Greekgeek's Top Ten Squidoo Tips

My Top Ten Squidoo Tips 

The PT Barnum "This Way to the Egress" School of Lensbuilding

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  1Write what you know and love, letting your passion shine through. Keep asking yourself, "Would I really read this lens -- ALL of it -- if I found it on a random website? Or would I click away from it?" Be honest with yourself.

• 2Divide "potbound" lenses that have gotten too long, "fertilizing" spin-off lenses with fresh content so each can stand alone. See my Graphics Tutorials Suite for an example; originally that was all one lens! Note my CSS widget in the introduction of each lens passing traffic between them.

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  3"Don't let them get away!" Many visitors are NOT going to read your whole lens, or even scroll past the first screen. Provide a juicy "clickout" link in your introduction for those with short attention spans, so they leave via a clickthrough, not the "back" button.

• 4Tell your visitors on the first screen what's on the rest of page. Remember Newspaper Layout 101: "Above the Fold" is gold. The introduction module is your 10-second job interview showing your visitors you know what you're talking about, you have something they want, and you're going to present it to them clearly and effectively. The introduction module is also where you embed keywords for SEO purposes.

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  5Make lenses easy to navigate. Squidoo pages tend to be longer than most websites, where one scrolls down only a few screens. For long lenses, I usually build a compact, clickable index of key sections in the introduction. It orients visitors with a road map and doubles as keyword anchor text. See my Make a Fancy Table of Contents tutorial for many useful examples. Then I put "back to top" buttons in each module (at right, the "up" button I made for my Volcanoes lens).
  
  Here's the code for an "up" link: <a href="#">[Words or graphic]</a>

• 6Dress your lenses for success! I use lots of graphics, horizontal dividers, colors, the Black Box and Most Important Thing Module, and Text with Big Pictures to vary my content. I use CSS, Web 2.0 glossy buttons, and/or shaded paragraphs with rounded corners. Lately I've been working on harmonious color schemes and using the paragraphs themselves as visual elements to break up Monotonous Wall o' Text syndrome.

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  7Show your visitors the door. I've already mentioned the juicy link up top for Sam the 10-Second Surfer. Provide interesting exit ramps throughout your lens. At the end, point your visitors to another lens, a book on Amazon, your blog, or something else you'd like them to see on the way out.

• 8Don't do everything right the first time! Have good content, filled-in module titles and working links for your first visitors, of course: there's no do-over for first impressions. Also make sure you've picked the best URL, since you can't change it later. Anything else? That's what the edit button is for! Squidoo wants you to publish fast and loose, update later for lensrank boost!

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  9Stumble good webpages that link to your lens! Watch your traffic stats carefully for inbound traffic sources, and Stumble/Digg/Tagfoot/bookmark those with halfway decent content. This tip avoids having your account blocked on StumbleUpon or another social bookmarking service for promoting too many pages on the same domain (i.e. Squidoo).

• 10Write a lens mission statement on a BlackBox or StickyNote, which you may later incorporate into your introduction or conclusion. What is the goal of your lens? What do you want your visitors to get out of it? Then, check all your modules against your mission statement. Does it work, or is it content for another great lens?