Squid Donts- Things Not To Do on Your Squidoo Lens

Before starting on the segments which will show you how to generate traffic become known, and make money with Squidoo. Let me share with you the most glaring mistakes, things that you do not want to have on your Squidoo lens. These are items that you will want to check and double check to make sure your new Squidoo lens is of the highest quality.

These mini websites will add to your brand, provide a extra traffic source and start to establish you as an authority if done correctly.

How do I know? I have been active on this content based community since October 2008. I have viewed and rated over three hundred lenses and continually try to improve my own lenses. I strive to have lenses of the highest quality and value to any and all that happen to read them. I have won many Squidoo trophys, blessings and likes. Now for Squidoo this is not a long time or high activity, as there are many veterans that have statistics that really surpass mine. I have been around enough to give you solid advice and direction an how to build, maintain and promote lenses on Squidoo.






With that said, lets talk about what not to do on Squidoo. Here are the worst offenders.


Carefully choose your title, url and description. The URL or internet address can not be changed after you have created your lens so choose wisely. The title and description can be edited at anytime. Make sure that the URL, title and description accurately represent what subject matter you will be covering. The URL Title and description will be what people first see in Squidoo directories and in search engines. Do not mislead them but accurately represent the information that you will be sharing about on your lens.



Do not be satisfied with poor quality content. Building a great Squidoo lens is a process. Make sure that each portion or module that you add is good quality information related to your title and description. It is all about value, the more and higher quality information you have the more traffic, likes and good rankings you will achieve.

Do not use purely promotional content, give great information, pictures, videos. If your lens is purely promotional it can be flagged as spam and be locked. Provide value before you sell. Many Squidoo lenses are promoting things, it is accepted if you have given good quality information on the subject. Lenses filled with links and little content are thought to be just spam. Think like your readers and write what they would want to hear.


Remember people hate to be sold but love to buy.

Do not have a blank or barren lens master page. There is a section that you will be completing that talks about the author or "lens master", make your Squidoo bio complete with a great picture. My advice is not a logo, or inanimate object but a picture of you. people like to do business with those they know like and trust. Start building that trust on Squidoo with your Squidoo lens master bio. Make sure and add your blog links, your Twitter profile, Facebook profile link and allow people to  explore who you are. Remember this is a community and to be part of it you must share about who you are, what you stand for and what you like to do.


Do not use poor spelling and grammar. Now right about here is where U wuill find whut it lookss too someeone else reeding a lens with poor spelling and or grammar. Time to click out if we can not even have proper spelling and grammar huh? There are many tools that you can use to achieve a good quality module with proper spelling and grammar. Use the tools and then check it and recheck it. Have a good friend proofread it. Even after being very careful, I will catch a mistake I have made down the road. Everyone makes mistakes but a high quality lens will have little to no spelling and grammar errors.


Do not leave any uncompleted modules. When you first publish a Squidoo lens, there are default modules added, to build a lens you will continue to add text modules, video modules, picture modules. Always double check that all default module titles have been changed and customized by you and all uncompleted modules are removed, don't worry you can add any of these later but when you push the publish button have all uncompleted ones removed.



There are many resources on Squidoo itself to help you get started. Squidoo lenses on etiquette (http://www.squidoo.com/squid_etiquette), for Squidoo newbies (http://www.squidoo.com/best-lenses-for-newbie-lensmasters) and a Squidoo forum called SquidU (http://www.squidu.com/forum/index.php) to read, learn, make connections and get questions answered.



Do not be in a big hurry, take your time, become part of the community and add value. This is a long term traffic and authority source, which ranks in Google very well and quickly. Thanks for reading and come back as in the next segment I will teach you how to get traffic, likes, comments, build your reputation and make money with Squidoo.

Graphics by  Greekgeek  and
Donna Maher

7 Steps for Squidoo Lens Creation to Build your Online Business

Graphics from Greekgeek
 http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/Greekgeek

Creating and maximizing quality websites or "lenses" as they are called on Squidoo will add significantly to your brands value, can help establish you as an expert and will help you to connect with more people every week that have an interest in what you do. There is a community at Squidoo that make money from Squidoo by building numbers of quality lenses, maximizing the lenses, and promoting the lenses. This post will give you some basics and help you get started creating some killer Squidoo lenses.






1. Choose the topic or subject of your Squidoo lens. This is the very first step in starting your new Squidoo lens creation. The first step covered in the how to video goes really quick but is very important to the long term success of your Squidoo lens.Squidoo lens creation is handled by what is called a Squidoo lens wizard. The title at the top of the page will be "Step 1: What's your lens going to be about?"

2. Chose the title of your Squidoo lens. This is another important step of creating your Squidoo lens. The title should include your keywords and also be something that will attract attention. As with any article or content that you write the title is important. It will need to captivate the attention of people that see it. Now this is less critical than the topic at this time because you can always change the title of your Squidoo lens at any time. In step two you will chose your lens title, set your lens URL, pick your topic and pick a rating for your lens. The most critical part of this step is choosing the URL for your lens. This will also be the URL or address of your Squidoo lens so it is very important to choose wisely. This can not be changed later for this lens. It is best to do some keyword research and find the best short keyword phrase that describes your topic. I use a powerful keyword tool called Jaaxy, this provides me the best possible combination of keywords and keyword phrases to use in my titles and URLs.  After finding good keywords  add them to a list, a text file and save this for future reference. These keywords will also have to be available from Squidoo, so it may take a little experimenting to find a targeted keyword phrase to use. It is worth it to take extra time at this critical step to get a good targeted URL. The title can be changed at a later date.

3. Choose the category selections for your Squidoo lens. You will be able to target your category and topic selection with a top level topic selection, a sub topic and a even more targeted sub topic. This categorizes your lens for the Squidoo community to be able to be easily found.

4. It is now time to choose your targeted keywords or tags for your Squidoo lens. Go back to your list of keywords and keyword phrases researched in step one and add them to your tag list for your Squidoo lens.
You can add or change your tags or keywords at any time. Enter your keywords or tags and also fill in the security code box. This is to prevent automated lens creation from computers

5. Create interesting, original content for your Squidoo lens. Squidoo lenses are targeted information centers, I think the most powerful lenses offer a solution to a problem or tell a story. This is an important part of your Squidoo lens creation, as with any internet information source content is king. Your written content will be the core of your Squidoo lens and should be quality control checked many times for grammatical and spelling errors. Your content should be valuable and compelling, remember solving problems, offering solutions and stories are great content. Remember to include your keyword phrases to your content. Focus an making your content for the reader and use your keywords in the content. This makes your Squidoo lens easily found for people searching on Squidoo and in the search engines for your information. This produces targeted traffic, people interested in the topics of your lens. You can also use simple html and CSS in your content modules to highlight and make your content attractive and compelling.
Remember peoples attention span is short so split long blocks of content into several modules.

6. Use captivating pictures to add an aesthetic touch to every content module.You can use your own graphics or pictures or find them at stock image sites. Remember that graphics catch the eye and add a visual impact to your Squidoo lens. Here are also some good resource from Squidoo

http://www.squidoo.com/free-web-graphics
http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-graphics

 You can add informational videos and a myriad of other modules to make your Squidoo lens unique. You can add graphic modules, polls, Twitter feeds, news feeds and many other modules to make your Squidoo lens a place of value for people searching out information on your chosen topic. There will be a default Amazon module where you can offer Amazon items related to your topic for sale and a new guestbook comment module. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a series of videos showing you these steps from a screen capture video.


7. Follow these important tips and double check these in your Squidoo lens. Make your introduction powerful, short and to the point. tell people what to expect from your lens and always add a great picture in the introduction module. Always change the default module titles. Remember to replace "New Text module" with your content section title. The Amazon module replace "new Amazon" with a unique title and "new guestbook comments" with a unique guestbook title. Remove any modules that you have not completed.  As you can see in the image below you can add modules at any time, preview, or save draft. It will be good to "save draft" as you are creating your Squidoo lens and when you have these steps completed and your preview looks good ..push publish. Congratulations on your first Squidoo lens!

Now just creating a fantastic Squidoo lens will not bring the squid world to your doorstep. The adage "build it and they will come", is not true on the internet or Squidoo. This is just the first step, creating a quality interesting lens.I have learned the basics of Squidoo as I have been a Squidoo lens master for many years and I will share my secrets and experience at Squidoo here with you. Next we will focus on the basics of maintaining and maximizing your Squidoo lenses for profit, getting traffic, ranking in the search engines and teach you the secrets to getting quality traffic to your Squidoo lens.

Squidoo Lens Creation to Build Your Online Business

Squidoo a powerful content driven community that you can use to build your online business.

Use Squidoo lens creation to learn content and article marketing which will generate targeted traffic to your websites.

An important piece of the internet and affiliate marketing puzzle is  content and article marketing. This traffic strategy is as old as the internet and still quite effective. Article marketing is used to generate targeted traffic, putting your information out on the internet where interested people can find it.

Squidoo lens creation should start with interesting and valuable information. Solutions to people’s problems and personal stories make the most powerful content and article marketing pieces. The same is true when creating a Squidoo lens.  These informational pieces should not be sales letters. The most effective articles are giving information and solutions not selling.

Although Squidoo is not an article marketing site, it is a powerful content platform. Squidoo is one of the most powerful traffic producing tools in my internet tool box. This is why I want to share with you the basics of Squidoo lens creation.

Squidoo is more of a tight knit community of webmasters that share their content.

To be effective at Squidoo lens creation you will need to start to learn the Squidoo lingo. Yes there is a whole lot of new lingo or squid slang that you will need to know. Let’s start off with the basics; a mini web site is called a "lens". A Squidoo lens should be the equivalent of one content packed web page complete with information, pictures, videos, yes and links to your sales or opt in pages.

Squidoo webmasters are known as "lens masters". This is the term given to people that share their content and information on Squidoo.

Your web pages or lenses will consist of modules. Squidoo modules are essentially paragraphs or blocks of content, videos, or many other options.

The Squidoo lens rating system is called "lensrank". This updates once a day and is calculated by the amount of content you have, lens freshness, squid "likes”, traffic and many other factors. This is all track able through your Squidoo lensmaster dashboard.

Just some squid basics to get you started, yes it is a little silly but at Squidoo everything is "squid" related! Squidoo is quite fun and a close knit group of many people sharing great information on almost any topic that you can imagine.

Squidoo lens creation is worth your time and actually can become an income stream because Squidoo revenue shares from advertising, and has very many revenue producing modules such as Amazon, Zazzle, Ebay and many other ways to monetize your Squidoo lenses. You can also donate your Squid earnings to charity like I do, it is up to you.

Watch the videos above about Squidoo lens creation and follow this link to get started, sign up at Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/mrkensworld)  and you can started creating your first lens today. Please come back and follow this site for the rest of the series that will help you on your way to being a respected Squidoo lensmaster and a traffic generating machine.

Here is a great resource on help for newbies at Squidoo, SquidU's Lensmaster Lounge: Help for New Squids (http://www.squidoo.com/loungehelp)

Here is a good resource on a Directory of Squidoo Help andTutorials (http://www.squidoo.com/tutorialdirectory)

This series will show you the Squidoo basics on how to get started, , basic Squidoo lens creation, how to earn Squidoo points, generate traffic, and build relationships at this great content based platform.

Secrets on How to Get FREE Website Traffic Revealed! Part Number Seven

Generate you own powerful, interesting and original content. You can do this! This is where your traffic generation strategy will really start to pay off. Choose the most popular content that you posted, you can analyze this by the analytics inside Hootsuite and also by the amount of likes and or comments that your posts generated.  Questions asked about the content you have provided and posted to the social networks will provide you with other ideas that will be the basis for your own original and pertinent content. Start to build your own original content. Analyze your Hootsuite analytics to see what posts generated the most responses.

Use the most interesting topics and subjects that you have found and do a little keyword research. You can analyze Google results with Google’s keyword tools. You want to identify the most trafficked keywords with the least competition. This keyword research is critical to getting the most traffic from your hard work or investment in creating content. I use a perfect SEO tool that gives me the information that I need to pick the best keyword phrases to base these articles on. This tool is called Jaaxy

You can start with a free account and get your first 30 searches for free as you study this tool you will find that it gives you the most critical keyword information at your fingertips. Jaaxy will provide you with some great information to pick the correct keywords.

Now you have a few choices at this point, you can write your own content or hire writers to generate content for you. This will depend on a few factors, it is time versus money. It will also depend on your skill level and how comfortable you are writing. Out on necessity when I started, I learned how to write my own content, for websites, articles to be distributed ect.

 I now have a large portion of my content produced for me by writers that I have come to trust over time. One that I have come to trust and will recommend is Jeff Schuman and his team. http://article-writer.team-schuman.com/ They have a lot of experience and always provided me with good content on the keywords that I provide them. Here is Mr Schuman’s linkedin profile http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jeff-schuman/4a/b32/844
There are many other ways to get content written.

Post your content to a blog or article marketing sites. Here are some great places to start..
Article Sites and Ranking as of 04-18-2012
•    http://wordpress.com/            Page Rank 9
•    http://www.scribd.com/           Page Rank 8
•    http://www.livejournal.com/      Page Rank 8
•    http://www.squidoo.com/          Page Rank 7  Original content only
•    http://ezinearticles.com/        Page Rank 6  Original content only
•    http://www.gather.com/           Page Rank 6
•    http://www.wetpaint.com/         Page Rank 6
•    http://www.articlecity.com/      Page Rank 5
•    http://hubpages.com              Page Rank 4  Original content only
•    http://business.ezinemark.com/   Page Rank 4
•    http://www.streetarticles.com/   Page Rank 3 Original content only
•    http://www.easyarticle.org       Page Rank 3
•    http://articles.submityourarticle.com   Page Rank 3
•    http://goarticles.com/           Page Rank 3
•    http://www.articles3000.com/     Page Rank 3
•    http://ezinearticlesnow.com/     Page Rank 2
•    http://www.my-article-city.com/  Page Rank 1

Promote your content! 
 Use the relationships and trust that you have built in these groups and post your content to all of the relevant groups.
Use Social bookmarking to promote and build back links to your articles and content.
Sites like Digg, Delicious, Stumble, Diggo and many others are places that you can bookmark and also build links back to your articles and blog posts

You must generate useful, interesting information to build your brand, generate interest and bring more traffic back to your websites, blogs and squeeze pages.
Set a schedule to post new content regularly.

Next series I will show you how to publish at one of my favorite article sites, http://www.squidoo.com/.

I have great success and get a large amount of traffic from the content I have built at Squidoo. I will be sharing with you how to publish there, promote and get traffic from Squidoo and the search engines using Squidoo. Stop back by and learn some more…

Secrets on How to Get FREE Website Traffic Revealed! Part Number Six

One of the best ways I know to generate interest, brand yourself as an expert and start conversations with new people is to post interesting content to the social networks. It isn’t hard to manually post interesting content to a few groups, but as your networks start to grow you will need a better solution. In this section of “Secrets on How to Generate FREE Website Traffic Revealed” I will show you how to automate your content sharing. Branding yourself as an authority will cause more traffic to go to your web sites when you post content. People tend to gravitate towards you when they are used to you posting great information and it is second nature for them to want to see what your personals thoughts, content and blog posts are about.

While there are many ways to accomplish this, I will be covering a method and program that I use, I prefer to use Hootsuite. You can visit  http://hootsuite.com/ the basic edition is free and the Pro edition where you can add unlimited social profiles is $9.99 a month. I recommend that you try the 30 day free trial first and test it out. This is a great way to generate interest and brand yourself as the expert.

You may have wondered earlier in this series why finding great content that has good pictures is very important. This step is where those articles and blog posts that have great and compelling pictures will be used. People love pictures and Hootsuite will post the link, an excerpt from the article and a picture to your Facebook fan pages, Facebook groups, your Facebook profile also if you wish. The Twitter and LinkedIn posts are text only but include a link to the graphic to view also. I have found that this generates interest and questions. I watch who comments on these posts and then interact with them; this has led to many new relationships and new business.
Hootsuite has been awarded the Top Ten Reviews Silver Award because of its ability to post to Twitter and other social networks. This program makes it very simple to share relevant content with your groups across social media platforms. Hootsuite also provides powerful analytics, which will be very important for thios stage and the rest of your traffic generating strategy. These analytics will enable you to see which posts generated the most interest and what social network the clicks came from.  This will be critical as we go into the last few points of this traffic generating strategy.







Hootsuite also will shorten and track your url making it easier to get more for your mile out of Twitter’s 140 characters. Hootsuite also has a world class help and support services. You can read the Top Ten Reviews Silver award review here- Hootsuite Review Here is also a PCMag review from 3-2011

I have found that by continuously providing good content and posting it to the many niche groups that I belong to on Facebook and Linkedin I have increased my interactions and connection requests drastically. I am constantly interacting with more and more people in these groups that like and comment on these posts. This also generates traffic back to my social profiles and the links that I have listed in my social media profiles. This also provides a steady stream of traffic back to my sites as I share original content that I develop by learning other people’s interests and questions.

Secrets on How to Get FREE Website Traffic Revealed! Part Number Five

Need more traffic? Isn’t that the number one cry of every web master? This is article five in this series that will show you a method that generates you free targeted website traffic. If you just landed on this article please scroll down and read the last four articles to get up to speed. This series will give you many facets of one killer traffic generation method that you can learn and use at no cost to increase the traffic to your website.

Now you have some great information that is valuable to your industry, you have a list of websites that others will be interested in and a number of blogs or websites that you have commented on.  Part number five in this killer traffic generation strategy is about generating interest and establishing you as an expert. That’s right you... You have the latest information that will be of value to many people in your niche and industry. You will want to share this information with people that are connected to you.




To best use this part of the process successfully you will need accounts at least the major social media platforms.

• Twitter
• Facebook and Facebook groups
• Linkedin and Linkedin groups.
• Google Plus

There are many other social media platforms that you can use in this stage of generating traffic but I use Facebook, Twitter and Linked In mainly.  The more people that you have following you on Twitter, the more groups that you are a member of on Facebook and LinkedIn, will determine your results in this part of this traffic generation method.

Tips on getting targeted connections to generate traffic from social media platforms.
On Twitter it is simple to find people that have the same interests that you do, or an interest in the niche or subject you are marketing. So let use the example of network marketing, you type into Twitter search bar the term #networkmarketing, Twitter will generate a list of people that have interest in network marketing. Always use the hash tag symbol # when tweeting and searching on Twitter. Follow these people and interact with these people. Spend 30 minutes a day following and interacting with new people on Twitter. Also tweet with people that you are already connected to.
Facebook is also simple, find and join any groups by using the search bar at the top of Facebook. Just type in your search term and look to the left of the page. Choose groups, this will produce a list of groups that you can request to join. Spend 30 minutes a day finding groups and interacting in the group. You must interact with the people in the groups; you can like, comment and post. DON”T start posting your links, or business opportunity to these or any groups!

LinkedIn is also similar, find and join groups that have an interest in the subject that you are interested in or your target niche.

Now after you have introduced yourself to your Twitter stream, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups take out the list of relevant content that you have found. Pick the most relevant powerful content valuable to the groups and share this information with the members. . This is where for Facebook and LinkedIn you will want to share the powerful content with a nice picture that you have found. Great content with a great picture produces the best results; remember this because it will be important to you soon.  I can’t say this enough, interact with these people, edify encourage and be positive because you are building your brand, generating interest and this generates traffic also. Branding yourself as an expert by consistently providing and sharing relevant content sets you apart from the groups, don’t be self-serving, be a servant of all and you will enjoy the benefits.

Set a schedule for posting this content to the streams and groups that you belong to and always comment on other people’s posts also. After you have posted check back periodically to answer and interact with anyone that comments or likes your posts.  No this can be done manually, many people recommend that you only share manually but it can be time consuming and I am going to show you one automated method that I use to share content with these different streams and groups.

Develop relationships and encourage people in these groups. This is an important part of generating a load of killer targeted traffic to your web sites. There is more to come, if you want to get the rest of this killer traffic generating method quicker, comment, like and share this one. The more comments, likes and shares I see the quicker I will let the rest of the story out..