Blogging for Squidoo Lensmasters

Blogs are a great promotional tool for many reasons.

A good blog can attract lots of attention and traffic to help you get your ideas out to the world and visitors to your lenses.

Blogs are very search engine friendly, offering a quick shortcut to google's first page of search results.

Blogging is fun and easy like Squidoo, you can blog about anything you like.

Links from blogs to your Squidoo lenses can get them indexed by search engines faster.

Links from blogs can give your Squidoo lenses a big SEO advantage.

There is no limit to what you may want to blog about but from a lensmaster perspective it is probably best if your blog compliments your Squidoo lenses rather than competing with them.

I like to build my lenses as references, information sources and shopping hubs and use my blogs to attract attention to these with frequent, timely posts.

Here are some ideas to promote Squidoo lenses with your blog or blogs:

Blog about your latest lenses, don't duplicate all the content, just provide a summary to get attention and send people to your lens to read more. I blogged about this lens on my blog Web2.0DomainName.com. As you can see it's just a teaser that summarizes what his offered.

Blog about news items that relate to any of your lenses. Say a new rocket to Mars has been launched and you happen to have a face on Mars lens, whats the connection? is it a Hoax?

Blog about events in your life that relate to lens topics. For example if it is your kid's birthday this weekend, do you have a great homemade gift lens to blog about?

Blog about cool affiliate products that you can promote for cool cash.

A big part of this SEO and promotion game is accumulating inbound links to your lenses and blogs are perfect for this.

Remember when blogging to always include links back to your Squidoo lenses with descriptive link text. That means using keyword terms like Retro Tshirts in your links instead of generic terms like click here <-suxors.

Links of special interest such as your lensmaster page can also be placed in the Blogroll in the sidebar of your blog for extra exposure. These sidebar links appear with each individual post, that means after 500 blog posts you have 500 more inbound links =) boh!

There are lots of places where you can register for free blogs. If you have time it may be good to go for more then one. Remember the part about Links Links Links?

The most popular blog providers are Blogger and Wordpress but there are others. Even Myspace accounts include a blog.

While much can be gained from using a free blog there are some cautions as well.

As has been recently discussed in the Squidoo Forums many blog providers including Wordpress and Blogger will shut down blogs that they consider overly commercial or promotional of another site.

Some of the things free blog providers watch for are affiliate links or too many links to one domain. This catches Squidoo members who need to link to their many Squidoo lenses or who are trying to monetize blog traffic with affiliate links.

Unfortunately this has resulted in a number of lensmasters loosing their free blogs and all the work they put in to them.

Free blogs may also contain advertisements placed on your page for any number of products you may or may not want to support. Of course you won't be seeing any of that ad revenue.

You can avoid the pitfalls of free blogs by hosting your own blog.

Hosting yourself means you can be free with your blog content including as many links as you want wherever you want.

A self hosted blog also provides many cool extra features not available on the free platforms like ratings widgets, video embedders, social bookmarking and much more in a simple plug-in format.

One of the coolest things about a self hosted blog is you can own your own domain name. Instead of building a blog at myoldblog.blogspot.com you can get a unique name like superwowblog.com that is your own personal piece of the net. Your domain goes where you go, as a blog, ecom site or future empire it is yours to promote and grow.

Custom features can also be added to self hosted blogs in the form of free plug-ins that you can download from around the net. There are hundreds that range from star ratings for your posts to social bookmarks to automatic backups.

Self hosted blogs can also be customized graphically with hundreds of colorful blog templates available for free download.

To host your own blog you will need:

1) a Domain Name
2) a Hosting Plan
3) Blog Software

First register your domain name, it doesn't have to be .com but they are the most popular and widely recognized. Many .com names are already taken so utilizing other extensions like .net .ws or .us can give more flexability.

A domain registration will cost about $10 a year. My registar of choice is GoDaddy Domains because they are well established and dependable. That link should also give you an automatic discount for $6.95 .coms about the best price available. Be careful when buying domains, it can become addictive (for reals!) also don't fall for all the GoDaddy upselling, you dont need any of it, buy your domain and get out!

Second you will need a hosting plan which range from $5 to $99 a month, Wordpress is not resource heavy so the smallest plan possible is usually sufficient. Before signing up make sure you ask your host if it can run the latest version of Wordpress. My host of choice is Dreamhost where I host multiple Wordpress blogs and web sites without a problem, they are also a carbon neutral green host which is cool.

Third you will need blog software, Wordpress is the best and can be downloaded free from their site.

The last step is to install Wordpress and set your domain's DNS to your hosts name servers. These steps vary slightly depending on your host and registrar, many hosts (including Dreamhost) now provide one click Wordpress installs which are considerably helpful. If not Wordpress provides pretty straight forward walkthrough of the installation process.

If this sounds like a lot of work read on for a shortcut =)

Although the process above is not technically advanced it is still somewhat of a hassle for a lensmaster who just wants their own hosted blog.

Most hosting plans also provide much more hosting then is required for a single blog so you pay for resources that aren't being used.

I thought it would be helpful to the Squidoo community to offer hosted Wordpress blogs for just $2.50 a month, that is half the price of the cheapest host I could find (Typepad which doesn't even run Wordpress) and I can set everything up for you.

The GoDaddy link above will get you the cheapest domains available, if it makes your life easier I can also register a name for you. So $30 for a years hosting and $7 for your domain name and you are rocking your own hosted Wordpress blog that comes already set up courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Timewarp.

Blog comes installed with 50 themes and some essential plug ins and if that's not enough you are free to download, customize and install your own.

Post as many links as you want wherever you want.

Shouldn't be hard for your blog to pay for itself and then some with affiliate links, squidoo traffic boosts and even adsense. That's all up to you, our adsense share policy is that it is all yours 100% go for it =)

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These themes available online for free.