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.

…

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.

Did you know you can offer a subscription option for your lens visitors to receive your SquidCasts in email? Recently I wrote a lens to explain this: Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts.

In my lens I give step-by-step directions for setting up these emails using a SquidCast feed from SquidUtils, and FeedBurner, a service that provides RSS feed services for bloggers, including email services.

This may sound complicated, but using my step-by-step guide, it is very easy!

You don’t need to worry that this is spamming because the emails are sent with the permission of the person requesting them. Lens visitors will click on your link and be sent an email notification. In that email they will click again giving permission for FeedBurner to send your SquidCast emails. Every email also contains a link for the person to unsubscribe.

On my lenses I mention that my SquidCast emails will update them on ALL my lenses, not just the one they’re looking at.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I’ve experimented with this and found that it works great!

By the way, I put this information together because someone was asking for an email subscription method over at SquidU, a great place to find lens ideas!

I now have more than ten blogs on a variety of topics. I also have over 35 Squidoo lenses on similar topics. For example, I have a writing blog at Perspectives on Writing. To that blog I can link my literary arts lenses because the topics are similar.

I have blogs on other topics – for example, Bigfoot Sightings (the blog) complements my Bigfoot Sightings lens. They are linked to each other, and they both get lots of traffic.

I have a new movie review blog: Mystic Movie Reviews. This will help drive traffic to the SquidFlix lenses I’m planning. Likewise, I can promote my movie review blog by linking to it on my SquidFlix lenses.

The goal is to keep the same subjects together. Placing links on appropriate sites with similar topics increases the SEO value of your links.

I’m not recommending that anyone go out and get ten blogs. In fact, that’s crazy-making, believe me. If you can have one or two blogs and manage to keep them up to date, you’ll be doing fine. You will find tips on blogging like an expert at my lens, Expert Blogging.

Two of my favorite bloggers whose niche is to help us learn to blog better are Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. Both these guys are phenomenal and worth knowing. Their blogs are worth reading. I’ve also participated in Chris Garrett’s forum, Authority Blogger. Great stuff there. The two men got together and wrote a fantastic book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.

You can learn to blog like a pro. You can use blogs to promote your lenses and you can place your blog RSS feed on your lenses. It’s a win-win situation for those of us ready to do both.

[Update 12.29.08 - When you place blog links on your lenses, use the link module and enter them one at a time. This gives a perfect backlink for SEO purposes. Don't use the RSS module as it provides no backlinking benefit.]

Like most of you, I have some lenses that get no hits, or very few. I’m going to have to focus on doing things to make these lenses viable.

The most important thing I can do is to make sure these lenses are linked from as many places on the Internet as possible. I’ve got a lens that lists places where links can be posted – for example, MySpace blogs, Xanga blogs, and many Web 2.0 sites. I’m making a list of these sites on Squidoo Traffic: How To Promote Your Squidoo Lens. This lens is becoming an ongoing research project to find places where lensmasters can create back-links for their lenses.

After making sure I’ve got back-links in place, I’m reviewing key elements of the lenses that aren’t performing. I’m checking the keywords, comparing them to the ones I find at Google’s Keyword Tool. I also make sure those keywords are represented in headings and other text on my lens. I check out the search engine results to see how possible it is that my lens could ever rank on page one of the search engine results for my chosen keywords. If need be, I change the main keywords to something longer (the long-tail) so I’ll eventually get to page one of the results.

I’m pleased with the number of lenses I have that do get search engine traffic, and encouraged to keep trying for the lenses that are not working yet. I know that with constant updates and keyword tweaking I’ll most likely succeed sooner or later. I’ve done this with some of my websites – with great success.

There may come a time when I feel I must leave a dead lens and go on to other projects, but for now I’ll keep trying. I like all my lenses and would love to see them succeed.