heartharmony.com.au

Well, last week’s post about alternate ways to drive traffic to your site created a load of interest – particularly around Squidoo.

So what is Squidoo? Squidoo is a community website, started by Seth Godin and some others. People can create pages (called lenses) about single subjects of interest to them.  As a writer (or lensmaster), you can go as deep or as shallow as you like in terms of information – as long as each lens is a single subject.

I like to think about Squidoo as a sort of more fun version of Wikipedia. If you want to know how to create Star Wars birthday cakes – you will find a Squidoo page on it. If you want to learn more about Woodstock – someone has written a page about it.

There are 35 different category areas in Squidoo, of which business is only one category. In business, there are a range of sub-categories including marketing, small business, internet, real estate, employment amongst other things.

Creating a lens is simple. It is a content managed site, so you don’t even have to know HTML – just choose your modules and fill in the blanks.

My lens on Employee Performance Review Tips hovers consistently in the top 20 pages in the business category, so it seems to have captured the imagination of readers. A few people last week wanted to know how to write great Squidoo pages – so here are some of my tips of what works (and doesn’t work).

1. SEO – SEO – SEO. By this I mean, don’t start writing a lens until you know what people are looking for. I used my internet research skills to find out the most searched for keywords in my niche (and what people were looking for). It then made it easier for me to create my lens.  Of course I made sure my keywords were in my title and throughout my lens.
2. Solid content. Give useful & practical information – this is not the place to push a sale.
3. Pictures. Spice up your text with colourful royalty free images.
4. Link back to my blog. My Squidoo lens pulls in the RSS feed of my performance review blog – so it gives even more targeted information back to reader (while increasing traffic back to my blog).
5. Links to my products - I have links to all of my performance review products.
6. You Tube video – I found some funny You Tube videos about performance reviews. People love humour.
7. Humour. I added in more performance review humour with some performance review jokes that used to be passed around in HR circles.
8. A poll. I added in a poll. This does double duty for me – people love interacting, and it also gives me stats on the most common objections or problems people have with performance reviews (which helps me refine my product and my marketing).
9. Link to my Twitter feed. Another way to get people to interact.
10. Amazon books. These are books that I have read and loved. And a % of each sale comes back to me as an affiliate fee (and I also donate a % to Kiva). Yes, you can make money from Squidoo Lenses (although you will never replace your day job from these fees).
11. Reader thoughts.  People share their comments & thoughts about the lens.
12. Adsense. Another way to earn affiliate income.

The main takeaways from this post is to make sure your lens is optimised for search engines, has killer content as well as a bit of fun and interactivity to to. This is not the place to be stuffy and boring!

So what doesn’t work? If the topic is not a “hot topic” that people are interested in (and you haven’t done your SEO correctly), then you won’t be found and you won’t get the traffic. I have a few other lenses with mixed results. They do get some traffic, but these are not as popular traffic wise as my hot topic.

One of the good bits about Squidoo is the amazing amount of support out there to help you. There is an active forum as well as  Squid U – all designed to help you work out any tricky bits of code you want to insert, or learn the tricks of the trade.

And does Google like Squidoo?  Well in many cases new lenses are picked up by Google within 3 hours (which is another brilliant tip if you want your regular website found – create a lens that links back to your site). And if you look in search engine results – Squidoo is right up there (type in employee performance reviews into Google to see what I mean).

Happy lens creating!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Web copywriter