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Advertising your lens

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Getting your lens more visitors...

Making a lens is one thing but getting visitors to actually go to your lens is another. Getting visitors to your lens can actually be harder than making the lens in the first place.

If you've just made a lens which took you 2 hours to make you'd want tons of people to come visit and comment not just passers-by every few weeks that are only on your lens by accident.

To really get people to your forum you'll need to advertise. But don't worry no money is required!!! I never spend a single penny especially when I know I can do it for free!!!

Contents

What's in the lens...

  1. Advertising techniques
  2. Why traffic is important...
  3. Forums
  4. Blogs
  5. Leave comments!!!
  6. Len's Tags
  7. Specialized Squidoo sites
  8. Youtube
  9. Social Networks
  10. Submit your lens to search engines eg. Google
  11. Ping it!!!
  12. Emails/Squidcast
  13. Tell people
  14. What do you think?

Advertising techniques

There are hundreds of advertising techniques that can be used, some need to be paid and others are free.

I will show you as many free techniques as I can possibly think of. Give them a go and see what happens. Remember they're all free so you may as well.

Why traffic is important...

So why exactly is traffic important. Well firstly you'll get a better lens rank if you get more traffic. If you hardly get any traffic then you'll probably have a very high lens rank rather than being in the top 50. This will also put you higher up on search results.

Star ranking aren't that important in ranks but they do contribute a bit.

Having more traffic will mean you are more likely to have a more active lens. If you have a poll then more people are going to do it. Your lens will be rated more and hopefully will get the 5 stars which I'm sure you deserve.

More traffic also means that you are more likely going to have your lens lensrolled and also have you lens advertised by others. If your lens is good there will be more people who are likely to recommend your lens on the Squidoo forums and all over the internet!!!!

Forums

Forums are places where people with the same interests go so why not go to forum to do with your lens???

Say you have a lens about The Simpsons, a great way to advertise is search on Google "Simpsons forum" then join the forum for free and tell everyone about your lens. This way you're getting people who are actually interested in reading your lens rather than people who are just coming to your lens because they have to.

I use this method all the time and it's great. As new members join they'll see your post about your Simpsons lens and they'll visit it too.

Be sure to edit your forum profile so that your "Signature" has a link to your lens. A signature it what appears at the bottom of every post you make. This helps to advertise your lens when just replying to messages and getting involved in discussions.

It's simple and free, all you have to do is make your lens sound amazing so everyone on the forum clicks on the link to view it.

Blogs

Blogs are set up to everyday to talk about all of your interests. By creating a blog and advertising your lens on there this creates another direct link of the internet to your lens. The more links you have all over the internet the more views your going to get.

Think about it, if you had one link over the entire whole internet your not going to get many clicks because it's extremely unlikely that that one link is going to be seen much. Create a few free blogs advertising your len's. Update it when you make another lens and by doing this you're creating more links to your lens.

Simple free and effective. Here's some sites you can use to make blogs:

1. Blogger

2. Blog.com

3. Blog.co.uk

4. SOSBlog

Leave comments!!!

Another great way of advertising your lens is to leave comments on related lenses.

Say you have a lens about football. You can search in the search box "football" then find a related lens and leave a comment. Obviously make your comments appropriate and take your time to look at the lens and rate it.

Now what will happen is when people go to that lens they will see your comment with your link to another football lens. You've already got your target market because they have come from another football lens. Your lens might even turn out better and the viewer might actually prefer yours.

This is a great way to get discovered. Just made sure you don't go around spamming ever lens. Take your time to read theirs and return the favour by rating it

Len's Tags

When you create make sure you give it as many tags as possibly that are related to your lens.

If your lens is about radio add tags such as: radio, am, fm, broadcasting etc.

Anything you can think of to do with radios add it because you want people to be seeing your lens before anyone else's when they search.

It's simple but so many people actually forget to tag their lens making it nearly impossible to search for!!!

Specialized Squidoo sites

There are three specialized Squidoo sites that I use to promote all my lenses. All the sites are free to join and free to use.

All you do is add your lens to the site. More links to your lens will give you a much better chance in getting better traffic.

Youtube

Making videos to promote your lens on YouTube is a brilliant way to get people to come visit your lenses. Millions of people use YouTube everyday so getting a video on there about your lens is a really good idea.

You don't have to be a computer geek to know how to make a video. Check out my Get your lens on YouTube lens. It will show you how to make simple videos that you can post on YouTube and best of all nothing will cost you a penny!!!

Social Networks

Facebook it, Twitter it, MySpace it, Bebo it, TELL EVERYONE!!!!!

Social networks are becoming more popular than TV itself so this is a perfect way to get your lens known. Members of social networks have tons of friends, I have 140 odd on Facebook, some I don't even know.

By updating your status and letting people know what your up to you can tell everyone what you have been up to!!! Once you've made a new lens update your profile and let people know about it. It's a great and easy way to get people to visit and if they're your friends they might even leave a few nice comments and rate it well.

There's loads of social networks you can join for free so start using them now!!!

Here's a list of Social networks that could be useful: Wikipedia: list of social networking websites

Submit your lens to search engines eg. Google

Submitting your site to search engines means that you could potentially get hundreds of views. Especially if your lens is near the top page. This would be more likely if your lens was unique and covered a niche in the internet.

There are a lot of sites that allow you to submit your lenses for free. For better results I recommend using each one listed below. They are all free too which makes it even better!!!

- Submit Express
- Free Web Submission
- Add Url

Ping it!!!

The idea of a ping is to let indexing sites know you have updated or added new content to your web page (in this case your lens).

Each lens you make gets its own RSS Feed which can be used to inform the sites of when it was updated.

I use www.pingomatic.com which is a free service that updates all the feeds of certain sites. Sites that can be pinged include My Yahoo, Google Blog Search, NewsGator and more.

There are a lot more though which are all free. Here's a small list:

- www.pingoat.com

- www.pingmyblog.com

- www.kping.com

- www.feedshark.brainbliss.com

- www.pingomatic.com

All you need to do is:

1. Add a the title of your lens in this case "Advertising your lens"

2. Add the URL of the lens in this case "http://www.squidoo.com/advertising-your-lens"

3. Add the RSS URL in this case "http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/advertising-your-lens".

To get the RSS URL click on the RSS Feed button which can be found in the "Bookmark and Share" section next to each lens. When you click on it this you can copy and paste the URL of the page and add it to the "RSS URL" section of your selected Ping service.

4. Then select who you want to ping and send

Don't ping unless you have updated your site or the pinging services may blacklist you.

Emails/Squidcast

Email is one of the fastest ways to send information around the world. When you've made a new lens don't hesitate to send an email to all your friends and family telling them about it.

Send a Squidcast to all of your fans and people who have favorited your lens. This lets them know about updates and new lenses!!!

At the end of the day friends and family are the people who are most likely going to recommend your lens to others creating even more traffic.

Tell people

Telling people is the oldest way of advertising in the book. Before there were computers people had to rely on word of mouth to know what was going on. You've already conquered the internet with the techniques above so know it's time to conquer the outside world!!!

Here's how you can get the word around:

1. Tell your friends and family to pass the word round.

2. Make posters and put them around your school and town.

3. Flyers can be given out to people.

What do you think?

Before getting the traffic to your lens make sure its the best is can be. Check out my How to make a 5 star lens lens for help on how to make your lens even better!!!

Thanks for all the kind comments.

  • CWatts May 12, 2012 @ 10:46 am | delete
    I found this lens very helpful. Thank you.
  • angelcho Apr 4, 2012 @ 6:12 pm | delete
    Good lens.
  • betamech11 Feb 14, 2012 @ 9:17 am | delete
    Really good lens! Thanks!
  • timo5150 Dec 22, 2011 @ 9:53 am | delete
    Good advise I will try some of these thanks
  • pixiepot Jun 13, 2011 @ 3:12 pm | delete
    Amazing lens. Obviously much time and effort has been used to create this lens, you have done a great job!
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jamiew23

Hey everyone I'm Jamie
Using Squidoo for ages now but I'm starting a new and am gunna use it more to keep a online diary and keep you up to date with... more »

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