Have you heard of Squidoo?  No it’s not a fancy type of calamari.  Squidoo is a Social Media site that is comprised of a collection of single web pages referred to as ‘lenses.’  These lenses are used by members of the Squidoo community to create content rich lenses on their favorite subject. Squidoo lenses come with Adsense included which means that you have the potential to earn  advertising revenue as well as any sales or commissions you might make. 

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Social Traffic Espionage  recently had the opportunity to talk to Ross Goldberg about Squidoo and he described a Squidoo lens as a blog on crack – the search engines love them. So if you are serious about using Social Media, you can’t afford to ignore Squidoo.

Making a Squidoo lens is easy. Simply go to www.Squidoo.com  and join the community. Once you have joined Squidoo, you are given the option of making a lens using  an automated wizard. Most beginners chose this option whilst more advanced users usually choose to create their lens using a simple template. You don’t have to create all the content for your lens at once you can add, modify, optimise or maintain your lens at anytime.

What should your Squidoo lens contain or look like? How do you build a popular lens? These are great questions and we have included  7 useful guidelines below that should help you get started.

 1. One Lens,  One Specific Topic
Squidoo lenses are more efficient generating Social Traffic if their content is specific to what the visitor is searching for. For instance instead of a making a cat training lens, make one on training cats to shake hands.

2. Focus on Content – Useful, Appealing, Engaging, Concise and Unique
Build a lens that is full of useful content that is appealing, engaging, concise and unique. Your good content is what will bring your visitors and make them keep coming back. Provide excellent content that is infused with your passion, personality and knowledge of the subject. Your goal should be to become a trusted resource in your subject area. If you are not sure about what to include visit SquidU to learn how to make the best lens you can.

3. Write A Killer Bio
By now you know the drill. Social Media is all about creating relationships. So it’s important that your bio and picture represent you. Make sure you include a photo and a link back to your blog or any other sites you might have. Tell your visitors a little about yourself  let them get to know you.

4. Keywords and Tags
Write a keyword optimized introduction because a snippet of this shows up in the search engine results. Use tags to denote the lens topic. This also helps visitors from other lenses or related topics to find you and link to you. Linking of course will help boost your lens rank and relevance in the search engines

5. Pictures Are Worth A Thousand Words
Include pictures to convey your message to your visitors. It’s easy to upload pictures to the modules, so don’t skip this step. Remember you want to develop a relationship with your visitors. Make your visitors experience enjoyable so that they will return to your Squidoo lens or share it with their friends. So include some pictures enhance their experience – you won’t regret it. Repeat visits and sharing the site with friends is a sure way to get viral social traffic

6. Squidoo Is Not An Island
Use good quality external links to other Squidoo lenses and outside resources. Provide a brief description of each link. The links you include in your Squidoo lens are important and one part of optimising your Squidoo lens for SEO.

7. Modules
Include a nice variety of modules to vary your site’s content. The youtube.com module is great because of the constant flow of new videos. There are so many great modules, and adding new modules is a great way to update your lens.

Squidoo like any Social Media Network does require you to learn the basics. But you don’t have to go far for assistance the Squidoo website and the Squidoo community are right there, on hand ready to give advice and guidence.

We hope that this post has given you a few Squidoo basics that you can apply to your Social Media activities.  If you have enjoyed this blog post feel free to leave a comment and share it with others.