Reader's Digest Version of Baby Green Squid's Findings

In the beginning I did some of the things blindly, without understanding.

A newcomer must read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe of Squidoo Lens Creation! and Just the Faq page. There's a mine of essential information in there.

I am obsessed about backing up my data. So one of the first things I did was to check how to back up my lenses.

Listen to Giant Squids. They are like your mom: they may nag you a bit with their advice of do this and don't do that (squido and squidonts), but eventually they want you to succeed.

Please read Seth Godin's UUU eBook - this you must do!!! I slowly realized that people write here about what they do best and share so that when other people land here they have the best webpage they could have found anywhere. That's what it's about here and that's what you should be doing.

Seth Godin tells you the three U's you need to take care of for making your page attractive to others. Remember: 'UUU' = Unique, Useful, Updated. And it's not 'You, You, You!'

And I have come up with my own three R's: 1. Read lenses (other than your own), 2. Rate them, 3. Rebuild your lenses often. Now you have 3xU and 3xR and this is what I call "UR Squidoo".

Apparently, even if you don't explicitly publish a lens, the algorithm does it for for you and it's embarrassing to see your skeleton page go online all of a sudden. So don't make a lens until you are sure you want to publish it.

If you have a lens and your heart is really not in it, remove it. Copy the contents into a notepad somewhere.

Be consistent in the use of modules. Don't be too flashy. Don't be gimmicky. Use white space liberally.

Don't take 100% cash. Leave something for charity. Greediness begets only greediness.

You can constantly polish your lenses. And improve them.

Don't put so many ads in your lens that it looks like NASCAR racing. Put relevant ads and put them sparingly. Oh God! I am beginning to sound like a nagging mother too!

Most helpful lenses for newbies I found were the following; read them, explore them.

• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe of Squidoo Lens Creation!


• 50 Awesome Squidoo How-To Lenses From A-Z


• Avoiding the Squidoo Pitfalls


• Squidoo Marketing Strategies: Help To Develop and Market Your Squidoo Lenses

You can learn a lot by reading, searching, posting in the forums of the SquidU University. The AnswerDeck is awesome.

I found out there is a also site called squidutils.com which has tons of advanced features. Explore it. Really cool for advanced stuff.

If you are a newbie like myself, I hope this will encourage you a bit. Did you know that a newbie and a noob or n00b are different? I looked it up in urbandictionary. We are newbies, not noobs. Okay.

You can one day become a Giant Squid, and spend your time playing with those octopus babies in the Octopus's Garden in the Shade !!

Thank you for reading this lens. I appreciate your time. Please kindly leave your feedback and comments below.

I think you are missing out on the real deal by not reading the longer version of this article, Musings of a Baby Green Squid. It will be your time well-spent. For example, I didn't have the space to tell you about the importance of tags, or how I got my motivation; in that lens I tell you those things and more, all for free. Also there is a cool Beatles video in that one which I haven't included here: don't miss out.

Also check out my other lenses including Learning Macro Photography with Butterflies as Subjects.

Thank you.

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