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.

I must admit here that I love planning more than implementing. I can spend hours and hours in planning my moves for the next week, month and even years. When It comes to implementing them though, I have miles to go. Having said that – planning is very essential if you want to meet your goals and that is true even for Squidoo.

Let me give you some insights on what are the areas that you need to think and plan about while hanging around on Squidoo.

Lens Ideas :This is where you should be spending significant time thinking ahead. Jot down all the lens ideas that you get in a place where you can conveniently review them. Schedule a couple of hours on a weekend or whenever you can focus and get down to evaluating whether those ideas make the cut. You should be doing keyword research, competition analysis , check for available URLs, grab those URLs while still available and basically set yourself up for the next month or next quarter.

Lens Creation : This ofcourse is an independent style and I am not going to get into how you should you should build your lenses but you should evaluate how many hours per week you can dedicate to Squidoo and allocate a certain time to lens building. Set yourself targets – you have to complete x number of lenses per week. Have monthly lensmaking targets or quarterly if you prefer. IF you have a number in mind, it will keep you going.

Lens Promotion: Plan your lens promotion as well. How many articles you are going to write? Where are you going to submit those articles, what keywords you will use as anchor text? Will you require a niche blog for this lens, which are your other lenses from which you can link to these lenses

You can plan the entire lifecycle of the lens building process well in advance. That will give you a good understanding of your goals and will help you fight procrastination and keep you on track. This is the way I plan my lens building.
I would love to hear how you go about planning your time on Squidoo.

Show me your plan to succeed on Squidoo.

If you are done and dusted with the more basic link building techniques –its time to try something more exotic – like a Linkwheel.

A Linkwheel is nothing but an interconnected network of webpages where you try to not only link to your money page (in our case – a Squidoo Lens), but also link to each member of the linkwheel. Thus you are passing on pagerank and authority(linkjuice) to other members of the linkwheel – thus building the value of each of those web properties.

A Simple Linkwheel is shown in the diagram below

Here’s how this linkwheel works. You will need 6 unique articles or blogposts on your niche. You will post these articles on each of the 6 different blogs/web 2.0 properties shown in the diagram above. In each article there will be two outbound links.

The Orange Link – These are the links which are pointing to the Squidoo lens. Each of the articles will contain 1 link with your desired anchor text and will point to your lens

The Black Link – These articles will contain an additional link which shall point towards the neighbouring blog/web 2.0 property in the linkwheel. For example – as you can see from the above diagram – Tumblr links to Livejournal. Livejournal in turn links to Typepad. This series goes on until you reach Blogger.

Each passing neighbour in the Linkwheel is gaining from a backlink. So the links pointing to your Squidoo lenses are also suitably enhanced in page rank and authority. You’ve probably noticed that we haven’t closed the loop with Blogger linking back to Tumblr. I prefer it that way – since you’ve divided your link juice in different proportions across all your properties. The blogger page will have the maximum link juice since it has a chain a 5 sites indirectly linking to it.

What we are trying to do via a linkwheel is to add more fuel to your linkbuilding process. Instead of having just one blog link point to your lens – we are having a bunch of blogs/web 2.0 sites linking to both your lens and one another thus juicing up all the links you are receiving. This is one of the most basic examples of building a linkwheel. There are many more advanced kinds of linkwheels that you can build and it need not necessary be a wheel – it could be a bunch of webpages all cross linking to one another and also linking to your Squidoo lens. This would help in keeping the search engines from identifying that all the pages belong to the same author.

This brings us to the end of this 5 part series on SEO for Squidoo. In cased you’ve missed the earlier parts you can check them out here
Part 1 – Keyword Research for Squidoo
Part 2 – On-page SEO for Squidoo
Part 3 – Off-page SEO for Squidoo
Part 4 – Building Links within Squidoo

In Part 3 you learnt about Off-page SEO for Squidoo. You’ve probably realized by now that building links is one of the cornerstones of SEO that will help get your Squidoo lenses ranked well in the Search engines.

You don’t have to look much beyond Squidoo to get started on your linkbuilding strategy. Here are 4 ideas to build links within Squidoo itself that will help you kickstart your backlinking plan:

These are ideas you can put to use today and get some quick links to your Squidoo lenses.

In Part 5 -which will be the final post in this series– we shall talk about some advanced link building techniques called Linkwheels.

Welcome to Part 3 of our on-going Squidoo SEO series. In Part 1 and Part 2, we discussed keyword research and On-page SEO. It is now time to focus on our next key element and that is Off-page SEO. I am sure that you must or have seen or read about these ideas a multitude of times on the internet and what I am about to tell you ain’t entirely new. So there is not going to be any magic pill here. This is where the grunt work lies. The blood, sweat and toil of making money online. Of course if you’re already making enough money, you can hire some outsourcers to do this for you or buy some tools to make life easier. But you’ve got to do this.

There’s always a silver lining though. If your topics are in a niche where the competition isn’t too high, then you will be surprised that you will start to rank high in the search engines even without building a single link. That’s the power of the Squidoo domain. Try doing that on your own domain and you’ll realize what kind of punch the Squidoo domain packs in. In some niches you’ll get by with a few links.

But you’re here to make money right – so you gotta go where the money is and where there is more money there HAS to be MORE COMPETITION. At some point or the other in your Squidoo career you will realize that you have to go after some competitive keywords. Everyone loves a challenge.

Off-page SEO is mainly about building backlinks to your lens with your chosen anchor text (keywords that you want to rank for).

Enough talk now and lets get down to business. These are my top 3 favourite methods of backlink building. These are not the only ways – but my preferred ways.
1. Article Marketing
2. Blogs/Web 2.0 properties
3. Social Bookmarking

Yes. Its this simple. Not easy but simple. There’s another one which works well too. Create awesome content that people will want to link to. But that is something I am assuming you will do and again even if we have awesome content, we can’t just sit back and pray that people will start noticing it on their own and start linking to it. We have to set the ball in motion. Once you get your lens out there in public view, if your content is good enough, surely people will want to and will link to your lenses.

Coming back to my favourite methods

1. Article marketing: This simply means that you have to write a great quality article of 300-400 words and submit it to the top article directories. You will have to do this manually when you begin. In fact I recommend that you do, just so that you get the hang of things. Later on, if and when you decide to buy some tools, you will be able to appreciate how much those tools can do for you and whether that is worth the price they are asking for.

2. Blogs/Web 2.0 properties: Starting a free blog today is one of the easiest things to do. So go ahead and do it. Start a niche blog on your lens topic and keep posting short articles from time to time and use good anchor text to link back to your lenses. Relevant in-content links are more powerful that links from article directories which are usually found at the bottom of the article. The popular blogging sites are blogger, wordpress and typepad – just to name a few.Plus there are also other web 2.0 properties like Squidoo which you can also use to create backlinks to your lenses – Hubpages, Bukisa, Xomba, etc.

3. Social Bookmarking: Don’t go too overboard on this. Its not the most effective form of link building but certainly one of the easiest and should be a part of your link building strategies. I use some paid tools now to do my bookmarking – but that’s because I have a whole bunch of lenses and other sites that I need to link to. To begin with I started doing these manually and over time found out a few sites which would help automate this task for FREE. Do check out this blog post about this social bookmarking tool.

VARY YOUR ANCHOR TEXT

This is another golden rule that you must follow in your link-building campaign. Although you will have a few chosen keywords that you want a particular lens to rank for. It is important to vary your anchor text. In my view, you could do with 60-70% of links with main keywords and 30-40% with related keywords. Let me give you an example. Say you’ve built a lens about Chocolate Cake and you are trying to rank for the keywords
• Chocolate Cake; and
• Chocolate Cake Recipe

You will link to your lens using the above phrases as anchor text about 60-70% of the time. For the other links you can vary your anchor text by using other related keywords such as

• Chocolate Cake Recipes
• How to make Chocolate Cake
• Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe
• Homemade Choco Cake
• Simple Recipe for Chocolate Cake

Do you get the drift?

DO IT GRADUALLY

Link building is best done gradually. I don’t want to you spend one marathon weekend where you go on a link building spree and create 50-60 links to your lens in one go. Ideally you would like to mix it up a bit. Keep going steadily. Make a linkbuilding plan and plan out your entire linkbuilding stratregy for a month. Then let go. Keep a tab on your rankings and revisit your lens in a months time. See how your search engine rankings have improved and then go in for a second round of link building. Check back in another couple of weeks.

Yup – I told you, it was simple –but not so easy. The tougher the competition – the more time it will take to get there. But hang in there. Keep a tab on your progress and keep working on it.

The key thing is to keep building those lenses. Once you’re done with an initial round of promotion for a lens – let it take its own course. Go and build a bunch of new lenses in the meantime.

Hope you enjoyed this part. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and I shall be glad to answer your questions.

Our next part will focus on some easy links that you can build within Squidoo itself. Watch out for Part 4. If you have missed the previous parts, check them out here

Part 1 – Keyword Research for Squidoo

Part 2 – On-Page SEO for Squidoo

On page SEO for Squidoo is one of the easier components of the entire optimization work that you need to do for your lens. Why I say it is easier, is because most of the backend work is already done by Squidoo. If you were building your own website, then we would have to take about title tags, header tags, meta description and a whole bunch of other jargon that I don’t want to bore you with.

So lets get down to business. What in the world is On page SEO?

In very simple words – it is the stuff “ON” your page (or lens) which the search engines crawl through and try to decipher what the page is all about. It is your job through On page SEO to “help” the search engines in this task. In earlier days, the term “help” was easily replaced by “manipulate”. But as days go by, search engines are getting freakishly more human-like and see through most of the manipulations. So we stick to our credo – which is “Helping the Search Engines”.

Helping the Search Engines – How do we do that?

Different Search engines have their own ways of analyzing a webpage – but there are certain “sweet spots” on your page which most search engines look at and lend more emphasis on. It is going to be our endeavour to ensure that we place our main keywords for our lens in these key spots on our page. That’s the crux of On-page SEO. We need to make sure that we don’t overdo it – since that could be considered as “keyword stuffing” which the search engines do not like.

Where can I find these sweet spots?

A. Text
1. URL of the Lens
2. Title of the Lens
3. Title of Introduction Module
4. Introduction Module Text
5. Titles /Subtitles of all other modules

B. Images

TEXT
You need to place your keywords in all the areas that are mentioned in #1 to #5 above. However what is important that you try to write for your readers. Make the Lens title appealing. Keep your module titles exciting. Use synonyms and variations of your keywords so as to not sound repetitive throughout the lens.

For example – if your main keyword is apple pie recipe, consider the following titles
- Delicious Homemade Apple Pie Recipe
- How to make yummy Apple Pie
- Best Apple Pie Recipe ever

Get the drift? Try incorporating the keywords in your titles without sounding boring.

As I said at the beginning of this post, Squidoo has done all the hardwork for you by incorporating the code into their modules. So what you actually see as module titles are “header tags”. Your introduction text is the “meta description”.

So without getting too concerned about jargon – just ensure that you have your main keyword of their variations in the key areas I showed you. Go for your main keyword in your URL though !

IMAGES

Although the search engines may be eventually able to read as humans – they still aren’t able to see as we can. Once again our buzz word – “Helping the search engines”. We can help the search engines by naming our image file appropriately and adding a good “alt” tag.

As an example – an image file named, “apple-pie.jpg” will always be a better choice than “D00epu88.jpg”. I always prefer using hyphens while naming my images and I guess the search engines love it that way too.

If you are hosting your images on sites like Photobucket or your own servers, you will have to use the tag to insert your pictures. It also gives you the flexibility to add an “alt” tag to your images.

See example

<img src="urlofphotosite/apple-pie.jpg" alt="apple pie recipe"></img>

This will help the search engines to know what your images are all about. Don’t let this opportunity go by. Its one of the more tedious tasks, I know. I have been lazy in doing this for many of my lenses. But the ones I have done it on, it has also brought me traffic through the image searches. So it can turn out to be a dual advantage.

To sum up – For On-page SEO on Squidoo – ensure that you have your keywords in all the right spots and make sure that your images have good naming conventions and relevant alt tags.

Our next stop is going to Off Page SEO for Squidoo in Part 3 of this Series. If you haven’t checked out Part I you can do so here

PART 1

image courtesy Paloma Gomez via CC 2.0

Well begun is half done – goes the age old saying. In Internet marketing – it’s more than half the work. When I first joined Squidoo, I just started writing about what I liked, which was some book reviews and some recipes. After about a month and zero visits I got disillusioned and got bored of Squidoo. I came back after a year and this time did some more digging around and studying and found the Holy Grail – Ok that’s exaggeration! – But I realized the missing ingredient in my recipes (pun intended) if you will.

I wasn’t doing any Keyword Research. I didn’t know what words should I use in my URL, on my lenses and how many people were actively looking for information on the topics I wrote about. There was a moment when a bulb went off in my head and I realized that this was something I had to do even before I started building my lenses. I can now proudly say that this has been the main difference between earning a few cents in my entire first year on Squidoo and now doing more than $500 per month.

So what is keyword research all about? Let put it down here very simply without any jargon.

All we are trying to ascertain here is two things – AUDIENCE & COMPETITION

AUDIENCE

Are there enough people online who are interested in the topic I intend to write about and if so what are the words they type into the search engine to find information about this subject?

Put yourself in your potential readers’ shoes and think about what you would type into the search engine to get information. Now for the magic button (I know you’re looking for one). Fire up the Google Keyword Tool and type in your keyword or search phrase and the tool will throw up a bunch of related keywords and their monthly search volumes. You need to first calibrate your search by selecting the “exact search” option which you will find on your left sidebar. This is it. You now know how many people are searching for each of those keywords.

This was the easy part. It’s like your first day on college when you see a bunch of attractive, good-looking potential mates. But before you go ahead- you need to look over your shoulder to see if you are being followed by the prom queen of the football captain. Yup – I am talking about your competition.

COMPETITION

You need to figure out who you are taking on. Its one thing to think of yourself as David and wanting to take on Goliath – but if you are a newbie, I’d recommend you to choose your battles wisely. You need to take on somebody your size and play in the kiddies pool for a while before you graduate on to bigger things.
For a detailed case-study on how to do keyword research effectively using free tools, please subscribe to my blog newsletter and get a free copy of my e-book – How To Craft Elegant Money Spinning Lenses on Squidoo.

We will talk about “On page SEO” for Squidoo in PART 2 of this series!

Image courtesy Danard Vincente via CC by 2.0

If you’ve ever dabbled in the stock markets and felt the rhythm of your heartbeats swing to the dance of the stock prices, you will concur with me that you experience a similar rush each day when you see the lensrank updates.

Among others, I know the experience of the exuberant head rush when you see a tier 3 lens suddenly jump up 20000 or 30000 places and have enjoyed the ecstatic squeal of joy when a lens finally hits Tier 1. This is perhaps a question most often asked around on Squidoo.

What the heck is Lensrank all about?
A one line answer – is that it’s a nifty little algorithm that takes into account dozens of factors to determine the overall lensrank. But based on my experience if I were asked to select the top 5 factors that influence Lensrank, then I would list out these ones.

#1 – Traffic
This one is actually a no-brainer. If you don’t have traffic, then you can say good-bye to a healthy lensrank. How to get good traffic? Now that’s a whole different tutorial altogether. But based on my experiences on Squidoo over the past 3 years, consistent traffic is one of the single most important criteria to improve your lensrank

#2 – Clickouts
This is another important factor that affects lensrank. I’ve seen this innumerable times and I can vouch for the fact that if two lenses have identical traffic but one of them has a high click through rate (CTR), the one with the higher CTR will always outrank the other. In fact in some cases I have noticed that lenses with lesser traffic but significantly higher CTR easily outrank higher traffic lenses with low CTR.

#3 – Sales – Amazon/EBay
You can get all the visits you want with superb clickouts, but at the end of the day if a lens does sales it will beat another lens having more than 3-4 times the traffic that the sales lens does.

#4 – Frequency of Updates
This one is a tricky one. There is only so much updating you can keep doing on a lens. The trick that I use is to incorporate a blog search module on each lens and republish the lens on a periodic basis – usually 10-15 days. This keeps it fresh and the lensrank supported. To do this manually really sucks and it took me several months to figure out a way to automate this – which I now have. So now updating all my lenses is just a breeze.

#5 – Interaction on your lenses
Interaction on your lenses would mean likes, angel blessings, votes, comments etc. It is great to have activity on your lenses as it helps your lensrank. But in most cases it is a temporary boost and hence I don’t worry too much about it. All I do is include a guestbook and a poll – if it is relevant to the lens. If it’s a new lens I include a link with anchor text in the “Critique Me” section of the Squidu Forum. But I don’t really concentrate too much on getting likes or blessings and let my lenses take their normal course. I’d rather focus on building links and getting more traffic to my lenses.

These 5 are in my view the top factors affecting Squidoo Lensrank.

Building Squidoo lenses are fun. Building backlinks to those lenses…not so much.

If you are like me , then you hate building backlinks as much I do. However, I know that this is the single most important thing I need to do if I want my sites to rank higher in the search engines. I am always on the lookout for systems that can help me build more links in little or no time. The less time I spend on link building, the more time I have do my keyword research and keep building new lenses.

You’ve probably heard about Social Bookmarking and you know that you should build some bookmarking links to your Squidoo lenses in addition to the other link building efforts that you currently do. However this work is time consuming and bookmarking links are not that powerful to merit spending so much time. But what if I tell you that for as little as 5 minutes per day – you can get 150-200 Free Social Bookmarking links per month!

This is a complete whitehat link building solution and the name of this website is SocialAdr.com

Did I catch your attention? Then read on.

You have both paid and free options , but let’s discuss the free one for now. This site currently supports 18 social bookmarking sites. When you sign up for the free account – you will be required to set up accounts on all these 18 sites. Now they do have a very inexpensive option where they can do this registration for you. But unless you are extremely lazy or have extra cash to spare – I recommend that you take 30-40 minutes to do it yourself. Once you’re all set up –all you have to login in each day and push one button and you are eligible for 5-8 links per day.

Let me explain how this works

This site is a based on a community of users. Each day you login you will be submitting bookmarks pertaining to other users to your set of accounts. This is not complicated. They have an option called – “Quick Share”. You don’t need to look at any of the links. Just go to the Quick Share tab. There will already be 5 links populated, just click on Quick share and you are done. Your account will be credited by about 5 credits each day.

Now all you need to do is load all your Squidoo lenses into your account. Choose your titles, descriptions and keywords and leave it in there. What’s great is the “spin” option. The titles and the descriptions are spinnable and that’s a very useful feature.

Each day after you login and hit the quick share button, your account will get it’s share of credits. One of your links will be then be pulled into the system and will be offered to others users who will submit it to their accounts. Bingo –you’ve got your 5 links for the day.

Login next day. Hit the Quick Share button. Logout. Another 5 links.

There you have it. There will be an initial couple of hours of work required to set up your accounts and load all your squidoo lenses into the account. Post that – just login each day to get your share of credits and the rest will happen on Autopilot.

And did I mention all of this was FREE. Yup it is.

So whats the catch here. The catch 5 minutes of work is still work – plus its only 5 credits a day so if you have over 50-100 lenses it may not seem much to you. That’s why they also have the paid options. The paid are basically ones where you buy the credits – so that you don’t have to login each day. Just buy the credits for the month, load your links and forget it. You will be building links on total autopilot each day.

I recommend that you try out Social ADR today and begin to get your share of free backlinks. Yes this is an affiliate link. If you do choose to go for any of the paid options, I will get a small commission. But the free one works great anyways!

Get your free backlinks NOW!

I don’t think there is any right or wrong answer here. You can treat Squidoo whichever way you please, but if you really want to make a decent sum of money ($500+) per month – then I believe you need to start treating Squidoo like a small business.

It’s a very important shift in mindset and was one of the primary reasons why I suddenly broke the $50 barrier in earnings and am now doing in excess of $500. When you think of it like a business, all of a sudden you will start looking at things differently.

If you have business, you will need to invest in it (time+capital). Most people do invest time – but quite a few are scared of investing capital.

One of my earlier realizations was that I was good at picking niches and the only thing that was holding me back was getting my lenses found. Getting them indexed was a huge challenge and it took me a couple of months in the beginning. It was then that I discover the world of backlinks and spent hours learning search engine optimization.

I soon learnt of a tool that would help submit articles on a mass scale. This tool was different –it wasn’t just blasting one article to multiple sites – but each article was significantly unique. But it was expensive (atleast back then) –at $67 a month – it was a huge investment. But I figured out that if this tool helped me getting a few lenses in to the top tiers, then I could easily recoup my investment. It was a big leap of faith. I took it and I am standing here looking back with pride at that investment. Now in hindsight, I can say that the investment was worth it. But if you are just earning about $50 a month or even lesser – making that commitment seems difficult.

This is where the “business” mindset comes into play.  Once you think of it as a business, it is much easier to convince yourself to make the investment. Having said that it is important to treat it for what it is – a “tool” to help your activities. It is not a magic bullet. It is also very easy to fall prey to the Shiny Object Syndrome.

What I would recommend is to make an investment and use it till you reap the rewards and recoup your investments. Only when you have sufficient profits should you invest in more tools. So put on your thinking cap and see what areas of your “Business” can do with some automation or tools that can help you achieve your goals.

So have you decided to make Squidoo your business yet?