as many relevant Groups as possible— starting with the most popular Groups first. Like Lenses, there is a listing of the Top 100 Groups, although currently there are no Top 100 Group lists for individual categories.

4. Submit to Lens of the Day lotd@squidoo.com
   If you have a top quality Lens, you should consider submitting it to the Lens of the Day Blog — http://www.squidoo.com/lensoftheday.
   

   Each day, this blog features a Lens which they feel "stands out from the crowd". Getting your Lens featured on the Lens of the Day Blog will not only get you a nice backlink (the blog page currently has a PageRank of 6), it will also send some traffic to your Lens.

   And as an added bonus, you then get the honor of being able to add the rare and highly coveted Lens of the Day logo to your lens!
   

   

   To submit your Lens for consideration, send an email to lotd@squidoo.com.

5. Participate in the SquidU forum
   Yes, it's true, Squidoo has it's own "University" - and of course it's called SquidU! As silly as it's name may sound it's worth taking a look at. Among the valuable resources at SquidU is The Lounge Forum. This is where you can ask questions about Squidoo in general and your Lenses in particular. And yes, you can link to your lenses through the forum as well as in your signature. But don't spam the system. Link to your Lenses only when there is a legitimate reason for doing so.

6. Ask your visitors to link to your Lens from their lens
   Remember, this is your Lens–you can do whatever you want with it. So why not use it for a little bit of self-promotion. Invite people to add a link to your Lens from their Lens. Hey, there's even a module in Squidoo especially designed for this.

Getting Links from Outside of Squidoo — The key to getting good quality backlinks to your Lens is to focus on those links that you can easily and quickly obtain. Remember Squidoo, as a site, already has over 2.7 million backlinks. So, all you'll need to rank well is a few dozen or so high quality backlinks to your particular page.

To illustrate, let's consider our Cute Animal Pictures Lens that we used as an example last month.

As you can see, a high-quality, keyword-focused Lens with a few dozen links from within Squidoo, combined with a few more outside links, can easily rank high in both Google's and Squidoo's search results!

And, now that you know where to get easy links within Squidoo, here's a quick list of sites where you can easily get links to your Lenses from outside Squidoo:

1. Link to your lens from your websites and/or blog
   Find an article or blog post that relates to your Squidoo Lens (create one if you have to) and then find a way to work a link into your text as naturally as possible. Remember to use your keywords in the anchor text.

2. Blog comments
   If you find a blog post on someone else's site which relates to your Squidoo Lens, leave a comment with a link to your Lens in it. Again, remember to use your keywords in the anchor text. Also, make sure that your comment is of value.

   To easily find a list of blogs to comment on, do a search on Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com) or Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) You can also set up Google alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) for your keywords to get notices sent to your email whenever a new keyword-related blog post gets created online.

3. Forums & Answer sites
   Forum threads and answer sites are excellent resources for links to your Lens. Just follow the golden rule of making sure that your contribution is valuable. And remember to include a link to your main Squidoo Lens in your forum signature.

   To find relevant forums, do the following search on Google: [keyword phrase] + forum. For question and answer sites, it's best to start out at Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com).

4. Social Networking sites
   If you frequent any social networking sites like MySpace, then you will usually find a number of opportunities to add a link or two to your Squidoo Lenses. Needless to say, you should take advantage of those opportunities.

5. Social Bookmarking sites
   Be sure to tag your site at websites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Technorati & Digg. You should also consider using a book marking tool such as Only Wire (http://www.onlywire.com). Furthermore, if you know of any niche-specific social book marking sites, you'll want to add a link to your Lenses there as well.

6. Ask your Lens visitors to link to you
   It is very likely that some of your Lens-visitors will have their own website and/or blog that is thematically related to yours. And, since they have demonstrated an interest in your lens by visiting it, why not ask them (in a subtle but not overly promotional way) to link to it?

   Provided that you are not too flagrantly self serving, this can be another great way to gather incoming links to your Lens. And, while you're at it, ask them to bookmark your site on del.icio.us and/or digg.

Improving Your LensRank

How Does LensRank Work? — For most people LensRank is a new concept. So, before we go into too much detail, let's familiarize you with the basics.

For starters, there is no single overriding LensRank. Rather, there are numerous types of LensRanks...

• The Top Lens LensRank,
• The Most Visited Lens LensRank,
• The Most Profitable Lens LensRank

and so forth. Then to add to the pile there is also a general LensRank for all the Lenses as a whole and it then moves on to category specific LensRanks.

The advantages of having a high LensRank — is that it provides another avenue for getting traffic to your Lens. If you are in the top 100 Lenses for a particular category, then your Lens will show up whenever someone searches the top 100 Lenses of that category. Furthermore, whenever anyone does a keyword search on Squidoo they have the option of sorting the results by LensRank:

That means a page with a higher LensRank will get more exposure because it shows up higher in the search results when someone chooses to sort by LensRank.

How Does Squidoo Determine LensRank? — There are a number of factors that go into to determining your LensRank, and of course Squidoo likes to keep some of those close to the vest. The Known factors are:

1. Your rating by your Lens Visitors
   Each Lens provides visitors with the opportunity to rate that Lens. The higher your visitor rating, the more it helps your LensRank score.

   

2. Click-through-rates
   The more people click on the links within your Lens, the higher your LensRank. Seemingly, this is a way for Squidoo to encourage people to create Lenses that people actually want to use!

3. How often you update your lens
   The more often you update your Lens, the better. However, you don't have to constantly do major updates—simple changes will do the trick. Adding a new module, rewriting a paragraph, adding a product, etc. It is generally sufficient to do a little light tweaking of your Lens once a week or so.

4. Your Squidoo "reputation"
   Basically, if you help Squidoo and its customers, then Squidoo will help you. It's a kind of a 'you tickle my tentacles, I'll tentacle you back' type of algorithm.

5. The quantity and quality of inbound and outbound links
   The more high-quality links you have coming into or out of your Lens the better. This is an incentive to effectively market your Lens as well as provide good quality content on your Lens.

Getting Direct Traffic to Your Lens

Needless to say, direct traffic is great traffic. The better your Lens, the more likely it is that people will return. Although, as you might expect, there are a few tricks that can encourage the process. Start with these:

1. Promote your Squidoo Lens to your email list
   If you have an opt-in or customer email list, then let them know about your Squidoo Lens — it's a quick boost of traffic. And who knows, some of them may end up linking to your Lens. In fact, you can even ask them to do so.

2. Link to your lens in your email signature
   Most email programs allow you to create a special signature which automatically appears at the end of each and every email that you send out. Include a link to your Squidoo Lens in that signature.

3. Hold a contest
   People love contests—if you hold a good one it can be a nice draw to your Lens.

4. Give away something of value
   People also love free stuff of high perceived value. Giving away the right 'something of interest' can significantly improve your Len's reputation.

We've Saved the Best Part for Last!

Now it's time to look at ways to use your Lenses to generate income. After all, you aren't doing all this out of love for strange sea creatures. Click the Next button at the bottom of the screen to read Part 4 of our Squidoo series.