Internet Marketing Toolbox

Call me a little behind the times if you must… but I’ve only just discovered Squidoo! Yeah… I know - there are only 24 hours in a day, so discovering the good things among all the crap can take a fair bit of time.

So Squidoo’s a good thing? Probably a bit early yet to make any sort of declaration on that score, but I decided to give myself a Chrissie present and set up my first Squidoo lens.

For those that don’t know… essentially a Squidoo lens is simply a single page which is highly focussed on a particular keyword or topic. And ANYONE can set up a lens for nix!

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take too long to do either.

Check out the two lenses I’ve started so far

1. My Internet Marketing lens - which aggregates several of my Internet Marketing sites and articles I’ve written.
   
2. My Stephen Spry lens - which chronicles my web career since 1995… so far I’m only up to about 1997, but I’m getting there. If you want to go back in Internet time… this is an interesting journey.

Early days so far… but what I’ve found is

• It’s surprisingly EASY to do!
  
• there are HEAPS of modules you can choose from - in the above lenses I’ve used the text/write module, the RSS module (to grab my RSS feeds from my blogs), and the guestbook/feedback module.
  
• Once you hit the “Publish” button… it all starts happening! Give it a day or so for your new lens to get indexed… and you’re underway.
  
• I’ve got a lot more I can do there to start directing targeted traffic to my various sites.

So what do you do with it once it’s going?

Well first up… LINK to it from your other sites/blogs (as I am doing in this post) and get some initial traffic to your lens… that should get it indexed by Google pretty quickly… and that means you will get some more links back to your site.

So get over to my lenses, and add your ratings and feedback! Go on… pretty please!!!

Make sure you CHANGE/ADD something regularly! Squidoo likes “fresh” content, and part of their ranking algorithm is based on update frequency.

Make LOTS more lenses… on all sorts of different topics of interest to you… and don’ t forget to link them together as appropriate. I’ve got a range of sites in a whole heap of niches, so I can see some new lenses on those topics pointing to my sites!

Go and look at the top 100 lenses in various topics… this will give you an idea of what you can/should do with yours to increase its ranking and popularity.

Seek out other lensmasters in your area and start networking with them! You never know what can become of it!

The whole point of this Squidooing is to get more traffic to visit your web sites from your lenses… so get started now. Hopefully it’s worth spending a few hours every week updating and maintaining your lenses to achieve that.

MY BIGGEST SQUIDOO TIP OF ALL TIME?

A MOST ANNOYING thing I found when trying to use the online form boxes to write my content… especially in the text/write module… was that if I hit a certain key combination, I found my browser goes back a screen or two, and I LOST MY WORK (several times worse luck!!!!)

So - write and edit any lengthy content in a text editor like notepad, and then PASTE into the Squidoo boxes when you are finished writing.

Good luck with it all, and let me know how you go with your lenses!!!!

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