Squidoo Help for Beginners

In order to become a member of the Squidoo community you need to complete the sign up form. All the fields on the form must be completed. The good thing about Squidoo is that you can have multiple accounts as long as you have a unique email addresses for each one.

Take a look at the screenshot and enter the following information:

• Enter your First and Last Names
• Enter your email address and confirm
• Enter your desired username
• Enter your Password and confirm
• Read and Agree to all the terms and conditions regarding the use of Squidoo
• Enter the security keyword
• Press the Continue button

As you can see by looking at the image your account is confirmed by getting to this page.

Now you need to create your first lens.

A lens is just the Squidoo name for a web page that focuses on a particular subject.

Click on the overly large 'CREATE' button that you'll find in the bottom right hand corner.

Top Tip: If your not sure where to start you can use the Squidoo search feature or the Top 100 to see if there's anything that you think you could do a better job on!

The first step in creating your first Squidoo lens is to pick the topic you want your lens to be about.

The thing to remember about this step is that you can change the title once your lens is created, however you'll find in the following steps there are things that you can't change.

For this tutorial I'm going to create a lens about Ant Farms called "5 Top Tips for Starting Your Own Ant Farm". You really can write about anything so I suggest writing about something that you know lots about already or that you are very interested in and don't mind doing some research.

Step 2 is a little more complex and your choice will dictate what modules are included in your initial lens. I'll explain more about modules later, in the meantime lets give you a quick overview of your choices.

• I want to get the word out about 5 Top Tips for Starting Your Own Ant Farm (easiest option)
  
  
• I'm gonna sell 5 Top Tips for Starting Your Own Ant Farm stuff and earn $$, for me or for charity (money maker!)
  
  
• I want to make a list of my favorite things about 5 Top Tips for Starting Your Own Ant Farm (most popular)
  
  
• I just want to do my own thing.
  
  

Step 3 may be the most important of all the steps you have completed so far, so stick with it, you're almost there!

The first thing you'll see is your lens title which is already filled out from step 1, however you can change this now if you wish.

The second box has a space for you to enter a URL which is a means for people to find your page when searching Squidoo or the internet via Google or any other search engine.

Be aware that what you enter as your URL is permanent and cannot be changed. You can include letters, numbers, hyphens and dashes in your URL.

For my Ant Farm Lens I've decided to use my lens title with dashes in-between each word like this "5-Top-Tips-for-Starting-Your-Own-Ant-Farm". Google will see the dashes as spaces and it looks easier to read then "5TopTipsforStartingYourOwnAntFarm"!

All that's left to do after this is to choose the right category. For this lens I have a few choices but I think the Animals and Nature category looks like a good one.

The last option is to choose what type of material will be on your lens, G rated, R Rated (think swear words and racy commercials for Victoria's Secrets!) or X rated!!!

By default your initial tag is the same as your lens name. You can change this if you can think of a better primary tag for you lens or leave it and enter three more in the boxes provided.

If your not sure what a tag is then listen closely. A tag is a way of making your lens findable in search engines like Google and Yahoo and even Squidoo.

For your tags to be effective you need to enter words or phrases which you think people will use to find about about your lens. For example for the Ant Farm lens I think I'll add "Animal Ant Farm" and "Ant Farm Tips".

The good thing about tags is that they can be changed and you can add more tags even once you have finished creating a lens.

All you need to do now is enter the security keyword and press the "Build My Lens" button!

Top Tip: Tags play an important part in getting your lens found. Don't underestimate their importance and try to do some research on which tags you choose. Keep the total number of tags for your lens at around 6, no more.

You get taken straight to your lens once you press the build my lens button and at first this screen can seem a little daunting.

I'm sure there are plenty of Squidoo accounts that have gotten to this stage and immediately given up after seeing all the different buttons and options available, however I'll tell you that it really isn't all that difficult.

The first place to look is to the right where you can make some important changes to your lenses. The first thing to look at are the themes that are available.

Click on the themes box to expand it. Each theme can be previewed by clicking on the same link text next to each theme. You can change this at any time, even after you have published your lens.

Under this you have both bio and photo boxes which you can complete if you wish. Many people believe that having a bio and a picture gives your work more credibility and makes readers more likely to read your content and maybe add you as a favourite!

Top Tip: Once you have finished and published your lens go into your dashboard and edit your bio and avatar picture. Try to be as honest as you can with your bio, however you don't necessarily need to put up a picture of yourself, but at least try to have a picture that's relevant to your topic!

As you can see from the image the introduction module is fairly easy to navigate, however there are some things you need to know.

The first thing you need to complete is the Lens Intro Title which should be fairly short and to the point and the Lens Description which you should try to keep to around four paragraphs!

A little further down you'll see a Browse button which will allow you to search your computer for a picture to upload. The picture needs to be either Jpeg or Gif and try to keep the image size to below 2MB. Also remember to click on the upload button once you have selected your picture.

Back at the top of this window you'll see a Table of Contents tab, click it. In here you'll have a simple radio button that you can change to on or off. I'd suggest turning this on to make your lens easy to navigate for your visitors.

The next tab over is the discovery tool tab. By turning on this option you allow Squidoo to direct visitors from other Squidoo Lenses to your lens via the discovery feature. The great thing about this tab is that once you have other lenses which are related to your original lens you can add them on this tab and drive even more people to your lenses!

Top Tip: When you add pictures you should try to keep them as square as you can, making it too tall or wide could cause your text to look strange.

The text module is very similar to the intro module however it doesn't contain any tabs.

The first thing you need to change is the module title. If you look at this lens you'll see that each module has its own title and sometimes even a subtitle which you'll find in the box next to the module title box. The subtitle box is optional so don't stress if you can't think of one this very second.

Under this you'll find the main text box which is where you can place all your fascinating information regarding your topic of choice. Again its optional to add anything to this box, but then why have a text box!

Finally you can also add a picture the same way you did in the intro module. The great thing you can now do in Squidoo with your pictures is add a label (which is just fancy talk for a name) and you can also make your photo a link to another site, either Squidoo or another site; like a blog.

Top Tip: One of the great things about Squidoo is that you can also include HTML in your text modules. This will allow you to do all sorts of great things and really let your lens stand apart from all the rest! For example the box that you see around this text was done using some simple HTML code, however don't worry about putting any code into your first lens as it will just frustrate you, just know that It can be done!