Squidoo Newbie Survival Guide

"Making Your First Lens" Mentor gives a complete, step by step walkthrough of building a first lens. Even if you've already made your first lens, she offers excellent advice worth reading.

Graphics add professionalism and pizzaz to a lens, but where do you find free, legal to use, graphics for your Squidoo lenses? Greekgeek has a great guide full of places to find free to use graphics. Trekkiemelissa, Greekgeek, and Glen all have pages of graphics they've released for use on Squidoo. (Psst: Trekkiemelissa made the image I used in my introduction.) Check the lenses below:

Used well, Squidoo's themes offer a great way to have a beautiful lens without knowing anything about html or css. SquidooKimberly has created a lens showcasing these. This is great for getting an idea of the possibilities.

If you want to color coordinate using html, check out Glen's lens on html colors.

Glen's basic html lens teaches us simple html tricks like centering images and making clickable links in our text.

Greekgeek and FunGifts4All take us on a tour of the modules we can use on our lenses, what they look like and tips for use. Greekgeek's module index offers your tour divided by category (all selling modules together, for instance), while FunGifts4All's module lensography offers it alphabetically.

The lensmasters who made the following three lenses are successful, well-known Giant Squids and community leaders. They've shared some of their best tips and tools for success with us on the lenses below:

Traffic is the key to survival, but unless you luck into some lightning strike choice in wording it doesn't come beat down your door on its own. You have to learn how to appeal to people looking for your topics and do the leg work to get your lens out there to be found.

Greekgeek shares how to bring readers to your lenses.

Spirituality spotlights how to utilize forums and Stumbleupon as effective promotional methods.

SquidU is the Squidoo forum. Click that link on your page, and you will find forums to introduce yourself to the community, post your lens for critique, ask for help, learn the tricks of the trade, and so much more. Don't miss The Squidoo Answer Deck, full of the answers to commonly asked questions and just about anything else you could think to ask about Squidoo.

Check out the lens below to learn all about SquidU:

These lenses cover that tricky stuff that can get your lenses locked or your account closed. Read them so you know what Squidoo HQ doesn't want on Squidoo.

The rank of our lenses is an often mystifying number we see on our dashboards. It can become a bit of an obsession as we hover over it, watching it rise or fall each day. But what is it, what does it mean, and what affects it? Spirituality explains:

In Top 10 Ways to Make Money on Squidoo, Megan Casey explains current sources of income for lensmasters.

Christene answers frequently asked questions about our squidoo earnings on the payday faq:

Search engine optimization is something that many online writers keep in mind as they begin their next writing project. Done well, it builds a powerful promotional tool right into your page, making it attractive to search engines and likely to come up within the first pages of results for searches on your topic.

Greekgeek wrote an excellent post in the SquidU forum with a clear, concise explanation of seo and lens promotion, and comparing the two main methods, here: Web Traffic 101 for newbies: How to get visitors to your lenses.

For more about SEO, see these lenses below:

As previous guides explained, one way to make money on Squidoo is with lensrank. Using the Amazon and eBay modules to feature relevant products is another. Taking this a step further, we're able to set up our own affiliate accounts with companies and feature products.

Spirituality wrote an excellent, newbie-friendly guide to the AllPosters affiliate program. Many lensmasters use this program as another source for great relevant images to illustrate lenses, and Allposters offers a commission if the products you feature sell.

For more about the Amazon modules, as well as very useful tools to use as an Amazon associate if you decide to join Amazon's affiliate program yourself, see thefluffanutta's Amazon guide.