Stupid Squidoo Tricks - Publicize Your Lenses

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Fans of CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman will recognize the reference to "Stupid Pet Tricks" and the more recent follow-up "Stupid Human Tricks."

The truth is I hope to foodle around with the Squidoo interface and develop (or "borrow") some interesting, non-obvious uses for Squidoo lenses.

Here are a couple just for starters:

Everybody knows that the Israel-Palestine situation ends in a two-state solution, but nobody will make the first move. Less momentous, perhaps, but far more immediate is the stand-off between lensmasters who want a little help with their lensranks.

You don't really want to help that guy who's already ahead of you, do you? (Honestly now!) Here's a way to break the impasse: Click on the "Statistics" tab In your Lensmaster dashboard, and you'll see some "Lensmaster Referrals" at the bottom. If you don't see any, you need to go to the left margin near the bottom and click on "Refer a friend (and earn a bonus!)". This will take you to your own personal sign up page., Make some links like this one:

Join Squidoo!

When you do have some referrals, go through the list and become a fan to every one of them. Their Lensmaster pages now link back to yours, improving your visibility. It's a small nudge, but every bit helps. Besides you want to help these people, because when they earn $15, you get $5. Impasse resolved!

Did you heed the advice to "Favorite it in StumbleUpon" going to the trouble to join StumbleUpon in the first place, only to learn that you must download the StumbleUpon Toolbar to add your favorites?

Great. Another possible spyware intrusion to evaluate. Besides, I couldn't even download it. Maybe my firewall settings are "too tight," but their php download page wouldn't run for me.

Now you can go ahead and add a title and review for this page if you want, but to add your own page, replace the "http://www.squidoo.com/Stupid-Squidoo-Tricks" part with the URL you want to add. Refresh the page, and you should be ready to add your content.

Don't forget to tag your lenses. Tags are to Web 2.0 as the deprecated keyword "meta" tag is to regular web pages -- they insure that your lens is properly indexed by search engines under all the relevant keywords. In fact, your Squidoo tags appear in a keyword "meta" tag which you can see if you view the source for the lens.

Squidoo has a mostly unpublicized "Popular Tags" page which graphically displays which keywords are currently popular as well as the all-time most popular tags. Useful.

The "black hat" version of this is tag-spam -- simply including all the popular tags in your lens. Google and other large search engines don't look at the keyword meta tag because that produces such irrelevant, useless results. Squidoo pays you "weakly" for tag spam, but if you actually want to make sales, you don't want visitors who were looking for one thing to find your unrelated lens instead.

The "white hat" version is tag collaboration. Start a group on a popular subject like National Geographic. Invite people to join and encourage them to use the proper tag. When you reach the "magic number" (currently about 70), the tag will appear in the tag cloud, and produce a nice boost in traffic for everyone.

Squidoo's current (04 JUL 06) offering of 32,000+ lenses may seem like a lot of content, and it is. Compared to the billions of pages on the Internet at large though, it's a drop in the bucket.

If you want to reach a wider audience (and improve your lensrank), you need to make sure that people can find your lenses through the usual search engines. You can do that by persistently linking to your lensmasters page.

Go to any lens you've written (the actual lens, not the edit page) and click on your by-line. Voila! Your Lensmaster page, with a link to every one of your lenses.

By the way, you might also want to publicize your "Favorites" page.  I'ts a great place to highlight your best "undiscovered" lenses, or to collect lenses on topics you may want to write about later. Once you have your own lens on a subject, you could include these in a "lensroll," but I've found that few people notice these links over in the navigation part of the lens (on the right-hand side.) It's probably better to use a link list module to make a "More Like This" or "Featured Lenses" section.

This one is pretty obvious for lensmasters, and I know a lot of people make purchases from their own links already. This module is more for Amazon associates, who may have been misled on this point.

"Newbies" at the Amazon Associates Forum regularly ask if they can earn commissions on their own Amazon purchases. If I catch the thread, I always tell them about Squidoo. The forum "regulars," in order to preserve their imaginary credibility, then have to argue that this is preposterous -- having already said "No," so many times. The forum rules prevent me from telling them they're drooling idiots, but the facts are what they are.

Amazon.com doesn't allow associates to earn commissions on their own purchases. They also prohibit schemes that pay "kickbacks" for purchasing through somebody else's account. Apparently Squidoo royalties (which are only partly based on Amazon sales) are legal though. I asked Amazon about it, and although their answer seemed like they hadn't entirely understood the question, I saved it. They can't say I didn't ask!

If you want to buy something from Amazon.com (or any of the revenue-producing modules) just make your own Squidoo link and order through it. You already know enough about the product to convince you that you want it, so write a short paragraph sharing what you know, and you'll have a little revenue center. Maybe you'll sell a lot. You never know until you try!

If you only have a few lenses, making a Table of Contents may seem like a waste of time, but by the time you have as few as ten or more lenses, you're going to find it hard to locate them on your "Lensmaster Dashboard."

"Oh, well," you might think, "Nobody said making a fortune with Squidoo was going to be easy."

That's true, but the thing is you may take the time to pore over the whole list looking for something you already know is ther somewhere, but your readers definitely will not! Help them find what they're looking for!

This is another of those cases of, "Do as I say, not as I do," but my Lensmaster Index: The Editors of Rolling Stone Magazine is a popular example, and My Squidoo Table of Contents is currently under construction.

Many Squidoo pages have a "bug report" link. I keep forgetting this, especially since a lot of bugs don't neatly fit into the "bug report format." You will have a MUCH better chance of getting your issues addressed if you use these, though.

Personally, I find this to be a bug in itself, but it's true. Use the bug reports if you have a problem, and it may be addressed. I was recently able to get some of these "Orphan" Groups onto the philanthropy "topics" page, which mollifies me somewhat.

I'm pretty sure the following list of "Orphan" Groups accounts for much of the growing popularity of this lens, so I'm leaving it here at least for now.

Quite a few people have been able to ditch their boss and make a full-time living selling on eBay. If that appeals to you, this is right up your alley!

Obviously, you will make more from a well-publicized auction than from one nobody knows about or bids on.

When you get home from your garage-sale, auction, flea-market, or whatever put up an eBay module for your items.

You will also have a convenient place to see what similar (same) items are selling for before you set your reserve price, bid increment, etc. for your own auction.

When you're ready to hold your auction, change the eBay module to point specifically at your item. Hooray! You have an established page with its own search-engine links and traffic pointing to your sale!

eBay sellers: Earn an extra $5 from Squidoo by signing up through this link!