Squidoo Tip #7 - Increase Clickouts to make more money on Squidoo.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Squidoo uses the number of Clickouts as one of the parameters in determining your Squidoo Lens rank. Why are they so important? When visitors land on your Squidoo page, they are looking for answers and solutions. And it is your goal to give them the information that is relevant to their searches. Ideally, you want the visitor to spend at least a few minutes reading over your lens and then send them on to a different page - it may be a product you are promoting, or a site that may be interesting to your reader, or maybe one of your lenses on a related topic (hey, a clickout and an extra lens view - can't get much better then that, unless you are trying to make a sale, of course...)

The last thing you want to happen is for the visitor to glance over your lens and click back to other Google Search results. Click backs will have a negative impact on your lens' Google rankings. Google lets your readers decide on the relevance of your lens' contents to the keywords used throughout the lens. By Generating Clickouts, you optimize your Squidoo lens for Search Engines. It is a great way to send a reader on to a different site and keep them from clicking the "Go Back" button. Clickouts will give you a better Google Search placement and will help your lenses make it into the Tier 1 and 2.

In my Squidoo Earnings Diary, I feature my top performing lenses, give links to my blog, link to articles that may be interesting to other Squidoo lensmasters, and feature Amazon products. If someone clicks on a Google Adwords ad, Squidoo will also count that as a valuable Clickout. I also like to take advantage of the Google Search Module to help my readers find useful information on relevant topics.

As always, I hope you are making money on Squidoo. I would like to hear from you - would you like to share your Squidoo SEO tips?

Squidoo Tip #5 - The easiest ways to build backlinks to your Squidoo lenses.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Backlinks are very important in optimizing your Squidoo lenses for the Search Engines. What is a backlink? Basically, it's a clickable phrase that points to a webpage. For example, if I wanted to point to this blog, I would want to select something like "Squidoo Tips" or "Squidoo SEO" and place href attribute with the links' destination (my blog).   In HTML, the backlink would look like this:

<a href="http://squidtips.blogspot.com/">Squidoo Tips</a> ,

 and it would look like this to my readers: Squidoo Tips. By the way, if you do decide to comment on this blog and backlink to your Squidoo lens, <a href... > format is what you would need to use.

So what is the easiest way to build backlinks to your Squidoo lenses? How about another Squidoo lens? For example, let's take my Google Adwords Tips and Tricks Lens. In this lens, I mention that it would be smart to use a Google Adwords Coupon when experimenting with Google Adwords campaigns. I also have a Google Adwords Coupons lens. So why not create a backlink to the lens and make the "Google Adwords Coupons" lens more attractive to Google?

This backlinking strategy works really well if you have several lenses covering related topics. By building links between your Squidoo lenses, you will not only create more content views, but will also make Google think that your content is popular, since other webpages are pointing to it. I recommend using your key words for the anchor text of the backlink.

Also, I recommend that you checkout this Squidoo lens by Squidoo Lensmaster Emonanam: Best Do Follow Forums and this Squidoo lens by LisaAuch: How to get my lens found

Hope you are making some money on Squidoo! As always, comments are very welcome. How do you build backlinks to your lenses?

Squidoo Tip #4 - Do include YouTube modules in your lenses



Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net  

Why would you want to include YouTube Video Module in a Squidoo lens? Not only will you add great relevant content to your lens and bring more value to your readers, you will also optimize your content for Google. One of the things that Google takes in consideration when figuring out where your lens should be in the Google rankings is how much time your readers spend on your site and whether they click back to Google Search results. By displaying the right YouTube Videos on your lens, you answer the readers questions, keep the reader on your Squidoo page for a couple extra minutes, prove to Google that your content is relevant to the key words, and therefore, your Squidoo lens gets a better ranking in the Search Engine Results. Squidoo is a big authority on Google. So if you use the right key words throughout your content, display YouTube Videos, engage your reader, and provide the information the reader is searching for, you will have good chances of landing on Google's 1st page. As always, please feel free to leave your comments and link to your Squidoo lenses.

Squdoo Tips. Tip # 1 - Pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses.

What is a marketing niche? Why would you want to pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses?
I love writing on a variety of topics. And that's what I initially started out doing on Squidoo - I had a lens about my dog, a lens about Christmas gifts, a lens about a steam mop I use, and so on. My lenses weren't supporting each other and the few views I was accidentally getting here and there didn't result in any additional traffic to the other lenses.

Image: Naito8 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When compared to mass marketing, niche marketing can be described as "targeted to a certain group of people". The best way to make money on Squidoo is to build a lens around a product or one very specific topic that people are searching for. Then build more lenses in the same niche. What would be a good niche? Recipes lenses do really well on Squidoo. Let's take "Casserole Recipes" - you can build lenses "Beef Casserole Recipes", "Chicken Casserole Recipes", "Potato Casserole Recipes", and so on. You can feature your other casserole recipes in Squidoo lens' Sidebar or at the bottom of each lens. You can make one lens that includes links to all the recipes. With recipe lenses, picking a product to promote is not very difficult. But like Seth Godin suggests in one of his books, make sure you have a banana you are selling, and that banana is very obvious. When given too many options, consumers get lost  and end up leaving without making a purchase - and that's the one thing you want to avoid.
So if you are interested in making money on Squidoo, my tip today is to pick a niche for your Squidoo lenses and write, write, and write some more. Connect your lenses to each other and get several lens' views out of every visitor that comes to your Squidoo lens. Looking forward to hearing about your Squidoo experiences. Please feel free to leave me a comment and a backlink to one of your lenses :)