Building Your Squidoo Fan Club

Great lenses are a must for growing your own fan club. If you have mediocre lenses or no lenses at all, there's not going to be much of a fan following.

Some lensmasters always reciprocate when someone joins their fan club. However, not all lensmasters do. They take the word "fan" seriously, and if someone's lenses don't impress them, they aren't likely to become fans.

So what makes a lens good? Mostly good content. Excellent content that's useful or at least entertaining can make up for a lot. But it's also important for your lens to have pictures and a guestbook module. You should also rename your modules instead of sticking with the default "New Guestbook" or "Great Stuff on Amazon" titles, which looks unpolished and turns many people off.

Have you uploaded a personal avatar and edited your profile yet? No one wants to see "This is my bio. I can edit it later!" We want to know who you are.

You don't have to be wordy or reveal any personal information. It can just be a glimpse into your personality, a summary of your Squidoo-related goals, or whatever.

Remember, almost anything you come up with will be better than the default message! Completing your profile and uploading a picture shows other people on Squidoo that you're serious about your lenses and care enough to make a good impression.

Once you have some good lenses under your belt, try to find some lensmasters you admire and join their fan clubs. You'll find that many lensmasters will reciprocate.

While there's nothing wrong with joining someone else's fan club when you don't have some good lenses yet, it can be a potentially wasted opportunity. When I see that someone has joined my fan club, I always make an effort to visit some of their lenses. I'll only become a fan in return if I honestly like what I see.

Leaving comments on other people's lenses gets you noticed. Since lensmasters usually get some kind of alert when someone leaves a comment, signing a guestbook is a good follow-up action after joining a fan club.

Be careful, though: You don't want your messages to sound self-serving. Many lensmasters delete guestbook messages that sound like this: "Nice lens, please visit my lens about shaving poodles." If it looks like you're just using guestbooks as a way to lure people to your lenses, other lensmasters are not going to be pleased with you.

People will become more interested in you if you leave intelligent, thoughtful comments. A quick & dirty "Nice lens, 5 stars" isn't very compelling. Make it sound as if you really did take the time to read the lens and gleaned something from it.

Most of my favorite lensmasters are active on the SquidU forum. They don't all necessarily pop in every day or even every week, but they still have a reputation in the Squidoo community.

If you're active, friendly, and make intelligent contributions, people will eventually start taking an interest in you. That means they're also more likely to join your fan club.

Bonus: You'll have fun and learn some things in the process. The SquidU forum is also a great place to get feedback and tips for becoming a better lensmaster.

I love it when I run across something that gives me great information, especially if it's filled with ideas I can use to become a better lensmaster or a better writer. If I find myself consulting someone's lenses quite a bit, well, that must make me a fan!

If you become a great resource for how-to lenses on, say, cooking, you're probably going to get a lot of people interested in your work. They'll be more likely to become your fans.

Once you have some fans, you'll be ready to send them messages whenever you build a new lens or update an existing one. These messages are called "squidcasts." Here are some tips for squidcasting:

• Always preview your squidcasts. Double-checking your squidcast will help prevent you from sending out messages containing embarrassing typos and errors. Previewing is especially important if you add any HTML to your squidcast message.


• Promote only your best work. If you're like me, you'll occasionally make a lens that isn't the best example of your work. Maybe it still needs more content, maybe it's a subject that not many people would appreciate, or maybe it's strictly a money-making lens. In the end, I'll only announce lenses I'm really proud of.


• Describe your updates. Always mention exactly what you added or changed. Don't force your fans to re-read your entire lens just to figure out what you added.


• Condense your squidcasts. If you created or updated several related lenses, consider sending out one squidcast that announces and links to all these lenses. (You'll need to know some HTML for this.) This way you won't flood your fans with a bunch of new messages at once.


• Don't flood your fans. Sending out a squidcast once every few days is good, but contacting your fans more than once a day is probably a bad idea. At this time (March 2008), fans can only view the last 25 squidcasts they received at most. If you send out a bunch of squidcasts, you'll push other lensmasters' squidcasts off the list before their fans get a chance to read them. This could annoy your fans and give them a reason to quit your fan club.


• Use SquidUtils. It's a good online tool to help you manage your lenses. More to the point, by using SquidUtils, your squidcasts should get listed at the SquidCast Digest. This could give your lenses more exposure.