How to Create a Great Squidoo Lens

Making Giant Squid is a great accomplishment. 50 amazing, interesting, thought provoking, well-illustrated, and useful lenses will get you noticed, but there are some small things that might deter you from making the cut. What are these tiny things that you should take care of on all of your lenses? We'll list some them out here...

Uploading a picture is easy, and a very important step in having your lenses get noticed. Using the default Squid picture is a bad idea. You want to build a following here on Squidoo and create an online presence, so your bio picture will be your symbol...and be something they'd like to associate with interesting lenses, websites, blogs, etc.

Occasionally you might come across a lens where the lensmaster has decided to put a link or banner every two sentences to their own website, or for an affiliate product. This isn't very effective, exciting, or useful, and is largely considered to be spamming. The efforts of the lensmasters will either go unnoticed and the lens will sink to the bottom of Squidoo, or the lens might even get banned. It's okay to promote your own business or cause, but do in a way that is interesting for readers. What would you consider interesting?

Interesting can be visual, it can be something that hasn't been done before, it can be easy to read bulleted tips, it can be a huge resource of information. But chances are, if it isn't interesting, it will be ignored. So make it interesting, and sprinkle your self promotion through your lenses, don't overwhelm us. We'll see the link.

There are hundreds if not thousands of lenses for Clickbank products here on Squidoo for the exact same ebooks. For instance, the convert your car to run on water is a good example. The automotives category is overrun with these lenses on the exact same topic. Before you decide to write a lens, check and see if the topic has been written about using Squidoo's search box. If it has been written about again and again, maybe you might want to try something else. If it's been done, but not very well, give it a try. If it's never been done, perfect! You've found a good lens topic.

If you've already published a lens and just found out that there's another out there on the same exact topic, add more content to yours to make it better, more unique and great! You can always improve upon things.

And this is a huge lightlulb to represent a good idea >>>
and it's probably been before, so that's a bad example...woops!

Squidoo is a very social community. Squidoo thrives off of lensmasters visiting the forums, commenting on guestbooks, taking part in duels, voting on link plexos, taking polls, favoriting lenses, lensrolling and rating lenses. Visiting the forums (that's SquidU) is a great place to learn more about making lenses, to see what the community is up to, and get some critique for your lenses. The "critique me" forum is one of the most valuable places to head to that often times is ignored. There's plenty of lensmasters willing to take a look at your lens and tell you what looks great and what can be improved upon. Before you go there, maybe you might want to read this lens on SquidU forum help.

Some Giant Squids do just fine with no interaction at all with the Squidoo community, but it never hurts to get out there and mingle with other lensmasters! But these lensmasters aren't usually all about self promotion, they've still made great lenses worthy of Giant Squid status (and that's what is most important!).