Do You Squidoo?

But do you Squidoo? This is a fun easy way to get a backlionk to your site, and increase traffic at the same time. It is particularly effective for niche sites.

Squidoo is fairly easy, as their ‘wizard’ will basically walk you through each step. Say I want a Squidoo for puppy hoodies. All I have to do is sign up for an account, and away I go!

First Gandalf (the wizard – yeah, I’m a Tolkien fan, and all wizards are Gandalf to me) asks me what I want my Squidoo lens to be about. Easy. ‘Puppy Hoodies’. Next; what is my goal? Duh! ‘To promote my puppy hoodies!’.

Steps three, four and five. Title… ‘Best Puppy Hoodies’. URL? Same thing, with the dubyu’s and the dots. Category? I surfed around earlier, and decided ‘puppy clothes’ was the best fit (no-brainer, there!).

Gandalf has one more suggestion – tags. All possible relevant keywords can go here. Now he vanishes, and I’m in the lens master workshop actually designing my lens.

First things first – fill in the bio. This can contain my logo for ‘Home Dawg Hoodies’ – which is of course the niche market I am trying to corner the market on. I add a catchy slogan, like ‘When the cat’s away, the dogs can play!’ or whatever (hey, I’m just coming up with this stuff off the top of my head!).

Now I can mobilize by adding modules. Content, photos, links, a comments section – you can even add a book marking display. Don’t forget to fill in your table of contents for easy navigation through your lens.

A Squidoo should be optimized just like a page on your website. You can submit it to search engines and directories such as Squoogle and Lensroll.com, you can add more content as you see the need – it actually can become a tiny site in and of itself!

You can do Squidoo lenses without a strong background in HTML, but a little knowledge is helpful. Don’t panic – there are only a million helpful guides that will dumb it down enough for you and me!

The important thing is to remember the precepts you learned while building your site – keep it simple, easy and user friendly, and you will be on the right track. Optimize for users first, engines second, and don’t forget to use your words!

One last hint – you can earn a few pennies or dollars with Squidoos ad program, but if you prefer an uncluttered site you can opt out by selecting to donate your lens’ earnings to charity and clicking opt out on the WHOOPS box that they pop up to make sure you really don’t want ads on your lens. (Gandalf is a greedy little wizard.)

Congratulations. Now you Squidoo. Do it again!