How To Add Amazon Widgets To Your Lens

Once you've signed up and are logged in we can now start to create a widget. You'll find the button on the top right.

You will be asked where you want to add Launchpad. Choose "On my Webpage" for a seamless integration. There will be no additional widget frames around your widget, unless you want to publish a widget for sharing.

Building a widget for your Squidoo lens is really easy as A, B, C! You can ignore most of the options on this page. Just do the following steps:

• A Name your Widget. This is just for your future reference. It will not appear anywhere on the published widget.
  
  
• B What Do You Want To Share?: Add the code you got from your Amazon Associate account.
  
  
• C Click on "SAVE".

Yay! You're well on your way to publishing your very own Amazon widget on your Squidoo lens. Way to go!

When you reach this screen "Congrats..." resist the temptation to grab the code on your right side. It won't work on your lens.

You want to click on the link in the middle on the left side that says: "Publish Your Widget".

You'll land on this page with a lot of shiny apps, which you can safely ignore for now. Just hit the link near the top where it says "Widget Home Page Settings".

Next, you will be teleported to the page for your Widget Home Page Settings. There's nothing you need to do here, except to click on the link which will finally take you to your Widget Home Page:

A new window or tab will open and you're close to the finish line. The Widget Home Page!

For the first time you will see a real live preview of your widget. If it doesn't look as expected go back to square one and create a new widget. Or, if it's something you can change on the Amazon Associates page you can change the code over there. You cannot change the code that is inside your Clearspring widget! At least I haven't found a way to do that. Feel free to correct me.

Assuming it looks good we can now go to the final step - putting it on your lens! For this you must locate and click on the familiar Squid on the right hand sharing menu. If you don't see it try clicking the "All" tab and scroll down. It should be near the bottom left. At this point you should be logged in to your Squidoo account because in the next and final step Clearspring will connect to Squidoo and get your list of lenses.

The look of the sharing menu has changed a bit recently. If you do not see the Squidoo Squid on the sharing menu please click on "All" services and then scroll down the (alphabetical) list until it appears. It is a bit shy but it's really there!

The final step is here! You're almost done! Choose the lens on which you want your widget to appear. This will add a Clearspring module to your lens. You will be able to enter title, subtitle and description as usual - but you won't be able to see or edit the widget code itself.

Your familiar Lens Workshop will now open and you will find your new widget added to the bottom. Here you can edit title, subtitle and description if you want. You still won't be able to see the actual widget code though.