I am not a work at home dad or mom for that matter – I don’t have all the time in the world to spend on Squidoo. I do this in addition to my 16 hour day job. At the end of the day there is not much time left for me to spend on Squidoo. This is why I use the 80-20 rule. I spend 80% of my time doing the most important things – which is keyword research and lens building. You can even outsource the lens building part and only focus on keyword research if you have still lesser time. Everything else I can find either another person or another tool to do for me.

You may want to ask me – Is this the way I started out on Squidoo? No!! I did all the steps right from keyword research to lensbuilding to SEO in a painstakingly slow manual manner. But it was worth every drop of sweat. This is grass root training. Only when you have done each and every task yourself – will you be able to appreciate the value of either outsourcing it or automating it. So why are so many folks against spending money to earn money on Squidoo. Why is there so much noise when people talk about tools. Perhaps people think its sinister or evil. In fact-its just plain technology.

I started looking at Squidoo as a business a long time ago. From that day onwards as a businessman, I knew I had to invest some capital, take some risks to make things work. At worst – I could lose some money in the process – but that was a risk I was willing to take. Should you be doing the same? I am not going to make that decision for you. I will tell you what I did and I will let you decide for yourself if you think you can adopt some of these techniques.

Do you want to know what are the things that I outsource or automate – here they go. But before that let me warn you again, I am not claiming that any of these are magic pills. In fact if you are looking to find one below – I’d rather say good-bye now, cause you are not going to find one. You will have to make each of these work for you. There is no push button solution (well except one tool). I will show you that push button solution – that will help you automate one tiny task of the entire lensbuilding, maintaining routine. But that’s just one small task. For all the others – you need to understand what they do and if you think the value is more than its price, then you can go ahead and make your own choice. Okay. Enough rambling now and lets cut to the chase.

1. Keyword Research. – No I didn’t outsource this one and I urge you not to do the same as well. If you could pick just one piece of this whole puzzle to do for yourself – then it has to be this one. But what I did find along the way were tools that did speed up my keyword research like a zillion times and did all the grunt work of competition analysis. I just had to pop in one phrase. I would get all the lowdown with the search volumes, all other related keywords and competition analysis. Searching a keyword on the Google External Keyword tool is easy – but analyzing whether the competition is beatable is always a tough ask for a newbie or even veterans. I’ve been wrong several times. Keywords which I though it should be easy to rank for took me a whole lot of time to rank for. That’s when a few years back I came across this tool – which lifted a whole burden off my shoulders. I could now evaluate literally 10-20 times more niches that I could do earlier. I also found many more niches which I wouldn’t have otherwise while doing it manually.

This tool is Micro Niche Finder.

Its not too cheap ($97) – but it’s a one-time cost. There are a couple of other similar products in the market – but in my view MNF is the best. Yes this is an affiliate link. If you purchase the product via this link I may make a small commission. However if there was one tool I would urge you to get if you are really serious about not just Squidoo but internet marketing in general and you want to like set up 500 lenses and /or 100 websites – then you have to get this tool in your arsenal. If you are the casual browser doing just 1-2 lenses a month – then don’t bother – the free Google Keyword tool will do just fine and if you want to learn competition analysis (the free- quick and dirty version) –just optin to this blog’s newsletter and you can download my free e-book which has a chapter on this subject. Here the link again in case you want to check it out Micro Niche Finder.

2. Lens Building: This is a taboo subject and many of you will not like this. But this is my business and this is what I do as well. About a year back I decided that I had a ton of ideas in my head but no time on hand to execute those ideas. What if I found someone who was able to execute those ideas just as I had imagined them. I started looking around and found a brilliant lensmaster (a Giant Squid at that) who was looking for work. I struck a deal for 100 lenses. I eventually ended up doing 60 odd lenses. You must be thinking – oh that would have cost a fortune – you’d be surprised. I got them for $6 a lens. Ofcouse I had to provide some content for each lens – but everything right from choosing the theme, to the images, modules, etc – everything was done by this lensmaster.

In the end I got 60 lenses for $240- Six months later this account was bringing in $100 a month. Its now bringing in close to $170 a month – with a whole bunch of lenses in tier 2 and a few moving in and out of tier 1. Its upto to you to decide.  If you are doing a full time day job like me and have brilliant ideas just confined to a word document on your laptop or that little black notebook by your bedside – just wake up and smell the coffee. As long as the content is great – it doesn’t matter if you have not built it yourself. Think of yourself as the architect who has designed a great building. The actual work would be done by the construction staff or labourers – but it will still be considered your piece of art.

That’s one way to look at it. You may like this analogy or you may not. The truth of the matter is that one year since I did this outsourcing gig. I have already made close to $1000 and am going to cross $200 a month pretty soon. That will make it an annual income of $2400 from this one account – All this for a swallowing a bit of my pride and spending $240. But remember I am not making this money just because I spent $240. The real winner were the keyword ideas that I had come up with and my directions as to how I wanted the lens to be built and ofcourse the brilliant execution by the lensmaster who built it for me. Think about it!

3. Backlink Building: Again another topic where one gets really hammered in the squidu forums if you talk about paid tools. But if you step our of your comfortable little nook on Squidoo and get into the internet marketing forums – you will realize that the maximum amount of money is spent by internet marketers on some tool which will automate their backlinking process. Now don’t give me that “Content is King” look. Well Yeah but even the King must wear some clothes while walking into his kingdom – else you will find a kid screaming out the “Emperor has no clothes”.  Just as the Emperor needs clothes,  good content also needs good backlinks.

Do you want your lenses to rank high? Then you definitely need backlinks. I am not going to give you a lecture here on the importance of backlinks –there are enough resources in the internet to help you with that. Time and again you would have heard on the forums that the best backlinks are between your squidoo lenses and from your own niche blogs. This is good advice. Do that by all means. But think about this. Are you going to be writing in one niche or 25. If you are a 1 niche person, then niche blog and interlinking is the way to go. Over a period of time your niche blog will gain some PR and will help all your lenses. If you are anything like me, where I am looking at 20-30 niches instead of one – I really don’t have the time to start and maintain 20 or 30 niche blogs. So I need to find other sources of backlinking. Interlinking lenses will get you through in some of easier niches- but if you want to be talking big money (read tier 1), you’ve gotta stop acting like a chicken and look at some serious linkbuilding techniques.

You’ve probably heard this several times that you should choose keywords with low competition. I’ve said that too in the past and have actually done that. But overtime I’ve realized everybody is doing that. So lenses which got enough traffic to reach tier 1 6 months back are struggling to retain tier 2 now, although they are still pulling in the same amount of traffic. Whats changed ? Competition on Squidoo. What this means is that you’ve got to graduate from the easy competition niches in to the medium to difficult niches – which have much more search volume and hence much more competition as well. It will probably take you 4-5 times more effort to rank these lenses high in the search engines and probably more than double the time. But think again – this is a business – you will have to give some time to make big money. If you want to get into the big league then you will need some linkbuilding firepower. The easy ones wont cut it.

This is however one big bad world in internet marketing with too many shiny objects vying for your attention. I have fallen prey to several such objects. But there’s one tool which I’ve stuck with for all these years and that’s Unique Article Wizard This is an article submission tool which will generate sufficiently unique articles from the content you submit through their process and will distribute this to their network of sites.

Let me warn you that this tool will work for you only if you make it work for you. Don’t just expect to buy the subscription and make just one submission a month. Aim to make several submissions per squidoo lens and over time (not overnight!) – you will begin to see it’s magic work through. Actually its not magic, you are basically building links on their article network – which google will over time index and with each passing day your lens will be earning some backlinks from different sites. Some links will show up, some wont and hence consistency in submission is the key. Creating 1 submission in my view shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. But those 30 minutes of work can be multiplied manifold and translated into links though Unique Article Wizard or UAW as its popularly known. If MNF quadrupled my productivity in terms of ideas, UAW more than doubled my income. Tier 3’s became tier 2s and tier 2s became tier 1s.

Its not very cheap and not very expensive either. It’s a monthly subscription though for $67. To recover this you should get maybe 7-8 lenses into tier 2 or 1-2 lenses into tier 1. Look at your current portfolio of lenses. Evaluate whether those lenses have reached top rankings in Google or Bing for their main keywords and if they do what is going to mean in terms of tier payouts. If you feel there is sufficient potential in your lenses to go to the upper tiers and make that additional $67 a month, then this is a call you have to take. Ofcourse if you are expanding your horizons beyond just squidoo and starting your own network of sites – then it’s a no brainer – you are eventually going to need an article submission services and this is one of the oldest and most efficient networks. Check out UAW here and give it a go!

4. Push Button Solution: This is what I promised you earlier. Watch this video. This is automatically refreshing and republishing each of my lenses at the click of one button. I do this once every 10-15 days to keep my lenses fresh.

This is a simple firefox plugin called imacro that you need to use. Once you install imacro – use the record function and manually edit and publish a couple of lenses. This will generate the basic code of the program. Then all you need to do is edit that program and copy paste the code a multiple number of times depending the number of lenses you have. The basic code will look something like this.

TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Edit
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Publish
Wait Seconds=5
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Dashboard
Wait Seconds=5
TAG POS=2 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Edit
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Publish
Wait Seconds=5
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Dashboard
Wait Seconds=5
TAG POS=3 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Edit
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Publish

If you notice the sequence – the macro searches the Edit button to go to the workshop mode and then hits publish and returns back to dashboard. For the rows where the macro is searching the EDIT button – you need to keep changing the Tag position. Tag Position 1 refers to Lens 1, position 2 is Lens 2 and so on. So if you have 50 lenses, you will need to extend this code until 50 tag positions. If you are afraid of code, then the other alternative is to manually edit and publish all your lenses while recording the whole session. But that will be too painful, if you have too many lenses.

Conclusion

Its yours for the taking. You decide if you want to use automation and outsourcing to multiply your productivity.  I am simply using the principle of leveraging. If i can use tools and people to leverage the amount of work I do and multiply it manifold, then my income is also going to increase manifold.

Give it a thought and I would love to hear your comments.

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