A Homeschool Mom's Squidoo Tips & Tricks

A mistake I made in my early lensmaking days was making lenses too broad and too long. Learn from me. When you are planning lens topics, think of very focused and specific topics. Think narrow; think niche.

If you can think of a series of lenses to link together, that's even better.
Examples --
Shakespeare lens series
nature study sites series
vocabulary series

So instead of making a gigantic lens about Chinese Holidays, you create five different lenses, one for each specific holiday. You want each lens to be meaty, but you also want each one to be highly specific.

Backlinks demonstrate the quality of your lenses. When other related blogs and websites link to your lenses, that's the best backlink you can get. But you can be proactive in building your online empire as you generate backlinks (and traffic) yourself with these tips.

1. Set up a free account at Sharing Links and add your lenses (and blog posts).

Be sure to tag thoroughly and accurately because each tag page is another link. Look at this screenshot from the Backlink Check at Squidutils You can see that under the domain Sharinglinks, there are ten additional pages linking to one of my lenses.



2. Blog your lenses.

Integrate lens links into your blog posts. Then submit those blog posts to blog carnivals.

3. Write Some Complementary Articles at Wizzley

Wizzley is a publishing platform that is similar to both Hubpages and Squidoo. Besides gaining backlinks for your lenses, you can join the Adsense program there.

Keeping a lens fresh means periodically updating it, editing it, and tweaking it. Updating your lens makes it "fresh" and helps a bit to raise its lensrank.

photo credit

How often should you do this? I say whenever you have something worthwhile to add to your lens!

• Use your feed reader for fresh ideas. When I find a blog entry that's interesting but I don't have time to add an idea or link to a lens, I mark it unread in my feed reader. When I do have time to update lenses, I can look through the feeds that I've marked and easily find some material to touchup a lens. Clickouts are a factor in lensrank, so you want to have lots of relevant links in each lens.


• Subscribe to Google alerts for your particular lens tags. These are daily emails giving you the latest blog posts or news posts that pertain to whatever tag you choose. Again, I have an alert for notebooking and lapbooking. I've found wonderful blog entries, websites, and freebies to link to on my lenses. I also find good ideas through the links in Google alerts. Through Google alerts, you also keep the pulse of what's going on in a particular field, and can make new lenses or add to old ones accordingly.


• Join email groups, forums, and social networking sites that deal with your topics. Not only will you find ideas and links, but you'll also have an audience for your lenses. Especially effective is when someone posts a question that your lens can answer. You'll be thanked for posting the link to your lens. It's not spammy but instead very helpful!


• Every now and then, you'll want to check to see that all your links on a lens are working correctly. You could do it manually, or use an free online tool like W3C Link Checker. It's super easy and keeps your lens fresh and useful to your visitors.

Use Flickr to make your lenses come alive with eye popping photos.

Everyone loves a picture to illustrate a point! Look at this yummy one!

This is not my own photo, but I've used it legitimately with the HTML that Flickr provides and according to the Creative Commons license that the owner has given it. Here are the steps I took to find and use this image.

First, you must make an ADVANCED search.



Then on that page, check the box that says "Only search within Creative Commons -licensed content." Also check "Find content to use commercially."



Once you've selected a photo from the thumbnails you've been given, look for the SHARE THIS link. Under that is GRAB the HTML. That's where you get what you need to insert the photo, already correctly attributed/linked back to the owner. You can even select the SIZE you want! Flickr has made it so easy.



Of course, there is some risk in this strategy. If the owner of the photo deleted it, your pic would disappear. So choose a photo from a user who seems to be a long-time Flickr user. If the photo has many comments, it is also not likely to be deleted by the owner.

Always use the Amazon spotlight module rather than the regular Amazon module. It shows a larger image and is therefore more attractive. Choose just a few select, very superior, and relevant products to feature. Be sure to include personal reviews. I have found that products I can personally recommend and even show photos of have much better conversion rates. Show the reader how great that product is!

TIP FOR CURRCLICK (or other bookstore) AFFILIATES:

If the book is a good one, but it is not available for sale at Amazon, go ahead and use the Amazon spotlight module for the big picture, and link to the ebook at CurrClick right inside the description box. In fact, even if the book is available at Amazon, some people may prefer the convenience of an instant download. You can see how I do this in the screenshot above.

This tip will work for affiliates of other book sites -- Book Depository, CBD, etc.