Some of the best places to get backlinks to your lenses are directories. These are websites that collect and categorize links to other websites, and there are a growing number of directories specifically tailored to Squidoo Lenses.

I have been assessing the relative merits of these Squidoo directories, and I have put together this review of the best ones for your lenses. The ones I’ve listed here have been proven to provide backlinks, and will pass PageRank and maybe even a little traffic.

Continue reading “The Best Lens Directories”

This tool is for anyone who uses the Amazon Links or RSS Feeds provided by SquidUtils (read the introduction to these tools for more info), and it will show you which lenses and products are getting the most views and clicks. In the run up to Christmas, this could be a valuable tool for fine tuning your lenses to maximise your profits.

» Check out these demo stats, featuring real data from actual lenses:

Summary of Features:

• see views and clicks for every lens that uses Amazon Links
• see views and clicks for each product within a lens
• sort the lenses by views, clicks or CTR
• the data you see is live and instantenous
• includes data for this month and last (retrospectively)

Continue reading “Statistics for Your Amazon Links”

Squidcasts. These are short messages that you can send out from your lens, and they will be seen by anyone who has favorited your lens, or joined your fan club. To see the squidcasts from the lenses and Lensmasters you have subscribed to, you have to visit the Favorites tab on your dashboard.

On their own, this is about as exciting as they get.

But here at SquidUtils, the messages that you cast can do so much more, and reach out many more people (and search engines)…

Continue reading “Give Your Squidcasts More Legs”

When you create a new lens, the creation wizard asks you for one Primary Tag, and three other tags. When you edit your lens, you can add more tags to the list – up to 40. Knowing what tags do will help you figure out the right ones for your lens.

Tags help Squidoo choose the right lenses whenever someone uses the internal Search facility, but tags aren’t the only it factor uses. Squidoo’s search tool also uses the text from within the lens itself too, so if yours contains a particular phrase then it’ll appear in a search for that phrase.

The Discovery Tool directly connects lenses that share the same tags, which is much better than indirect linking via tag pages. These appear in the blue box immediately after the lens Introduction, with the title ‘Explore related pages’. This can result in a dozen or so links to your lens from other lenses.

The Primary Tag has more weight than the regular tags for searches, so make sure you use your main keyphrase (not your title!). For more details, see the previous blog post How To Pick Your Primary Tags.

Continue reading “Making the Most of Squidoo Tags”

If you don’t already know, the prime purpose of SquidUtils is to provide tools and utilities for Lensmasters. You can get a summary of what’s on offer here by reading the post Welcome to SquidUtils, and then come back here to catch up with what’s new.

In recent weeks, I have been building some new tools, and they range from the useful, through kinda nifty, to simply awesome. It wasn’t until today I realised how many I had ’sitting on the shelf’, so I thought I should get them out for Lensmasters to try.

Health-Check: This was mentioned at the end of my previous post, where I talked about large percentage of lenses that were not optimised for their keywords. The Lens Health-Check Tool will automatically assess your lens, and give advice on where you could improve it. It is still technically in Beta, and there is some functionality yet to be programmed into to it, but I wanted people to be able to benefit from it.

Amazon RSS Feeds: This is actually an old tool, which is was a little tricky to use unless you’re already an expert with Amazon’s affiliate program. It basically allows you to dynamically embed Amazon products directly into your lens, selected by Category, Listmania or ASIN. Finding the ‘browse node’ ids for a particular category was never easy, but the Amazon Feed Generator now has an integral node browser, that lets you drill down to the one you need.

But that’s not all of them – there’s more…
Continue reading “New Tools for Squidoo Lensmasters”

I have analysed almost 70 thousand lenses at Squidoo by 2,250 Lensmasters, and I’ve identified a number of issues that common to a staggering 80% of these lenses. Some of these issues are preventing the lenses from ranking well in the Search Engines, and many Lensmasters have posted to the forums complaining about a lack of traffic.

Here is an overview of the issues I have found, and how Lensmasters can fix them.

Continue reading “4 Out Of 5 Lenses Have Poor Health!”

One of the oldest tools here at SquidUtils is the Lensmaster Feeds. These are RSS Feeds that contain links to all of your lenses (or groups). These are perfect for syndicating – which will result in many websites linking directly to your lenses. And the great thing is, as you build new lenses, they will automatically appear on all the sites that are publishing your feed.

If you are a frequent user of these feeds, you may notice that your primary Lensmaster feed is now provided directly by Squidoo, and not from SquidUtils any more. But don’t worry, all of your links to the old feeds will be redirected, and all previous syndications will continue to work.

Continue reading “How to Use Your Lensmaster Feed”

The Amazon Link Error Report alerts you when your lenses have Amazon Links that have been changed or deleted. It will also tell you which lenses these links are on, so you can then go to your workshop and fix them. All you need to do is login, and look out for the warning message on your Advanced Dashboard. If you see it, there will be a link which will take you to the detailed report.

Continue reading “Do Your Amazon Links Still Work?”

One of the most common pieces of advice these days seems to be “write good, unique content”. While this is true, there’s a word that I seem to use a lot in my forum posts: “relevance”.

Why? Search engines love to make associations between ‘things’ that are related – this is how they work. Ultimately, they associate your search query with a web page that is related to it. They do this by finding similarities between words on a web page, and in the links to a web page.

So, how can you make your lens have “relevance”? Continue reading “Relevance is Key!”

The great thing about Squidoo is that you can sell Amazon products on your lens, without needing to sign up as an Amazon Associate first. There are 4 great Amazon modules that you can add to your lens. Squidoo handles all of that on your behalf, gets the maximum commission rate, and splits the revenue with you 50/50; this means about 4.25% for most products. This is perfect for Lensmasters who are new to affiliate marketing, and helps them learn the basics.

Now, if you’re already an Amazon Associate, you can put your own affiliate links onto your lenses, and potentially earn more revenue. The basic rate for an associate is 4%, which is no better than what you would get if you used the Squidoo modules instead. However, if you can sell just 7 items in a month, you commission will go up to 6%! The more items you can sell, the more revenue you will make.

So, how do you add your own affiliate links? Continue reading “Being an Amazon Associate on Squidoo”