Lake Erie Artists Gallery’s Squidlog

Many of you have probably heard of the Law of Attraction. What you put out to the universe will come back to you multiplied. I want to discuss the Law of Attraction as I feel it applies to Squidoo. This is totally my own concept, but I feel that the more you put into Squidoo, the more you will get back. There is a lag time on the return, usually 30 to 90 days, but if you work hard at promoting and building quality Squidoo lenses, you will get a multiplied return on them over a period of time.

I think of it more as creating pathways for the traffic to flow back to you. When you build a lens, allow it to grow, then continue to update and promote it, you continue to create new pathways for traffic to flow to your lens. The longer the lens exists, the more chances there are for traffic to develop and flow to it. Each time you add backlinks, tweet out your changes, do a squidcast, you are encouraging traffic to flow to your lens, and possible other connected lenses. Traffic follows traffic and before you know it people are reading and buying off your lens.

The benefits do not always return in the same fashion that you sent them out. You may get the return in unexpected places. But it will come. I have lenses that are just now blossoming even though they are 6 to 9 months old. And as I see which ones are getting traffic, I find more ways to promote and invite traffic to them.

We always hear that in business we should diversify. That is true in internet business too. You should not count on just one income stream to sustain you.

Start with one stream, and once you get that going, then start another one, and so on. For example, since we are all lensmasters on Squidoo, we either have or are trying to have an income stream on Squidoo. And that is great! What I am saying is while that one is growing, go ahead and start another income stream.

There are other websites available for you to make money on that would appeal to people who like Squidoo. None of them are exactly like Squidoo, but some have similar elements.

Helium and Associated Content are both article writing sites. You can earn money from them and develop ideas that will lend themselves to expansion into Squidoo lenses. Another site is Hubpages, which has some similarities to Squidoo. What you will find is your fans will find you in all of the locations. You can write related pieces on different sites. For more information on these other sites, follow the links in this post.

It is interesting to note that the lenses we think should get the most traffic are often not the ones that actually do. Of course, lenses are seasonal, and some only get traffic during certain times of year. Lately, I have noticed my highest traffic lens is Fun 21st Birthday Party t-shirts, a lens that I hadn’t spent much time on.

However, when I did a sort of my lenses on my dashboard by traffic, it was way above the rest. It had never been rated at all, so it was about 16000 in total lens rankings, but the traffic has steadily gone up for months.

So I decided that it was past time to improve and upgrade the lens. For this particular lens, the majority of traffic is coming from keyword searches on the web, almost none from Squidoo. So I decided to make this lens into a quality lens, and then see if some of my fellow lensmasters would agree with me. I completely redid the lens, added several modules, more variety, and a better sense of humor to the lens. It will be interesting to see how high it goes now.

My point is don’t neglect your lenses–make sure to see where the traffic is coming from, and improve those lenses first. They are the most likely to earn you money, at least right now.

There are so many great places to establish your presence on Squidoo that I will probably miss some in this post, and you will tell me what I forgot.

For Newbies:

If you are new to Squidoo, first of all–WELCOME! Squidoo is a friendly place and we want you here if you are here to add value to the site. Please remember not to spam everyone on Squidoo–that is the best way to get everyone annoyed with you. And spamming includes placing the same question several times in the SquidU forum.

Here are some great places to publicize your lenses:

1. SquidU forum–Introduce yourself and ask to be critiqued. Ask for help in the help section.
2. Fresh Squid Headquarters–This group was designed to encourage new lensmasters. And Willow, the Giant Squid who runs it, does a tremendous job.
3. You can put a few links to your lenses in your forum signature.
4. Start a blog on Squidtop.
5. Join other groups on Squidoo.
6. Visit other lenses and comment on them (but don’t leave a link to your lens–your avatar is already a link)
7. Follow other lensmaster blogs–there are several Squidoo related ones and the people writing them will undoubtedly check you out.
8. Offer suggestions and kind comments to fellow lensmasters on Twitter, they will start to follow you and check out some of your links.
9. Check out the Squidoo Chat Room. Only the greatest people hang out there.

For Established Lensmasters:

1. Some of the above applies to you, of course.
2. If your lenses are great and not getting notice, you can ask for an angel blessing, but personally I like it when the angels find me on their own.
3. Start your own groups.
4. Create a Twitter following. Usually if you follow people, they will follow you.
5. Create a fan page on Facebook. There are Squidoo groups there too.
6. Linked in also has a Squidoo group.
7. Mentor new lensmasters.
8. Tagfoot also has a lot of Squidoo folks and is a supportive environment.
9. Don’t ask to be critiqued unless you are truly doing something way out of your comfort zone.
10. Take the time to research your questions before asking them in the Squidu forum.
11. Add your lenses to the plexos on other lensmaster’s lenses.
12. Leave insightful and fun comments on the other lensmaster blogs.

Okay folks, what did I forget?

Usually as lensmasters, we find that certain lenses seem to attract traffic more than others over time. That will happen even if you promote each lens equally, and have the exact same number of backlinks to each lens.

When that happens, then you should realize that you have hit on a hot topic, and expand your lensmaking on that topic. This is one way to create a niche.

One of my hot topics is about an art form that I make jewelry from–Precious Metal Clay. I started with one lens–The Top 10 Reasons that I Love to Work with PMC. That lens has gotten steady traffic, and a sale from it, so I am expanding the niche by writing more lenses that will each focus on a specific way to use PMC. So far I have two–The Best Tools to Use for Working with Precious Metal Clay, and PMC Metal Clay | Hollow Beads .

Each of these lenses will complement each other and lead readers from one to the other through featured lenses, discovery features, and lensrolls. Readers will go from one to the other because they are interested in learning more about PMC. It is a natural sequence. This is a great way to show your expertise on a subject, and create trust and confidence in your readers.

There is a lot of discussion of quality lenses on Squidoo, but just what is a quality lens? And is there a blueprint for them?

A quality lens is sort of like a great cup of coffee. The composition is different for everyone, but you know one when you see one. So I can’t really tell you exactly how to build a quality lens.

But I can tell you some of the components that you need to include to have a quality lens.

No default titles
This is a biggie on Squidoo. Do not leave your default titles.

A minimum of 6 modules including your introduction and guestbook.

A picture in your introduction.

More than text only.

Original content

A tightly focused topic

A picture in your bio and some sort of filled in bio.

These items must be done for a quality lens. There are many other additional things you can do on a quality lens. But this list will be a great place to start.

In looking around for opportunities to promote my lenses and other businesses online, I came across this lens by experienced lensmaster, spirituality, called Human Forum Promotion. Spirituality does a succinct job of telling us how to promote ourselves in forums and how to find forums to promote ourselves in.

The trick is to find forums that are on a topic that you write about, and use the forums to publicize yourself subtly. Just by participating, and having the titles to appropriate lenses in your signature is a good way to start.

With all of the tricks there are to automate things these days, it is important to remember that the basis of the internet is still just people, with people’s foibles, idiosyncrasies, and habits. People do not want to be slammed with useless information, but they do want to know where to find good resources.

Remember that the numbers of hits we get are made by individual people, so be your friendly self, and be personable, and people will want to see what else you have to say.

Just what is spambait anyway? It is a term that has been batted about on Squidoo quite a bit lately. We’ve seen that the spam filter has been a bit hungry, and seems to be inhaling lenses that don’t even apply to the TOS spam no-no’s.

Spambait is a term that means it is a bait for spam. So that means that the lens may not actually be spam in itself, but is likely to attract spam.

I ran into trouble when I wanted to make a Squidbids lens on my listings on Ebay. One of the group of paintings I am selling is C. M. Coolidge’s Poker Dogs series. Unfortunately, poker is one of the spambait topics on Squidoo’s list. My lens hit the spam filter. So I changed the titles and took the word poker out. Probably not the best keywords to advertise those particular prints, but well worth it to keep out other spam.

Since Lake Erie Artists Gallery’s Ebay store has become more active, and we are loading it up with lots of great art products, I decided to try out the SquidBids template which is made for Ebay sellers.

I have to admit, although I do like the SquidBids logo at the top of the template, I didn’t really like what I got when I filled it in. I ended up changing the entire set up of the lens including the way the title filled in.

My lenses are selling art so here is the order of modules I ended up with:
Introduction
Wikipedia
Ebay(featuring my store)
Poll (but I completely changed all the poll topics)
Duel
Amazon Spotlight
Craigslist or alternate
RSS feed to my blog for the gallery
Amazon
Wikipedia featuring one of the artists I am selling
Guestbook
Featured Lenses
I left the Text module with the Thank You
Google Blog Search

See if you like what I came up with: Custom Framed Abstract Fine Art Prints Showcase

We have discussed RSS feeds as a way to publicize your lens, but you also have an RSS feed module to use on your lenses. There are lots of great ways to take advantage of this module. I am going to show you some of the ways that I have used it, but I am sure you can think of more once you get going.

1. In the lens introducing this blog, The Howling Squid Reveiw, I use the RSS feed module to show several entire posts from the blog including the pictures.
2. In Eco-Chic Green Fashion, I included a blog that fit the theme of my lens, but just show one post at a time.
3. In the lens, St. Patrick’s Day 2009 Gifts, I use the RSS feed module for a feed of Amazon products related to my topic. This feed was generated from SquidUtils.
4. In my lens about Lake Erie Artists Gallery, I use the RSS feed module to showcase items from my Ebay store.

These are just 4 ways to use the RSS feed module. Can you think of more?