When you write a lens you get traffic from a number of sources.

1. The Squidoo community...Via tags, lensrolls, groups etc

2. Links from other websites, newsletters or blogs that you own. Obvious, but have you done all you can with this?

3. Traffic from links on other websites, blogs or newsletters. If you write useful information people who read it may want to share it.

4. Search engines. If you have enough textual content the search engines will index your lens and you will pick up some traffic from them, especially from "long tail" searches.

A few simple procedures will eventually get people to see your lenses, but your progress might be slow.

Here is a way to ramp up the process, based on the ideas contained in Seth's "Flipping the Funnel" ebook, which you can find in the DOWNLOAD THIS STUFF section of General Help (at the bottom of your Squidoo page.

Let's look at how you can use your blog to turn the funnel into a megaphone. You can do the same thing via your website, newsletter, article or forum post, but let's use a blog as an example.

After you have put a link from your blog to your own lens you should consider putting a link in to SOMEONE ELSE'S lens. That's right - give somebody a free plug! Just make sure the lens you are pointing to is relevant to your readers, and that the lens is actually worth reading - don't erode your own credibility.

Now get the megaphone going. Suppose you have a lens on cooking and you find that Katerina has written an excellent lens on Greek Recipes at http://www.squidoo.com/greekcuisine

You decide to mention one of her recipes in your blog, complete with link back to her lens. You, your readers and Katerina all gain out of the process. Katerina may not even notice that you have done her a favour, so send her a message along with a link to the blog post so she knows about it.
See the Sample Message below.

Now Katerina is grateful and wants to pay you back. She could add a link to your lens or blog and this would be OK, but it would just make a closed loop. It would be better to built an open network of links and started a viral effect.

So ask her to PAY IT FORWARD. In other words, let her find SOMEONE ELSE's lens and do the same for them. But hold on, when do YOU get paid back. Well, eventually you will, because Squidoo is a relatively small community and what goes around comes around quite soon. Someone with related interests, and an internet presence outside Squidoo will blog or link to your lens.

Hi Katerina,

My name is Darby Higgs and I have a number of lenses including one on Food Pairing at http://www.squidoo.com/albarino2zinfandel/

I really like your Healthy Greek Recipes lens at http://www.squidoo.com/greekcuisine and I have included a mention and link to it in my blog at http://recipes.albzin.com

I hope this link in may get you some more traffic to your lens, and eventually improve its Google rank.

If you would like to pay me back, can I suggest that you 'pay it forward instead' In other words make a link, preferably from a non-Squidoo source, to someone else's lens. That way all of us in Squidoo will get bigger cake to share. See http://www.squidoo.com/lens-funnel-flipper for more details as to why this is a good strategy.

Cheers

Darby Higgs

Many of the tools in Squidoo are great for building a links and sharing traffic between lensmasters. Joining groups, using tags and lensrolls all help to get your lens in a better lensrank and more recognition and traffic from the Squidoo community. In other words a bigger slice of the cake.

But How About Building a Bigger Cake?

We can do this by building links to our own or other people's lenses from outside Squidoo. You can use a range of techniques to promote your own lens see SquidU for help with this. But building non-squidoo links to other lenses, and encouraging other lensmasters to do the same will give us a bigger cake to share.

1. Find a good lens related to a topic that you cover in some non-Squidoo website, blog, article or newsletter. You can even use this strategy with forum posts.

2. Mention the lens in your blog, along with a link to it. Couch the link in a few lines of text explaining why you think the lens is useful, and why your reader should visit it.

3. Contact the owner of the lens, tell them what you have done and why. You may like to use the Sample message above as a guide. Encourage the lensmaster to pay it forward to keep the chain going. Refer them back to this lens for a full explanation of the strategy.

4. Repeat every few days with a new lens on a slightly different topic. Don't overload your readers.

A Blog is the ideal companion to your squidoo lenses, and in fact, any website should have a blog.

Here is a short email course to get you started with blogging

SquidU Forum discussion based on this lens. - Has it been successful for you? Posting to the squidoo forum, about this topic/lens, or any other topic is a powerful way of spreading your message.
Why?
Because the people who hang out in the forums are the activists; if you have something useful to say they will pick it up and spread it around the squidoo community. Try it.

Link exchanges and link farms are now almost certainly disregarded by search engines in sorting out page rank. What you need are quality links from quality sites.

I have successfully used Value Exchange as a slow but steady method of getting quality inbound links. Value Exchange is one of the modules of the excellent suit of web hosting and business building tools developed by Ken Evoy.

See Value Exchange. If you sign up to Value Exchange you can also get a superinformative ebook "Make Your Links Work" which gives lots of advice, ideas and places to get your lenses blogs and websites well and truly linked.

Remember each link in to your lens or website helps in two ways. Firstly you can get traffic directly, but more importantly you get yourself noticed by search engine spiders and thus they send more targetted traffic to you.