how to create a squidoo lens

New members can start from the Lensmasters Dashboard. There are two buttons you can click to make your new Squidoo lens with. Click either one to start the Squidoo Wizard that will help you make your lens.

Members that are logged on can also see these buttons when they read published lenses.

Now, this step fine tunes what you have entered about your lens. You can

• Lens title: if you think of a better title than the one you started with, you can change it here.
• Set your Lens URL: This is a unique web address for your Squidoo lens. A default is given, but if it is already taken, then you can change it by using other words or changing the hyphens in the name.
• Pick a topic and subtopic for the lens: Squidoo helps with a pop up list of topics that you can choose from
• Open Graph tag: Use the Graph tag tool to help facebook direct traffic to the lens and
• Rate your lens: What is the advantage of only making G-rated lenses? G-rated lenses can be found and read by anyone, whereas R rated lenses are limited only to Squidoo members that have Safe Surfing disabled.

The first tag is automatically generated from page one, but you can add three other tags. The tags on Squidoo are used for internal purposes and you can find out more from these sites: Workshop Add-On for Firefox and Chrome and at squidutils.com.

On this page, you need to:

• Use the first tag automatically generated from step one or change it to another tag
• then enter up to three more tags that will help people find your lens and
• Then enter the security word and click 'Build My Lens'

Once your lens is built, you can see, edit, add or remove from the default modules provided. Namely, the Introduction, the 'New Text Module' and the 'new Amazon' modules.

Click the Edit button at the top right hand corner of any module to change it.

Squidoo is pretty medium for ceating and publishing your lens. If you want to try publishing what you have written so far you can do so now.

Click the orange 'Publish' button at the top of your lens. You will be warned (shown below) that your lens needs more content, but you can see what your lens looks like now and come back to edit it later on.

As you become more experienced, you will spend more time improving your lens at this stage, so you can publish a lens with enough information for search engines and ultimately your readers will need.

After you click the 'Just Publish Anyway' button from the earlier screen, you will see a page confirming your lens has been published.

Click the 'Go see it' link to admire your work.

Optionally, click the 'facebook' button to share your cool lens with your friends on Facebook. It is recommended that you wait till you refine your lens a few times before sharing. Depending on how engaged your friends are with your lens, your friends are likely to provide good comments. If the lens only has an introduction, readers may not get the concept of your lens and either ignore the page or leave negative comments.

Anyway, once again it is up to you.