How to Use Squidoo Effectively

How to Use Squidoo-Everyone, by now, has heard of Seth Godin’s Squidoo and many of you may have a lens or two in place already. But as a marketer are you maximizing the potential of your lens? This series of articles discusses how to use Squidoo effectively as a marketing tool.

 

 

The idea behind Squidoo was that each person’s lens would present a view of any topic that interested them. That it would then contain that person’s links to related websites, blogs, RSS feeds, eBay, etc. Anyone looking for similar information would then use such a lens as a starting point for their own searches.

How to Use Squidoo-

How to Use Squidoo-As Squiddo is indexed constantly by the major search engines and is possibly considered an authority site by Google, it is a good place to put a link to your site or blog. Many marketers are indeed using Squidoo for this purpose and this purpose alone. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

However, just because Google appears to favor Squidoo at the moment, this does not mean this will always be the case. As more lenses are put up, some of which may be of dubious quality, Google may eventually lower its importance.

So in the future, we may have to come up with more imaginative ways of using Squidoo effectively.

Squidoo lens is very easy to set up and I won’t go into the mechanics now…just head on over to squidoo.com and have a go at it…but before you do remember these three key points:-

1. Choosing a name for your lens

When choosing a name for your lens, this becomes your page title (you can change it later). So if your lens is about ‘making English sausages’…name your lens ‘How to Make English Sausages’. If your lens is about a product, then pick that.

2. Choosing a domain name for your lens

How to Use Squidoo-When choosing your page name, remember you should treat this in exactly the same way as you would select a relevant domain or sub-domain name. So taking the example above you would select /how-to-make-English-sausages (This can not be changed later.)

Now, you may not have to go to that level of targeting…but remember lenses are being put up all the time and the more common keywords are disappearing fast.

Anyway, by choosing your title and domain name carefully it is relatively easy to get a good natural SERPS ranking.

3. Selecting the right content for your lens

How to Use Squidoo-When choosing content for your lens, think of it as you would a landing page. You can add three keywords when you first set up your lens but you can also add more later…do so.

Squidoo encourages you to add a whole range of modules, such as Amazon, eBay, etc because that’s how they can best monetize your lens. But remember this is a whole bunch of exit routes away from your lens. So I would not use them. However, there is one I would use…

How to Use Squidoo-

If you have a related blog that you update regularly, then add an RSS feed from it to your lens. In that way, your lens gets refreshed regularly.

So, to sum up…Squidoo lenses are a good source for backlinks to your site or blog, but if used effectively they can become valuable marketing tools in their own right. In the next article I discuss how you can use Squidoo lenses to create your own mini traffic network, so look out for that.

Source by David R Brown