The Tools Mentor

Tags are important for helping your lens get found. Choose them carefully. You will want to use one to two words mostly but you can use more and it can also work. For instance in my lens Gifts for Grandmothers I would have a primary tag of Gifts for Grandmothers. Other tags I might use would include grandmothers, gifts, gifts for women, tags of the items I have on there, etc. Do not use tags that noone is else is using. When you use a tag similar to others than you will be found also in that group.

Katinka aka Spirituality has a great blog post on this subject you can refer to Spirituality's Blog

We have a great tool here to check on tags. It takes a few steps to get there and if you need help that is what I am here for, but you will want to try Squidaholic

To use it just click on the link. Type in or paste your lens on the page it takes you to. When you put the lens in and click it will take you to all kinds of information on that lens. Down a bit on the page you will see Tag, you're it click on your lens there and it should take you to a tag generating page. You will click on hit me. You can try different tags and click hit me and it will tell you how it is searched on the internet. The most it is searched the better it is to use as a tag as that will bring searches to you. Lenses that get google, yahoo and other search engine traffic do well here and sustain higher ranks

Lensrolling is a term coined here at squidoo. It is a great tool to use for linking lenses of yours with lenses you like that are similar.

For instance I have a lens called Gifts for Grandmothers. I may come upon other lenses about grandmothers I like so I will lensroll it to my Gift for Grandmothers lens, linking their lens to mine. Doing this makes that other lens show up on your lens to the right under (your lensmaster's name) recommends. What is great about this tool is now you can also easily find that lens again. It also a great way to promote lenses you also like.

When you are editing a lens you might notice to the right there is a label called lensroll. This is a tool to use if you want to delete any of the lenses you had lensrolled.

How do you lensroll

Just go to the top of the lens you are on and click on the smiley face. This will bring up a page with all your lenses. Put a check in the lens or lenses you want to lensroll to the lens you are on. Hope that explains it for you. If it does not ask me for help and I will help you.

image courtesy of flicker photos

This is a nifty tool for you to use to decide how you want to be paid. When you are editing your lens or creating it you will see to the right royalty settings. Click on it. When it opens up there are a few choices for where you want that lens money to go. You can choose the squidoo charity fund, you can do a charity of your choice or I want cash. You might also notice below that you can do global payment settings and change all of them to one choice of payment. It is up to and easy to use once you figure it out. You will also notice check your paypal settings. You will want to make sure you have your paypal email address listed if you opted to be paid cash


You can also go into your dashboard and to the right under Don't miss this tool you will find payments setting manager. If you click on it you will be taken to all of your lenses. Pick one and click on it. Now you have an easy way to edit the payment setting of any lens plus this list tells you what you have the setting on any lens set to


Want to know more about payments? You can go here to find out paymenthelp

Labels can be found in your dashboard to the left. You should see Lens Labels in bold print.

Labels are a great way to organize your lenses into categories you pick. For instance I personally have alot of poetry lenses so I clicked on add new label category and added poetry. Then it prompted me to choose from a list of my lenses which ones I wanted under that category. You can choose as many categories as you want. And one lens can go in as many categories as you want it too. This is a great organizational tool.

This can be done in the dashboard. You will notice near the top orange buttons. The sixth button says My Profile. Click on it to edit your profile. You will want to put your name in here, your user name, your bio and more about me.

More about me is a great tool to utilize. It is where you can put your favorite lenses that you want people to be sure to check out. This can be done under featured lenses. External links is where you can put links to your blog, other lenses you love of yours or someone else's, , your twitter page, your facebook page and other social networking sites you would like squidooers to know about.

You can decide here whether you want to share your favorites by turning it on or off. This is also where you will find your account settings, your payment settings and your social application settings.

You can upload a bio pic at profile settings as well. It is best to upload something to this. We like to be able to relate lenses and a lensmaster to an image. Some prefer their pictures like I do. Some prefer pictures of other things or cartoons of themselves. Whatever works for you works for us. Some people are more private than others in this area. That is fine. Just upload a picture of something.

This can be done in your dashboard under your bio pic. You will see the words edit bio. Just click on it and write. We want to get to know who you are. Share a little bit about yourself with us. You can use html here if you want. It is a wonderful tool to utilize so we can feel more connected to you.

This is a great tool to utilize if you want to back up your lens. I recommend doing this in case something happens to your lens. This will prevent you from having to start over from scratch. Just go into the lens you want to back up. On the left side under tags you will see export. Click on it and it will allow you to save an XML copy of your live, or last published, lens contents to your computer.

The forum is a great place to get the help you need. Many squids hang out in there and will offer you advice and help. We have alot of great people here that way. Just click on SquidU at the top of your dashboard. If you are new to the forum click on discussion forum and register where it says start here. Once you have registered and log in you have access to a wonderful tool. You can talk with other lensmasters, share your lenses, have morning coffee with Kimberly and stay in touch with what is going on at squidoo..

SquidU

The same link that takes you to SquidU on the top of your dashboard will also take you to the answer deck. Here you will find answers to many questions you may have about squidoo, lens creation, payment or whatever else is on your mind.

Discovery tool is a nifty thing you will want to take advantage of. It is in your intro module, the third one over when you have it open to edit. Here you can add three lenses either of your own or other lensmasters that perhaps relate to the topic of the particular lens you are working on.

This is a great tool to promote the lenses you put in there. You will notice the lenses you put there will show up to the right on your lens in the explore related lenses with the scroll bar.

You will want to pay attention to your stats. This is a great tool for knowing how a lens is doing. You get there from your lens on the right side or you can get there from your dashboard by My lenses. Within the stats you will find summary, traffic, and royalties.

In summary you will find graphics and recent lensrank and Traffic by Day. This tells you how many people are visiting that lens per day.

In traffic you can see where the traffic is coming from such as google, yahoo, discovery etc. It also tells you the source the traffic came from and the clickouts they clicked on while on your lens. This is also where you will find the keywords that people googled to find your lens. These are important for Tags

in royalties you will see what has sold from your lens during the month from links such as amazon and ebay you may have used on your lens.