Squidoo Lenses
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Creating Squidoo Lenses.
Welcome to Part 2 of my series on Squidoo. In Part 1, I introduced you to Squidoo.
Now, in Part 2 I am going to take you through the steps of creating your first lens.
Squidoo lenses
( their term for ‘webpage’):
* Are free to set up.
* Are easy and totally non-techy.
* Pay a royalty to hundreds of great charities or just to yourself if you choose.
* Get you credibility and traffic.
* Only take a few minutes to build.
Creating a Squidoo Lens.
Once you’ve created and confirmed your account, head on over to squidoo.com and log in with your newly acquired user name and password. Then click on the orange “Create a Lens” button on the right side of the screen.
Here, you will be guided through a series of steps.
Keep reading to find an overview of these steps.
Creating a Squidoo Lens.
Step 1: Type in what your lens will be about. Be clear and concise.
Step 2:
Squidoo Title
Choose a title for your lens, and then you’ll create the URL. Choose wisely as this cannot be changed.
Next, you’ll need to choose a topic and sub-topics from a scroll-down list. Following this, you need to indicate whether your lens will be G-Rated or R-Rated. G-Rated lenses give you a wider audience.
Step 3:
Squidoo Keywords
Now add your keywords. You are trying to read the minds of your readers. Which words would they use to find your information?
Do you know how to select keywords?
### Find out what people are looking for
How are people going to look for the kind of information your plan to provide. If your lens is about ‘Growing Tomatoes’, then just putting ‘gardening’ as a keyword will not be specific enough. When it comes to keywords, the more specific, the better. So ‘Growing Tomatoes’ or ‘Hydroponic Tomatoes’ would narrow down your audience search.
There are many ways you can do your keyword research. It takes years to master it, but I have found a basic tool to use for us newbies. It’s called the Google Adwords Keyword tool.
You’ll find it here
Once you’ve opened the page, type in a few related phrases, Type in a few phrases (long-tailed keywords) such as ‘growing tomatoes, Hydroponic tomatoes, growing tomatoes in tubs, etc This tool will then come up with a list of suggestions. You need to choose a suggestion with a ‘low’ competition rating with at least a few thousand searches a month, or at least more than a few hundred times.
### Make sure there’s not too much competition
Take your selected list and type in the individual phrases into Google , one at a time, surrounded by quotation marks.
You are wanting to make sure that there are not too many competing phrases. Look for less than 50,000. If there are less than 10,000, it is ideal.
Create your Squidoo lens around your chosen keyword or keyword phrase. Make sure to use the keyword in the lens title, the lens URL, the keyword list, and in the titles of your modules as well as inside the modules. That will ensure your lens rises more quickly to the top of Google.
Now, if you find several keyword phrases where there is not too much competition? Well, create a lens for each of them!
Step 4:
Earning money with Squidoo.
In this section, you need to indicate whether you want to donate your money to charity or not. These are mostly American charities. If you want to direct it to your own bank account, you need to fill in your Paypal email address so you can be paid once your earnings have reached a certain level.
Now, after you have completed Step 4, it’s time to create your Squidoo lens. Follow their suggestions, and you’ll be fine.
Here is a video to help you along…
My next blogpost will be about Squidoo Modules.
Keep an eye out for it .
If this post on how to create a Squidoo Lens has given you any value, please share so others may also benefit.
I always welcome comments too.