When creating content on Squidoo, you can add quite a bit of information without much effort.
Of course, since Squidoo lenses are not articles, it can help a little when creating them to take a minute and consider exactly how they relate to normal articles.
The Article Title
For squidoo, your Lens Title is the equivalent of your article title, so be sure to take some time deciding on it!
The URL
On Squidoo, you decide what you want your url to be. Most quality article sites use your article title as your url, and I recommend doing the same thing for your Squidoo lenses.
To do this, simply replace all spaces and special characters with dashes.
A lens with the title:
"Like eating fish? Learn to get more fish with dynamite!"
would become
"like-eating-fish-learn-to-get-more-fish-with-dynamite"
This helps strengthen the fact that your lens is about your title in the eyes of search engines.
Keywords
In step four, you can enter a few keywords for your lens. Be sure to do so.
If you want to add more keywords, you can do so on the right panel once you begin editing your lens by choosing "Tags" and then "Add More Tags".
Summary
For a Squidoo Lens, your summary is placed in your introduction and contents tool.
Be sure to edit it and write a strong summary. Additionally, I recommend turning on the table of contents unless you are creating a rather short lens.
Content
When I create a lens, I like to already have an article written.
I then take each section of the article and create a new text entry box for it, giving the section a title and subtitle and then filling in the content.
There are a lot of modules to choose from, but some of the ones that I tend to get the most mileage from are the following:
- Text with BIG Picture
- Just like the text module, but with a picture that goes all the way across. Great for large images.
- Amazon Module
- If I have a book to recommend, I’ll place an amazon module in for it
- This will earn you a little extra cash if people use the link in it and you have your royalty settings set to give yourself some percentage as cash.
- Featured Lenses
- Great for providing quick information on other lenses.
- This becomes more useful as you write more lenses.
- Links Voting (plexo)
- Let people add links and vote on them.
- Guestbook
- Let people leave comments on your lens.
- Polaroid
- For when you just want to insert a big picture.
- RSS: Add Your Blog
- A great way to showcase items from your store or posts from your web site.
- Automatically pulls new content as you put it up.
- YouTube vids
- Great for displaying youtube videos
Formatting your content
When it comes to formatting content, lists and paragraphs are the primary tools you have at your disposal in text modules.
Tables, data lists, and divs are stripped out automatically, so knowing how to style your lists and paragraphs can come in handy.
If you want sublists, the following can be helpful:
<ul>
< style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;">First List Item</li>
< style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Indented item</li>
</ul>
The first list item is set to be bold with underlining while the second is set to be pushed an extra couple of characters into the page.
If you want nice looking callouts, you might use styling on paragraphs like the following:
<p style="border: 1px solid #DE0000; background-color: #DEDEDE; text-align: center;">Your callout here</p>
The above results in a block with a reddish border and light grey background having your text centered within it. Some extra styles that can be useful are:
- font-weight: bold;
- That will make the text bold
- padding-top: 0.5em;
- That will make half a character height of extra space above the text, inside of the box.
- padding-bottom: 0.5em;
- That will make half a character height of extra space below the text, inside of the box.
Resource Box:
You really don’t have a resource box in a lens, but because you can place whatever you want in it, you don’t really need one.
Royalties
When creating lenses, I like to set them to donate some percent to the squidoo general find and the rest to me, but you can certainly set it up however you wish.
Squidcasts
When you create or alter a lens on squidoo, you can publish a squidcast, which is basically a short notice to anyone that has you ( or your lens ) favorited to give them some information about your new lens and/or update.
It is kind of like a built in twitter for squidoo users.
Don’t forget to send one out when you add a new lens or make major changes to an existing lens.
Thats it!
There really isn’t more to it than that. If you create lenses with good content, people will find them.
Additionally, you will be creating quality backlinks from within a fairly high page rank web site which the search engines seem to like quite a bit.
If you update your lens on occasion ( once per month or so ), it will continue to bring in new traffic for quite some time.