Lensmastery by Linda

While reading comments on another blog I noted that some lensmasters feel that lens making is more important than networking on social media sites. They feel that Squidoo is enough online activity, and that lenses will promote themselves as much as they need to.

I made a study of social media sites during the past few years for my lens, How to Promote Your Squidoo Lens. I’ve been looking for sites that provide good SEO backlinks, as opposed to sites that cloak or add ‘nofollow’ to links so they provide no SEO value.

Whether or not you choose to promote your Squidoo lens by participating in other social media sites may depend on what your goal is for your earnings. If you have all your lens earnings earmarked for charity, perhaps you don’t care about revenue as much as someone who lost a job and is in deep financial turmoil. If you are trying to make money with your Squidoo lenses, lens promotion has got to be at least as important as lens making, and probably even more time consuming.

Some social networking sites have minimal use in terms of SEO. For example, FaceBook and MySpace both cloak all outgoing links so any links placed on those sites do nothing to make your lenses more visible in search engines. There are many other social bookmarking sites and social media sites that are similarly useless for me, for the most part. I know that people can always go there, see the link, and click on it to land on my lens, but that’s pretty much nothing in terms of numbers. The big influx of lens readers usually happens from good search engine optimization or from having a link on a site that is capable of funneling large numbers of readers to a lens.

For example, if I put a lens link on Facebook I’m lucky to get one or two viewers clicking on it. However if that same lens link is on a high-traffic blog, I may be able to get hundreds of visits per week from that venue. Even better, if my lens ranks high for a popular keyword in Google, I may get thousands of visits per week. I believe that SEO is a vital issue for anyone wanting to make a lot of money on Squidoo.

My recommendation is not to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, truly a lot of social networking sites are a waste of time — but not all of them. It is important to recognize good backlink opportunities and to follow up on them.

For example, the site Qondio states it is there to give good backlinks for content writers. For each article I write there I get a backlink for one of my Squidoo lenses or blogs. It is a wonderful opportunity and I’ve even been able to add AdSense to my Qondio pages. I don’t know how profitable this will be for me yet; I’ve just started submitting articles there.

Gather is a popular site for informal article writing and networking. Lensmasters can put links in their Gather articles to let people know about their lenses. You can even put them in comments on other people’s articles. If you want to join Gather, please use my link as it will help me earn a few more points. Gather pays with gift cards or PayPal payments but I think it is easier to earn money at Squidoo.

One BIG caution is not to let your articles look spammy. If your articles look like spam, promoting products like medications, ebooks, and breath mints, nobody will appreciate them no matter where they are. Make sure you speak from your heart, never copy writing from elsewhere, be a real person who is sincere in making friends and participating in the sites, and offer something that goes beyond the mere hope for material gain.

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Recently I issued a challenge on SquidU: to create a lens listing your ten most recent lenses, and to place that in the “Featured Lenses” section of your Squidoo profile/bio page. Here’s my challenge: Quick Challenge: Your Ten Newest Lenses . . . and here’s my lens with my ten most recent lenses.

More next time…….