How to Legally Steal Traffic on Squidoo

Yes. Steal traffic legally.

This is a follow up to one of my previous posts about the new Squidoo Greetbox Feature. If you haven’t heard about this yet – then read this first – Should you play the discovery game?

As I had mentioned I turned on the discovery tab on all my lenses. A couple of my lenses have benefited tremendously from this tool.

One of my lenses is a mini lensography – Halwa Recipes. More than 50% of the traffic on this lens comes from the Discovery tool. You would have noticed that Squidoo has started sharing this info as a part of the Lens Stats. While getting traffic from one of your lenses is fine – the fun begins when you begin to get traffic from a competitive lens.

On another of my lenses – I again happen to receive more than 50% of my totally traffic from the Discovery Feature and this traffic is coming to me from a competing lens which is fabulous lens in itself. (I don’t want to name these lenses here – lest I lose this traffic stream..lol). The Competing Lens is ranking on Page 1 of Google for a very competitive keyword for which I haven’t yet been able to rank.

But I am receiving at least some of the benefits from the SEO work done by my friend with the competing lens, while I enjoy some free traffic, just for turning to discovery tab on.

But of course, this is a double edged sword and I could be losing some traffic from my lenses as well. It would be interesting if Squidoo would also show us the stats where my lenses have referred traffic to other lenses via the discovery tool. While some amount of traffic shift shouldn’t be an issue, if there is a significant traffic diversion, this would signal a need for some urgent sprucing up of the lens.

So now you know how to legally steal traffic on Squidoo – but just be careful, you might be losing some too.

10 Ideas to Create Backlinks for your Squidoo Lenses

One of the primary tasks for any lensmaster is to create backlinks for their Squidoo Lenses. They should be dofollow links and preferably with the primary keywords in the anchor text. Let's discuss 10 ideast to generate backlinks for your lenses.

1. Squid U Forum: This is perhaps the simplest options. Head over to http://www.squidu.com  and leave  a post in the Critique me section. You will not only get a backlink but also some useful advice on your lens from helpful lensmasters.
   
2. Lens Directory Submission: Submit your Lens to Lens directories. Couple of popular ones that I have used are IsleofSquid and Squidig. The links are dofollow and you can control the anchor text as well. A quick way to add some links.
   
3. Blog Commenting: Comment on a related blog. This may be a no-follow link – but it can get you traffic – if the blog on which you are commenting has a good traffic. It's generally preferable if you are among the first few commenters. The links in these comments have a better chance of being clicked upon.
   
4. Squidoo Groups: Join a related group on Squidoo. This is a simple but very powerful tool.Some Group pages have very good PR and a link from such pages will be very valuable in terms of link juice.
   
5. Squidoo Lens Comments: Submit a genuine comment on a related lens and if you feel that your lens can be a value add to the other lens – leave a link. Use this very scarcely and sensibly though.
6. Blog about your Lens: Write a blog post on your own blog (if you don’t have one – get started today).They will not only help you index your lenses faster but will also help you build good backlinks.
   
7. Niche Forums: Join a forum related to your niche and have the link in your forum signature. You can have links in your Squidu Forum signature as well.
   
8. Social Bookmarking: This one is probably a no-brainer. You can join the popular social bookmarking sites and add a link to your lens(Digg, Reddit, Stumpleupon). Be careful though and do some research on the bookmarking strategies for these sites. For Stumbleupon, especially you need ot be careful to not stumble only your squidoo lenses. You have to providing value so you need to be stumbling a variety of websites with one or two squidoo lenses in between. 1 Squidoo lens in 10 other websites will be a safe area. However there is a new kid on the block- Redgage – Not only can you post your lenses there, but you can also make from money from just posting links. Very interesting.
   
9. Other Web 2.0 sites: Join Hubpages and create a hub on a related topic and create links to your Squidoo page.  (hint – you can make money here as well). This is quite similar to lensmaking but has its own peculiarities.
   
10. Give me your ideas: I would love to have some comments here.
    

1 Simple Trick to Double Your Earnings on Squidoo

Image Courtesy wowcoin under a Creative Commons License

Everyone wants to make money online with Squidoo. Okay - at least most of the Squidoo Lensmasters are looking to make money either for themselves or their charities. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could double those earnings?

I read this some time back in one of the emails from fat loss expert Tom Venuto. This was in connection with doubling your rate of fat loss. He put it very simply.

“If you want to double the calories you are burning currently, just double your cardio.

 If you were doing 15 minute workouts, do 30 minute workouts. If you are working out once a week, try 2 weekly workouts”

The message was simple. If you double your efforts, your rewards will be doubled. Simple, isn't it. Reminds me of another quote. 

Success is Simple but not easy – says one of my mentors – Robin Sharma

I’d like to invite you to try it. How many Squidoo lenses do you have currently, 5, 10, 15? What if you went back and doubled those lenses, I’m positive that your earnings will double. It’ll perhaps do more than just that.

The simple fact is that you need to double your lenses to double your earnings. But it may not be the easiest part. If you have 30 lenses, it will take you a while to build those additional 30 lenses – but when you have done that – you will see those rewards doubled over.

Let me give you some real life numbers - Mine!

July 2009 – I had 14 lenses and they made about $20. I had only 1 lens in the top tier.

Aug 2009 – I had 24 lenses (not entirely doubled) but I now had 4 lenses in the top tier with another 6 in Tier 2 and I expect to receive at least $50 for this month.

Sep 2009 – I am on my way to Giant and I will have 50 lenses by the end of this month (I have 34 at the time of this post). Forget about the lenses I have built in September, those same 24 lenses from the previous month have matured and now I have 6 lenses in the top tier and 10 in Tier 2. I expect to make at least $80-85 for September.

Just going through Darren Rowse’s 31 days to Building a Better Blog (one of the best blogging guides- by the way) and I was struck by his story – he wasn’t an overnight success – He says it takes years to build a blog and advises young bloggers to not quit their day job until they have reached a sufficient critical mass.

Applying that analogy to Squidoo, it will take some time for you to acquire critical mass on Squidoo as well. Once you have over a 100 lenses, your earnings would be far more than you would have from only 10 lenses.

I am not even getting into the Amazon/Ebay/Affiliate earnings that you could make along the way.

Simple but not easy.

Keep working on those lenses. Keep adding to your tally.Double your lens count and I can vouch for the fact that you will double your earnings.

The Best Free Keyword Research Tool for Squidoo - Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Okay Friends - This is a cheat post!

I have been wanting to write on this topic ever since I've started this blog. Just when I thought that I have got my thoughts in place to write this post, I came across this post from a dear friend and fellow Factor-Y lensmaster - Chef Keem

How To Use The Google AdWords Tool For Free Keyword Research

This has everything that I wanted to say and this post just hits the proverbial nail on the lens head!

Enjoy this post and while you are on Squidlog, just enjoy the blog. It's truly amazing.

How to Keep Visitors Glued to Your Squidoo Lens

 

One of the simplest tricks to keep visitors glued to your Squidoo Lens is to use beautiful pictures. Pictures not only draw attention to your lens but also help in breaking the monotony of the page. If you have too much text on the page, it helps if you could break down the text into separate text modules and insert a relevant image in between those modules.

Recent on WiWon team, we had some beautiful tutorials on how to use pictures in your lenses. Check out this lens by Lensmaster Stazjia on Using Pictures Effectively.

P.S - If you liked the above image, I've got to tell you this secret. I made that image in under 1 minute - online. Just visit http://www.imagechef.com and you can work up some beautiful images in a matter of seconds.

The Squidoo Greetbox - Should you play the Discovery Game?

 

Image courtesy Noadi—noadi.net through Creative Commons License. 

The Squidoo Greetbox is one of the latest features introduced by Squidoo. This is what I love about Squidoo- their NSI approach - Never Stop Innovating. They are on the constant lookout to make Squidoo better and better each day.

The Squidoo Greetbox is another of its masterstrokes to combat spammers or irrelevant content. The way this is going to work is - visitors who are not logged on to Squidoo will be shown 3 related lenses that they could visit if the lens that showed up was not relevant. This could be both a boon and a bane to lensmasters. If the lens in the greetbox is more visually appealing - the user might click onto that lens, while I have done all the SEO hardwork to bring the user to my lens. It probably means that we as lensmasters will have to be more careful about both the content and the look of our lenses to keep visitor stay put on our page.

But ofcourse, if you participate in the venture - (oh yes, you have to opt-in on the Discovery Tab in the Intro Module), you can potentially benefit from having your lens featured on other related lenses.

To sum up, I think it is atleast worthwhile to explore and start experimenting whether this is working for your lenses.

So while I am off to switching on the Discovery feature on my lenses, you can go and check out the original post on the Official Squidoo Blog

Free Seo Tool - Search Engine Optimisation at your fingertips

Yes.

It's free.
It's a desktop tool.
It's very easy to use and extremely useful.




It's got a host of free features and it even has a SEO training course. Really useful for newbies who have no clue about SEO. One of the features I regularly use is the Search engine rankings page. This one tool saves a whole host of your times. You can add all the keywords that you are targeting for your Squidoo lens and immediately track where your lens ranks in all the top search engines for your keywords. Extremely useful to understand, where your lens stands among the competition.

So what are you waiting for. Its free. Go Grab it!

Top 5 favourite Squidoo HTML Lenses

Image Courtesy Andrew under a Creative Commons License.

Squidoo is a site where you will need to have multiple skills. You must possess the gift of the gab, the eloquence of the bard, and have a mad streak ala Steve Jobs. Okay, I took this a bit further there. But seriously,I think of the Ipod as a great analogy. Excellent Design coupled with Excellent functionality. That’s what you must strive for in each of your lenses. In this post, I want to concentrate on Excellent Design. I am not sure, whether I can teach you creativity, but I can surely point out where you can find the best building blocks of HTML to make each of your lenses a design superstar.

So here are my Top 5 Favourite Squidoo HTML Lenses

# 1. Basic HTML for Squidoo by Glen. No prizes for guessing this one. This was one of the first HTML lenses I referred to and till date, I keep coming back to this lens to spruce up my basics. Lensmaster Glen is also one of the most helpful lensmasters around. I still remember Glen replying to several of my HTML related queries on SquidU. On one occasion he even wrote a piece of code I was struggling with and asked me to just copy paste it. Yes, he is a wonderful guy.

At the time of this post, this is the #1 lens in Squidoo tips on Squidoo. Of course!

# 2. Advanced HTML for Squidoo by Glen again.
Once you’ve learned the basics, you don’t have to run anywhere. Just hop on to the advanced tutorial from Glen and learn advanced tips and tricks to make your lenses beautiful.

# 3. My Favourite CSS Tricks on Squidoo by thefluffanutta.
One of the highly respected lensmasters on Squidoo, Fluffanutta’s lens is another superb addition to your HTML armoury. This is only one of the facets of this lensmaster. He is also the creator of several fabulous helpful widgets and resources for Squidoo. I shall do a post specifically on these resources by Fluffanutta that I have used in my lensmaking. Yes – there have been plenty. For starters, just visit his site Squidutils and you will get a fair idea of what I am talking about.

As we speak this is the #3 lens in Squidoo tips at the moment.

# 4. HTML Border Backgrounds by Sojourn.
This is a lens by one of my dear friends on Squidoo and a lens which I consider to be the Bible on Borders and backgrounds. This lens is solely responsible for uplifting the look of my lenses to at least 5 notches higher than they were earlier. One of my lenses (The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes) which was spruced up using the ideas on this lens also won a badge. So I am very proud of this lens. Do visit this lens and I am sure you aren’t going to regret it.

# 5. Create Stunning CSS Backgrounds with Images by Dr Richard .

This is another stunning lens that I came across some while back. While I haven’t yet come around to using it on one of my lenses, it is surely on my agenda. The use of images to create backgrounds for your modules gives a really stunning effect as Dr Richard shows us on these lenses.

There you go – My Top 5 Squidoo HTML Lenses. These are by no means the only lenses, but my personal favourites.

Do you Squidoo yet? If not, time to start now!

Top 5 qualities to be successful on Squidoo

I have been squidooing for a couple of years now and I have realized that there is a common trait between all the top lensmasters. They seem to possess very similar qualities which drive their success on Squidoo. So I asked myself this question - What are the top 5 qualities that one must have to enjoy Success on Squidoo? This is what I came up with.

Passion
If there's one thing that is the most common attribute I have found is that the top lensmasters are extremely passionate about their cause and this passion shows in their lensmaking. If you are passionate about any topic, you will never struggle to finds words to describe your feeling.

Self-Belief
To be successful on Squidoo you must have a belief in your own abilities. If you believe that you can be the best around here, your belief will manifest into beautiful lenses which will be appreciated by all the others. You need to believe that you have the skills and courage to learn and do what it takes to be an excellent lensmaster. Believe in your self and the world will believe in you.

Curiosity
To be successful on Squidoo, you will need to be curious. You must be curious enough to look at all the modules on Squidoo and see what they offer. You must be curious enough to study the top lenses and lensmasters on Squidoo and see what they are doing right. You must be curious enough to keep learning, keep improving and keep getting better and better and better. The day you stop being curious, you may stagnate. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it would do you a world of good on Squidoo.

Social Skills
It’s hard to imagine that in this world where people spend most of their waking hours in front of their computer screen, people are being more social today than ever before. Squidoo is just the same. It’s not just a site but it’s a community and the more social you are, you will meet many a helpful lensmaster, who would be more than willing to assist you or answer your query. Become a part of the Squidoo community. Be Social. Be Nice and the world will be nicer to you.

Patience
I have saved the best for last. If you really want to be successful on Squidoo, you will need to be really patient. Squidoo is not a get rich quick scheme. In fact there are really no get rich quick schemes in the world. You will have to put in hours of effort and wait for the seeds that you have planted to grow into a full-grown tree. It takes time, but it is worth the effort. That lens which started out with a lensrank of 800,000 , if nurtured well, will soon grow into a Tier 3, Tier 2 and eventually a Tier 1 lens. But this may take a couple of months at least. Heck it may even make it to the top 100. You will have to let Squidoo take its own course. Of course, by all means, do your bit to promote your lens and take it to the top as fast as you can. However, at the same time, be cool, don’t lose your patience. The seeds that you have sown will eventually bear fruit.

So there you have it - My Top 5 qualities to be successful on Squidoo. Actually I should go out and make a lens about this. What say?

Do you Squidoo yet? If not, do it now!

Update - I did create a lens about this  - Top 5 Qualities to be successful on Squidoo

3 tips for improving your Squidoo lensrank

How Squidoo Lensrank is computed is always going to remain a mystery, but there are some very obvious guidelines, which one should follow to improve one's squidoo lensrank.

I have been around squidoo for a while and have most of my lens in the top 10000. Based on my experience, i want to highlight a few tips for improving your lensrank.

1. Fresh,Unique and Updated Content - This is perhaps one of the basic underlying factors in Squidoo. You need to have great content and keep on updating it frequently. To used to oft repeated cliche "Content is King".

2. Traffic - In my opinion, this aspect is one of the most important drivers in the Squidoo lensrank algorithm. If you have superb traffic, then your lens will continue to rank high, even though you dont have any fresh ratings, angel blessings or amazon/ebay sales. I say this from personal experience. One of my lens stayed put in the tier 1 for an entire month without a single update from me, solely on the strength of the regular flow of traffic. In fact if you start getting enough organic traffic, your lens will really be on autopilot and you will just have to keep tweaking it just once or twice a month.

3. Be Nice - The world is a very nice place and if you be nice to people, people will be doubly nice to you. If you look at some of the Giant squids and the most successful lensmasters, they will have rated and favorited 100s of other lens. What you give, you will get in return. One of my endeavours, is to try rating atleast 3-5 lenses a day and leave a comment or a feedback on squidoo. Invariably it does translate into a visit to your own lens, a rating, a comment etc. A word of caution though. Dont do this just to get ratings or comments. Do it with genuine intention of helping other people improve their lens, or give honest ratings and comments. Spam comments can be sniffed from miles away. Be nice to people and your lensrank will definitely improve.

There is a fantastic e-book just recently put together by some of the giant squids which has some really lovely tips for squidoo. Check it out here

Delete Irrelevant Content or Links to improve Squidoo Lensrank

All fellow Lensmasters.

I know it can be an excruciating wait for that daily lensrank update- when you've just tweaked your lens and you wonder whether your lensrank will be positively affected.

I am still fairly new to squidoo - but I think i have realised atleast one factor which does have an impact on your squidoo ranking once you have had a fair bit of Content or Links on your squidoo lens. Delete any Content or Links which are Irrelevant or not connected to your keyword or main topic of your Squidoo Lens. I have done that twice and i notice a decent improvement in my Squidoo Lensrank.

One of my lenses was doing fairly well on traffic and ranking and hence i thought i might leverage on that traffic and so I added links to my other lenses which were in dire need of some traffic. The links were not directly relevant. I thought it would improve the ranking of my other Squidoo lenses. In fact this irrelevant link did the opposite for all my Squidoo Lensrank. The well-progessing lens on which i had added the links to my other lenses, started falling in Lensrank while there was no benefit to the other lenses. Thats when i realised that i should delete those irrelevant links as well as delete all unrelated and irrelevant content from my squidoo lens.

It did work. Once I did delete all the unrelated content, my Squidoo Lensrank started showing signs of improvement. That's just one of tips from my experiences with Squidoo.

I will keep on posting more tips from my personal experiences. But the moral of this story is that we must edit our Squidoo Lenses on a regular basis and do some cleaning up. We must delete all Irrelevant Content or Links on our Lenses and then we will definitely witness an improvement in our Squidoo Lensrank

Do checkout some of my squidoo lenses