Squidoo Tools, Resources, and Guides

A Collection of Squidoo Tools, Tips, and Resources

Squidoo Tools, Guides, Lens addons, Linkbuilding tips, and news

This is a collection of free Squidoo tools, guides, and other resources to help you build and market your Squidoo Lenses.

I will also continue to gather various addons that you can add to your Lenses.

Rather than have to go all over the place to find the latest tool or site on Squidoo, I thought I'd put them all here. I'm weeding through all the garbage, so you don't have to (there's a lot of garbage, whew!)

If it's helpful to you too, then that much the better! If you come across other helpful tips or tools that I've missed, please leave a comment and I'll add it.

I

f you do find this helpful, please consider rating it.

Ping Tools
Submit to Search Engines
Submit Your RSS Feeds
Tools Specifically for Squidoo
Traffic and Statistics for Squidoo
Additional Tools
Addons for Your Lenses
Making Money on Squidoo
How-to Guides and Help
Directories that Allow Squidoo Pages
Use Other Social Bookmarking Sites
Squidoo-related Blogs
News and Articles

Official Squidoo News

Straight from the horse's, er Squid's mouth!

Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Ping Tools

Submit your lens to various sites, blog directories, etc

The following ping tools allow you to submit your lenses whenever you have re-published or published for the first time.

They all have a different assortment of sites that they submit to, so none are "perfect". Try one, then another, on different days.

Blog Ping for Squidoo Lenses: A ping tool especially optimised for Squidoo Lenses, and and is for notifying the blogosphere when a lens is updated.
Ping Service: Ping tool from My Page Rank
Pingler.com: Use Pingler.com to Ping your Blogs and Websites in the best way possible! This is a comprehensive ping tool and is super fast.

*You will probably need to enter your info TWICE the first time.
Ping-o-Matic!: Pings to blog services and directories.

Submit to Search Engines

You can submit your Squidoo Lenses to the various search engines to tell them to crawl your Lens.

In addition, it is important to try to get backlinks from other sites (see the Link Building Section below).

Add your URL to Google: Share your page or site with Google. We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the internet.
Add your URL to Yahoo: Add your page to Yahoo!
Add your URL to Live Search (MSN): Add your page to Live Search (MSN).
Register for Stumpedia: Stumpedia.com is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web.

Submit Your RSS Feeds

You can submit your RSS feeds to these services below.

What RSS feeds are available to me?
There are a number of Squidoo-specific RSS feeds available to you. The easiest way is to get your feed via SquidUtil's Lensmaster RSS Feeds

**Example**

For more information take a look at the following:

Understanding RSS by Seth Godin
How to Get Deep Links with RSS Feeds by theFluffanutta
Seven of the Best Uses for RSS Feeds by Lynx92

Don't over do it though! Submit only when you've updated your information.

General RSS Submission Form: Use this form to submit a new RSS feed, or update an existing listing. You need to specify a valid and accessible URL to the RSS file, and select a proper category for it.
Sports RSS Feeds Submission: Submit any RSS feed that relates to sports, sports teams or scores.
Political RSS Feed Submission: Submit any RSS feed that relates to politics, politicians, political issues or elections.
Educational RSS Feed Submission: Submit educational RSS feeds to the educational rss feed directory.
Automotive RSS Feed Submission: Directory displaying RSS feeds from automotive news and forums websites.
FeedAgg.com | Add Feed: Submit to FeedAgg
FeedBees - RSS Feeds Directory: The Most Updated RSS and XML Feeds Directory. You will need to sign up first.

Tools Specifically for Squidoo

Advanced Dashboard for Squidoo Lensmasters: This Advanced Dashboard will show you all of your Lenses on Squidoo, with quick access to stats, edit, and ping.
Blog Ping for Squidoo Lenses: SquidUtil's ping tool especially optimized for Squidoo Lenses, and and is for notifying the blogosphere when a lens is updated.
Health Check for Squidoo Lenses [Beta]: This tool will analyze your Squidoo lens, and let you know which bits you need to change. The checks include: titles, tags, ratings and backlinks.
Squidaholic - View Your Competition and more: With one little click you can find out who's talking about your lens, keep up with the latest scoop on your topic, and get all kinds of nifty ideas for promoting your lenses. Not to mention keep an eye on your competition.
Backlink Checker for Squidoo Lenses: A backlink checker for Squidoo lenses, with the links grouped by domain name. It just keeps getting better. This is an excellent backlink checker!
eBay Product Feeds for Squidoo: This tool will create RSS feeds of eBay products, which you can then place onto your Squidoo Lens. Feeds come in 4 different styles, and can include images, prices and descriptions.
Amazon Product Links for Squidoo: This tool will generate special HTML code for any Amazon product, which you can place on your Squidoo Lens. Links include the product photo, price and buy now button.
Amazon Link Error Report: It will show you any Amazon product links that are no longer valid.
Squidoo Lensmaster RSS Feeds: Get an RSS feed of all of your Lenses on Squidoo - just enter your Lensmaster name. Feeds are available for lenses and/or groups, and include descriptions, categories and dates.
Table Generator for Squidoo Lenses: Table Generator for Squidoo Lenses
This tool will create a table in HTML code that is compatible with your Squidoo Lens.
Squidoo Enhanced - Addon for Firefox: To use this addon, you will need to install the Greasemonkey plugin, and then install this script. Very nice addon!

Traffic and Statistics for Squidoo

Traffic, reports, and demographics information to help you understand the traffic to your lenses.

Statcounter and Site Meter are the ONLY real-time traffic data that you can get for your lenses, since Squidoo is now updating only once per day.

Squidaholic: With one little click you can find out who's talking about your lens, keep up with the latest scoop on your topic, and get all kinds of nifty ideas for promoting your lenses. Not to mention keep an eye on your competition.
StatCounter for your Lens: A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats.
Site Meter for your Lens: A fast, free Web counter and statistics tracker that features custom counters styles. Site Meter creates dynamic 3D charts showing visitors, page views, country maps, visit durations and much more!

Click here for a review by theFluffanutta of Site Meter and StatCounter, with respect to Squidoo Lensmasters.
Web Analytics 2.0 | Clicky: It appears to track and provide a great amount of information compared to the other tracking and statistics tools. You will need to add the following non-javascript widget

Click here for a review of Clicky, with respect to Squidoo Lensmasters.
Google Trends for Squidoo: Google Trends Report for Squidoo
Quantcast Report for Squidoo: Referenced by Gil about tracking Squidoo stats, it is available for us to see too. You have free access to some fascinating info about the visitors and traffic statistics for Squidoo.

Additional Tools

All of these tools can be used to help you with your Lenses (or any site for that matter).

Advanced Backlink Checker: An advanced Backlink Checker that checks PR, Anchor Text, Anchor Type, NoFollow and the number of other links on the page your link is on!

Find out what sites are pointing to your pages. This is an important part of linkbuilding.

*This is probably one of the best backlink checkers in existence.
StatCounter Free Web tracker: A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats.

This is helpful for those of use that want to see daily traffic differences, which is not yet available on Squidoo.

* what keywords visitors use to find your site
* your most popular pages
* links used to reach your site
* what countries your visitors come from
* how visitors navigate through your site
Firefox Squidoo Plugin (official): You get:
a) Squidoo search in your Firefox toolbar
b) Shortcuts to your lenses, Groups, to SquidU, and even to see Lens of the Day
a) A powerful bookmarklet button for quick lensbuilding on the go.

Download Firefox
Firefox Squidoo Plugin - Squidoo DE: A new version has been released that restores compatibility

If you have difficulty getting the addon from the Mozilla Firefox website, you can download it from here.

Squidoo Dashboard Extension. This is an excellent plugin!

Also, needs to have Firefox...so, download Firefox

Addons for Your Lenses

All free

Want to add content that isn't readily available via Squidoo? These are the latest free addons that I've found.

Squidoo : Buttons & Banners: The official Squidoo buttons and banners for your lens!
Add a Google PageRank Button: Add a Google PageRank button, if you are interested.

They have several to select from, including the following and
100% Free Counters for your Squidoo Lens: Get free counters for your Lens or profile. It can be very helpful if you want or need others to see how many visitors you have had so far.

free counter
Create A Free Hit Counter - Tiny Counter: Free hit counter with many fun and professional styles to choose from. Our free web counters count hits and unique visitors. No annoying ads. Totally ad-free.
Google Spider Last Visit: It shows the last time the Google spider (Googlebot) crawled this page.
It will look like the following:
Yahoo Spider Last Visit: It shows the last time the Yahoo! spider crawled this page.

It will look like the following:

You need to use http://www.squidoo.com
MSN Spider Last Visit: It shows the last time the MSN! spider crawled this page.

It will look like the following:
Table Generator for Squidoo Lenses: Table Generator for Squidoo Lenses
This tool will create a table in HTML code that is compatible with your Squidoo Lens.
1. Select data format:
Comma
Semi-colon
Space or
Tab delimited
HTML code block
Previously generated HTML code (not )
2. Paste in your data
Free Content - Dictionary: Free content, such as Word of the Day, definitions, and This Day in History.
FeedBurner - Headline Animator Overview and FAQ: Headline Animator is an easy way to promote your latest blog, podcast or RSS feed-powered content.
Christmas Countdowns: 50 Christmas countdown banners for you to use on your homepages or in your email signatures.
ClustrMaps: Do you know your audience? You will with ClustrMaps! Visitors don't need to click on anything: just viewing your page is sufficient. We provide (free) the HTML that gives you a tiny map
ZeeMaps - make your own map: Use ZeeMaps to create a map, and publish it digitally on your website, or in print in your brochure, magazine, newsletter, or invitations. For example, create a map of places you have visited, your customers, friends, or relatives.
Visitor Maps: This is mainly a site about MySpace addons, but you can use the map, which is pretty nice.

It will break it down by number of visitors from particular areas from around the world. Very nice!
BuddyMapping: Create your own Maps!: This is really cool! Add a map to your Lens to show visitors location, if they add themselves to it. Your visitors can create markers on the map showing where they live. They can leave comments and even attach pictures.

Buddy Maps appears to be having problems - use at your own risk!

*See my example
Free users online counter: Free Users Online Counter - No registration Required!

Get a free backlink to each page in which you have this counter. Just add the html code to the page somewhere.

It will look like the following:

Making Money on Squidoo

Read this post from PotPieGirl about how Squidoo pays. It's inspiring!

Check out The Squidoo Economy (or Squidconomy!) - It is a Lens showing the different payout tiers for Squidoo. Very informative!

Here's another great lens on Squidoo Payday.

According to Gil, the payouts are now based on average rank for the month. Great news!

The Tiers:

Tier1: $10.00+ range - Below a lensrank of approximately 2,000
Tier2: $1-2 range - LR Between 2,000 and 10,000 (Approx.)
Tier3: $.08 - LR Between 10,000 and 60,000 (Approx.)
*There may not be any fixed upper end to Tier3. It may be determined each pay period, so may fluctuate around 60,000.

The official Squidoo FAQ on Payment

Amazon

SquidUtil's Amazon Feed Generator - Very handy tool built by our own thefluffanutta!

Amazon Broken Link Checker - Check to see if your Amazon links have been discontinued. It checks all of your lenses.

Firefox Browser Amazon Addon - Easily add Amazon html code or links. It references your Amazon Associates ID. Use Firefox to use this addon.

Ebay

Ebay Feed Generator (from Squid Utils)

Ebay Feed Generator (trial)

Instructions for the Ebay Feed Generator

Squidoo Buy/Sell Lenses

Lens Author

Squidoo Marketplace

Sell My Lens - Buy and Sell Squidoo Lenses

Flip That Lens On Squidoo For Pure Profit!

Squidoo Buy/Sell Lens Creation Services

Custom Lenses By Noadi

Build My Lens By Lewis Smile

Digital Point - Services Section

How-to Guides and Help

Places to go for help with Squidoo

I have sorted the How-to Guides below in order of difficulty of understanding (In my opinion).

The Lensmaster Lounge: If you want to talk with others from Squidoo or have questions, this is the official place to go.

You can search by going here - Search the Forum
Squidoo : Squidbadges: Badges that you can earn for your lenses. Basically, marks of excellence and celebrity on Squidoo.
Squidoo Basics: This lens provides information about basic Squidoo features and answers some of the most common questions people have when starting out with Squidoo. This includes a simple procedure for backing up.
Common Newbie Squidoo Mistakes: Making a Squidoo lens is easy. Making a good Squidoo lens, well, that's another story. A lot of Squidoo newbies ask veterans to critique their lenses, and most of these lenses are not nearly as good as they could be.
How to backup your lens: To avoid future headache, once you have created your lens and are happy with the content, I recommend you take a few extra minutes to back it up on your computer hard drive.
Types of Squidoo Lenses: If you are new to Squidoo, or have only been creating the 'normal' lenses, you might not know yet that Squidoo actually has several breeds of them. These usually have a different layout and look, and choosing the right type should help you get more visitors.
The Best Keywords for Your Lenses: This will help you come up with new lens topics and focus on optimization.

Using trend reports and keyword suggestion tools to find what people are looking for via the search engines, you can then focus your website content, advertising, and affiliate links to improve your conversion.

Utilizing the keywords in your Title, Intro, and URL, in particular, you can greatly improve your likelihood of being found by search engine users.
The Secrets of Squidoo: Like a drop of rain that has joined a wandering river, we have been swept away by Squidoo, haven't we?Do you know where you are going, or how you are going to get there?Well let's face it Lensmasters, we have so much to learn. When you created you first lens, if you were like me you probably thought
HTML Tips for Color: Color can be applied via HTML tags to fonts, borders and backgrounds.squidoo.com/basichtml and squidoo.com/advancedhtml show how to implement these colors.This lens however isn't going to show how the code is applied, but is a repository for the lists of colors in both the name and the hexadecimal.
Basic HTML for Squidoo: You can use basic HTML in a few of the lens modules. Mostly used to create hyperlinks (they are the live links to other sites). Though there are also other uses for HTML. If you find yourself in need of quick tutorial on how to do it, here it is!
Advanced HTML for Squidoo: The techniques shown here aren't much more advanced then what's in the Basic HTML tutorial. The code being used isn't any more special. But the results and presentation can appear to be more sophisticated. Hence it being the Advanced HTML tutorial.
Super Advanced HTML Tips and Tricks to use on Squidoo: Additional html tips to build on the above ones.
Free Images and How to Use Them: A large collection of free sources for images. Includes many specialty image resources.

Also detailed, step by step guides on how to add, manipulate, and enhance your images on your lenses.
My Favourite CSS Tricks for Lenses: The basic tools provided by Squidoo will do pretty much everything you need to get your content out to your audience. But sometimes you want to format it a little differently, and this is where inline CSS comes into play.
Create Stunning CSS Backgrounds with Images: Here I'm going to show you how to spice up your lenses and pages and create beautiful backgrounds using CSS (otherwise known as HTML style).
Advanced CSS: Layout Tricks and Lab Experiments: Columns! Images! Colored boxes! This lens is my CSS sandbox, where I'm testing fancy layout tricks to make Squidoo lenses look great. As I figure out new CSS techniques, I'll share them with you, so you can use them on your lenses!
Getting More Out Of Squidcasts: Great advice about sending Squidcasts.

Link Building

From here down

Directories that Allow Squidoo Pages

This is a listing of directories (places to list your Squidoo Lenses with links pointing to them). As I find more I'll add them.

The better ones are toward the top.

Lensroll Directory: Social networking for Squidoo lens masters to share relevant content. Build links, increase traffic, make money for yourself. This is a 50/50
Adsense Revenue Sharing site.
Squidoo Directory - SquidUtils: Directory of the best lenses on Squidoo, organized by topic and primary tag.
Lens Master World: A directory of any squidoo lens, mainly so you can get some good link love and seo benefit from a relevant link.
Squoogle Article Link Directory: Lensmasters, Hub Authors, Content Producers, et al, are welcome to submit and categorize their best articles .
The Isle of Squid: The Isle of Squid is a Directory of the Best lenses on Squidoo.
Squidom: A directory of Squidoo lenses.
Squiddit: Register and list your favorite lenses.
Squid Point / Published Lenses: SquidPoint is a place for Squidoo users to let other people vote on their Lenses.
Squidpedia - The World of Squidoo: The home of SquidPedia, a Hand Reviewed Squidoo Lens Directory. Brought to you by Loyalis!

Squidpedia is a Directory of some of the Best Squidoo Lenses on the web. Submission for review to Squidpedia is 100% Free.

If you choose, you may also upgrade your listing to push it to the top of your category. This is done by using points.

Points can be bought through Paypal for $1 each or can be earned through various special opportunities offered by the Squidpedia staff!
Squidirectory: SquiDirectory Squidoo Directory Listings.
Squidoo Lenses - Lowsterslinks Link Directory.: Squidoo Lenses category of the Lowsterslinks Link Directory.
Open Directory - DMOZ: These are the few Squidoo pages that have made it onto the DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It is the most revered free directory you can be listed on. It is also very hard to get a listing. Good luck!
Squidlink.com: Accepts some Squidoo Lenses. It is meant for all websites and is human-edited.
The Squidirectory a Squidoo Directory - squidirectory: The best lenses on Squidoo directory! An online directory of selected Squidoo Lenses hand picked links to the best of the best of Squidoo! From Arts and Literature to gift ideas and shopping and everything in between Squidoo has it all!
Asia URL / Published News: Asia URL is Asia social Network portal. You can add your Squidoo lenses here. It is the same type of directory as Lensroll.
Free No Reciprocal Web Directory: Human edited web directory. Get your site listed free with no reciprocal required.

There are a few categories at my directory to submit squidoo lenses.
Categories:
Internet/Squidoo
Shopping/Squidoo
Kids & Teens/Squidoo
Squidoo - Free Submit Directory: This is the link directory where you can submit the URL to your homepage. There is a section for Squidoo lenses.
Tower Promote: A directory for Squidoo and Hubpages.

Use Other Social Bookmarking Sites

DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites

You can mention your Squidoo pages in the following social bookmarking sites. The search engines will follow the links, increasing your chance of being found by people searching for your topic.

PR = PageRank (the Google measurement) - A higher number is better.

Slashdot PR9

Furl PR7

Bibsonomy PR7

Spurl PR6

Jumptags PR6

Searchles PR6

Plime PR5

BlogHop PR5

MyLinkVault PR5

Google Knol PR5

Qassia PR5

Web2List PR5

A1 Webmarks PR5

ClipClip PR5

Diigo PR5

Listible PR5

MyVmarks PR5

Complore PR4

OnMyList PR4

Kapely PR3

info4it PR3

MyPIP PR3

SyncOne PR3

Yattle PR3

Faves PR0

UPCHUCKr PR0

TagFoot PR0

Twitter PR0

Tags I Like PR0

Link Building

From here up

Squidoo-related Blogs

These are blogs about Squidoo or by Popular Squidooists

If you have a Squidoo-related blog, you can list it on Squidoosphere too!

SquidBlog: Straight from Squidoo themselves!
Seth's Blog: Seth Godin's riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread. He's the person that created Squidoo back in 2005!
SquidooCool.com: The blog to help you be an expert Lensmaster!
Captain Squid: Free Squidoo Tips and Tricks from the best Squidoo Blog around... and Pirates
PotPieGirl.com: PotPieGirl will help you make your first dollar online...and many more!
I Squidoo, Do You?: Sharing my squidiction with the masses, throwing in some how to Squidoo tips along the way.
Squidoo Web Companions: Websites and Blogs with Companion Squidoo Lenses
Squidoography: Tips and tricks, my lens updates, interesting news, payouts, and everything else Squidoo related.
Reviewer of Sites: A mixture of SEO, marketing, social networking and other commentary, tips, and general curiosities. Plenty of good info on Squidoo too, by yours truly.

News and Articles

The Good

SquidVids for Custom Channels on Squidoo - The SquidVid feature
Quitters Can Win: Avoiding the Pitfalls of 'The Dip' - Article with quite a bit about Seth Godin

The Bad (or just not so good)

Yahoo Loves Squidoo : Search Spam Love Affair April 1st, 2008

The Ugly

Google Squishing Squidoo Over Spam? - An opinion that Google may be limiting the value of Squidoo's links across the domain.

If you have any suggestions or comments please let me know

And please add Squidoo Tools and Resources to your Squidoo favorites by clicking here. If you find the lens helpful, please think about rating it too. :)

Interested in supplementing more of your income? Look at this huge list of revenue sharing sites.