Give Your Squidcasts More Legs
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)…
To begin with, there is this digest of (almost) All the Squidcasts from Squidoo. Here you can get a glimpse of what other Lensmasters are working on, and you’ll get the opportunity to discover new lenses you might not have seen before. (This will also help the search engines to find new lenses too).
These casts used to be posted directly to @squidcasts on Twitter, but I removed this functionality because the tweet rate was too high. All you’ll get now from @squidcasts are the official blog posts from Squidoo, SquidU and Lens of the Day. You might like to follow @squidoonews too.
Next up, you can get your own personal RSS feed containing all of the squidcasts that you have sent out; get this from the Lensmaster Feeds page once you are logged in. You can put this feed on your blog or Lensography, so that your visitors can see all your latest news. You can also syndicate this feed elsewhere too, to get more exposure and links to your lenses.
(Tip: use TwitterFeed turn your casts into tweets).
Last, there is an RSS feed for you with all the squidcasts from your favorite lenses; get this from the Lensmaster Feeds page too. This is not intended for syndication, just for personal use. Subscribe to this feed with your favorite RSS aggregator, such as Google Reader or BlogLines, and keep up-to-date with any news the Lensmasters send out. Unfortunately, you won’t get casts from any fanclubs you’ve joined. Hopefully this will be provided directly by Squidoo one day.
Now that your Squidcasts are being seen by more people, these tips will help you take maximum advantage from them:
- Make sure your titles are good ones. The title of each cast will link back to your lens, and search engines will use that as a factor when ranking your lens.
- Be News Worthy! You should only sent out a cast when you have some exciting news, or have made a significant change to your lens.
- Your message can be up to 500 characters long – make the most of it!
- Don’t assume that everyone reading the cast has favorited the lens. People who have joined your fan club will also see it, but might have not ever been to your lens before. Use your cast to invite people to visits your lens, both again and for the first time.
- Jazz up your casts with some Basic HTML, using bold, italics and links.
- Remember to “Preview your cast” - you can’t edit it once it’s sent.
Finally, here are some lenses with more tips on Squidcasting:
Happy casting!
Related posts:
A very good article about the use of squidcasts. In fact squidcasts can be much more than they are mostly used for.
And thank you for linking to my lens.
Thanks for the tips. I really need some tips when it comes to RSS feeds. This was helpful! And, thanks for putting links to lenses that cover the topic!
Susie
This is one of those big posts/lectures that I have to read a few times before I can fully understand it and think of a way to implement things into my Squidooing. Thank you for loads of great info – I’ll be back more often from now on!
Thanks for pointing this out in the forums!