How To Promote Your Lens: Website Promotion for Squidoo Lensmasters

Build Your Lens Right
~Make Sure that Search Engines Can See Your Lens.
~Tell the Search Engines What Your Page is About.
~Let Search Engines Know What Is Important. page by page


Promote Your Lens on Squidoo
~Use the Tag Tool that Squidoo Provides.
~Get Involved with Other Lensmasters with similar lens topics.
~Get Social. Help and Be Helped!
~Mention your lens on other lenses you've built!


Promote Your Lens on the Internet
~Join Yahoo Groups and Post.
~Get Active on Yahoo Answers
~Blog and respond to blog posts.
~Do You Send e-mail? Use a Signature Line which Includes Your URL
~Invite Your Readers to Tell Their Friends!
~Invite Your Readers to Bookmark and Come Back!
~Ask the Little Blue Bird for Help. Twitter!

Promote Your Lens in the Real World
~Hand Out Business Cards.
~Shirts are Nice.
~Bumper Stickers.
~Talk About Your Lens. Get Others to Do So. Word of Mouth is Important

Especially in real-world promotion, don't forget that you can use general conversations about Squidoo to invite people to visit your pages. Statements like, "I've been doing a lot of work with Squidoo recently," will frequently draw a question about what Squidoo is. That is a perfect opening for you to mention specific lenses.

The vast majority of the people who are going to see your Squidoo Lens are already on the Intenet. They purposefully went to Squidoo and sought you out...or searched Squidoo for your topic of interest...or maybe they found you on a search engine. There are dozens of ways to get yourself, your lens, your products, and your ideas promoted on the Internet. And once you have produced quality content, promotion is where you need to focus the majority of your effort.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that you build your lens right. That means you should start thinking about promotion of your lens, your products, and your ideas BEFORE YOU TYPE THE FIRST WORD OF YOUR LENS!

Most Online Promotion revolves around being found and ranked by the major search engines. And that means making sure that what you are writing is what people are actually searching for. You need to write your lens in a way that search engines will understand what the lens is about and will rank your lens high in their search results. And That Means Properly Selecting Your Keywords!

A great deal of Lens Promotion consists of good building practices. The first area I would like to address is "keywords." Keywords are those words that Google, or any search engine uses to find your page and classify it.

The first thing you can do to make sure that you are being found is to use the tags that Squidoo provides. You can list up to 40 tags which are relevant to your page. Don't list tags that have nothing to do with your page even though they may be of interest to the general population. They will be seen as irrelevant or possibly even spammy by search engines.

For example, I'm using the name Harry Potter in this paragraph. The whole Harry Potter phenomenon is very popular. But even though the words Harry Potter appear on the page, it would not be appropriate for me to list "Harry Potter" as one of my tags.

Module Titles are Important.
Another type of tag that Search Engines consider important are "header tags." These are tags that let the search engines know that something is considered important. What is important to you is that those headers include your keywords. Squidoo marks the titles of modules as headers, so the search engines look for words that would be important in the context of your subject in the Module Titles and Subtitles. So you have a decision to make. Write the page for the benefit of the reader and make the module titles reader-friendly, or make them search engine friendly.

So, what should your titles consist of? Keywords!

Part of choosing good keywords is just using good common sense. Choose words that are important to your subject and write around those words. In fact, include the keywords in the body of your lens whenever you can do so while still writing naturally. But be sure that it really makes sense to include the keyword where you put it. We all remember Republican Presidential Candidate Bob Dole who evidently wanted to make sure his name got out to the public and referred to himself repeatedly in the third person. It seemed that the word, "I" was lost to his vocabulary. And he didn't do it once or twice, it was prevalent in his speeches, his answers to questions, in everything he did.

"How do you feel today, Senator?"

"Bob Dole feels fine. Well, thanks for asking Bob Dole about Bob Dole. Bob Dole is going to get into Bob Dole's campaign bus now so Bob Dole can go to Bob Dole's next speech. Thanks for talking to Bob Dole, with Bob Dole and about Bob Dole today."

It wasn't quite that bad, but it was definitely annoying.

Everybody laughed at first, but then people began to notice it ... and not in a good way. By late in the campaign it was being mocked.

There are several tools that will help you find good keywords for your page. The first tool I will mention is actually a tool that Google provides to help people who advertise with their AdWords program. The AdWords program allows you to buy advertisements on results pages for Google searches that are customized to those results. So, if a Google user searches for "chicken noodle soup," Google will place ads on that results page for companies who want to promote pages referring to Chicken Noodle Soup. It's important to choose your words carefully so that if you want to feed your family chicken noodle soup you don't see ads about chicken feed!
Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you will be able to enter search terms and see how many searches are being performed for those terms. Choose words that are relevant to your subject and include them in your tags.

A similar tool is the Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool. While this does not give you the number of searches for the keywords, it does let you see which keywords are generating searches. It lists the top 100 words for a specified term.

The Keyword Density Analyzer Tool analyzer also provides an important service. Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. So the more often you use a word on a page the higher the keyword density percentage will be for that term. Ideally you would like the keyword density of the term you are optimizing for be between two and four percent.

Use the first two tools to decide how to write your page, and the third tool to see how well you are doing placing your keywords into the body of the page.

Until recently, my advice to get a Flickr account dealt primarily with being able to add images to your lens in a way that would let you label the image with an "alt" tag. An "alt" tag is what search engines see when they look at your website. If you have a picture of a pumpkin on the page, chances are good that the search engine will have no idea what biggourd.jpg (or whatever the name you've given your picture) is. The "alt" tag allows you to put a description of the picture right there onto the page. The bonus is that if you have a visitor who has a slow connection what is written in your alt tag shows up on his screen with some browsers. If you put your cursor over an image with an alt tag, the description pops right up on the screen. For that reason, it is a good idea to place an alt tag with your picture.

Using Squidoo's default picture placement, you have no opportunity to place an alt tag in the URL. Google will have no idea what that picture of a pretty sunset, or a cute picture of a ktten playing with a ball of spaghetti is. You will use the opportunity for the picture to help you in search engine rankings. But including the description including one or more of your keywords in an alt tag when you place your own image onto the lens gives you the chance to lure a visitor with your pictorial prowess!

Recently Squidoo has done lensmasters the tremendous favor of allowing us to "label" an image when we upload it. This is actually allowing us to insert an "alt" tag. So when you see this come up in the box...TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO LABEL YOUR IMAGE.

But using a Flickr account is still important in that it allows you to place an image anywhere in the module that you want it to be.

To insert a picture into a text box follow this procedure. Upload your image to Flickr. Determine what your uploaded picture's URL is. When you place the image into the text box on your Squidoo lens, use this format.
< img src="http://your image's web address" width="the number of pixels wide" height="the number of pixels high" alt="several words describing your picture for the search engine" > (Be sure to remove the space before the img and after the URL")

One of the most important things that you can do to promote a Squidoo lens, a blog, or even a website is to make sure that people can find it when they search for your subject on search engines. The first thing you need to do is make sure that the search engines are aware of you. You can't show up on the first page of Google's search results if you don't show up on Google at all!

To check to see whether your website or lens is listed on Google, you can do a simple search. Go to Google's home page. In the search box type the word "site" with a colon, then your website's URL. For example, site:www.myurl.com

If you don't show up, all is not yet lost. Go to Add Your URL to Google . This is the page that you can use to enter the information Google needs to know about you to send their "spider" your way. Does it guarantee that Google will actually index your page? Bluntly, it does not. But if Google doesn't know you are there in the first place, you have no chance whatsoever of showing up in search results. It's quick. It's easy. It's free.

Once your lens has been noticed by the search engines you want to make sure that they realize how much work you are doing on it, especially if you are updating the lens on a regular basis. Regularly updated lenses are visited more often by the search engines, and will usually show up ranked much higher on the results pages. One of the best ways to make sure that the search engines are aware of all your hard work is to "Ping" the lens. This is just a shout-out to the search engine that, "There's something new and interesting here!" And you'd be amazed how many search engines there are out there. Manually pinging all of them would take you a very long time, so I recommend using a pinging service. Here are two sites that will ping search engines for you FOR FREE. Use them every time you do a major update your lens. If you are only doing minor updates on a regular basis it will probably be more effective to ping once a month or so.

Ping your lens with http://squidutils.com/ping-lens.php. This is a GREAT uitility that is optimized for Squidoo lenses. Extremely useful and absolutely simple to use. This one's a no-brainer!

Ping your lens and your blog with www.pingler.com. This is a great service for lenses as well as for blogs. Very easy and quick to use, this is also a great key to your success as a lensmaster.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most important things that you can do is monitor what is being said about you. Several steps that I would recommend taking are:

* Make sure you are indexed by searching Google for "site:(insert your URL here)" (Be sure to include the colon, and leave out the parentheses and quotation marks.)

* Regularly search the major search engines for yourself and your site by name.

* Regularly just search for yourself and your lens by name on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and any other search engine you consider important.

* Arrange to be notified when Google becomes aware of something written about you by subscribing to Google alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts.

Some people say that any publicity is good publicity. Don't believe it. If you find inaccurate or wrong information being published about you it is in your best interest to have it corrected!

Search engines of all kinds like to list pages that have shown that they are relevant, and there is no better way to prove relevance than to have other people link to you . . . or more precisely to have other pages link to your pages. The more links coming into your page, the more important your page is perceived to be.
There are several ways to get links to your pages.
1. Ask other people to link to you. Enticing others to link to your website is important. Actively seeking people to link to your pages is one of the best things you can do to raise your ranking in search engines. Trading links with relevant websites is another way to do this. (Just make sure that the website that is linking to you is truly relevant.)
2. Link to your own pages.If you run a website on a relevant topic...link to yourself. Some experts have indicated that Google checks ownership of the websites which link to one another, so this is something to take into account, not linking willy-nilly, but making sure that links are relevant.
3. Be active on forums about your topic . . . and include a link to your page in your signature line. This can be an extremely effective way to gain visitors (readers are already interested in your topic, otherwise they wouldn't be there) and links (search engines see some forums too!).
4. Link to Other Lenses . . . Even If They're Not Yours. Squidoo is a community. Be active in the community. Be helpful in the community. Help others promote their lenses and they will probably help promote yours. Even if they don't, good things happen to people who do good. Don't worry about it.

I've been fairly pleased with the results I've seen from this software package for websites, though not nearly as impressed for Squidoo lenses. (The software checks the entire Squidoo domain rather than my specific lenses.) I have seen rather substantial improvements in my rankings in searches on Google when I have followed the advice the program offers.

And the great thing here is that they offer the software in a "crippled" version for free. It won't do everything the full program will, but the results I've had improving my rankings for several important keywords for my own website has made the time I spent with the free version very worthwhile.

I've heard the question...I've asked the question...and you have, too. One of the best ways to get somebody to remember you, your business and your products is your business card. Hand them out everyplace you go! If you go to a restaurant, leave one with the tip. Stopping by the bank? Leave one with the teller. My barber shop has a place for customers to leave business cards.

You Don't Have a Card?

Click the Picture.

When people are searching for new information, for innovative ideas, for time-sensitive information, or even for effective products and services they are likely to use a search engine like Google. And if they are tuly tech-savvy they will probably look at the blogosphere.
The blog (short for "web log") is the medium by which everyone from cutting edge tech-heads, to innovative marketers, to politicos promoting the next best chance for America, to peole just like you and me can let the world know what they are thinking. Most major search engines have the option of searching specifically through blogs for a subject.

Yahoo provides a service in which subscribers who have a question can throw it out to the world and see what folks have to say. Questions range from the simple and mundane to the most technical you can imagine.

If you go to Yahoo Answers (Go Ahead and Click the Link to See Some of the Questions Being Asked Right Now!) you will have the opportunity to either post questions you have or, more importantly to this discussion, ANSWER QUESTIONS OTHER PEOPLE HAVE IN YOUR SUBJECT AREA.

Why is this important to you? If you choose your questions to answer in your field of expertise and insert a link to your lens on that subject your link is almost certain to be visited by several people. The person who asked the question will most certainly visit. Others who are thinking about answering the question will probably also visit your lens. Finally, questions and their answers are frequently archived, so people who have similar questions in the future may see your answer and visit your lens.

The visitors who come through Yahoo Answers are typically high quality visitors, who may well click on links on your lens. They've already demonstrated more than a passing interest in your subject. If you've written the lens well, you may well pick up another click or two. If nothing else, this will help the lensrank of your page.

Webmasters across the Internet are starved for content. If you can put together an article of between 400 and 750 words and post it to a free content provider it just may get picked up by a website or two and get read by dozens...or hundreds...or thousands of people that you would never have attracted to you page. What's the benefit there? You can include a link to your page in the article and in the author's biography box! People who read your article can click the link, and there's one more visitor who can read your thoughts, and maybe buy your product or service.

Recognize the Fact that A Happy Customer is the Best Advertisement
Get Active in a Community: Almost every successful product or service has a community of people who become excited about it and enthusiastically promote it. To promote your lens you should identify or create a group of people who will enthusiastically accept your product. . Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities is a key to achieving success..
Identify Influential Individuals A key to Effective Marketing is Identifying Key Communities and Ppinion Leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others. These are the people we need to target directly or indirectly as people who need to know about our efforts.
Go Viral A Key to Effective Marketing is : Creating Entertaining, Informative, Memorable Messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.
b> Engaging them in open, unfiltered conversation Promptly and honestly responding to their concerns Valuing customer opinion, whether it is positive, negative, or neutral
* Focusing on customer satisfaction
* Improving product quality and usability
* Responding to concerns and criticism
* Opening a dialog and listening to people
* Earning customer loyalty

An elevator speech is a really short presentation or description of what you do with some sort of hook. The object is to get somebody to either visit your page or to say, "Tell me more!" Short. To the Point! Have a Hook at the End! And all in about the time you would spend on an elevator.

"I'm a writer who builds Internet pages about small business and fundraising opportunities. The goal is to get your information out in front of more people so that you can make more sales, get more donations, expand your enterprise at little or no cost to your business.

"That's what we all want, isn't it?

"What kind of Internet promotion are you using?"

And be quiet.

There is no high pressure. There is the invitation to talk more out there. And if you get brushed off, you can simply say, "Have a great day. I hope things work out well for you," and go on from there.