Squidoo Guide – How to Squidoo

You already know that the Squidoo is a popular marketing web 2.0 catalog. A lot of internet marketers emphasize the importance of utilizing Squidoo because it has attained authority in Google’s Eyes and the lenses that most users create can rank well in the search engines.

You can create a simple lens in a matter of minutes and add sorts of modules so you can display it to be more interesting and encourage the readers to interact in your lens.

Users can rate lenses, leave feedbacks and add them as favorites. The essential effect of these things is very beneficial because if other people would see that your lens has a high rate and ranking, then they will trust you and get quite willing to purchase whatever you have to offer.

A trick that you can do to this is to create several Squidoo accounts and rate your own lenses so you can gain higher rankings and thus, get more traffic.

However, one downside to the Squidoo lens is that it has a very low click-out rates. Although the people behind Squidoo have done everything possible to keep people on Squidoo, or to get them to click-out through the Adsense ads so that they can make money.

The Modules:

As you probably know, Squidoo has a lot of modules that you can add to the lens in order to allow extra user interaction, to share more information and to add fun to the content.

There are so many modules on Squidoo that I don’t even know what they all do. Squidoo adds more modules as time goes on, so I don’t think I will ever figure out what they all do. However, knowing what they all do is not that really necessary at all.

The “Featured Lenses” Module: With this module you can add more lenses created by you that are related to that lens. That way if they want more information related to that subject, they have the option of going to one of your other lenses.

The “Text Module” Module: This is the most basic module and it allows you to add a basic text module to your Squidoo lens. This is good for adding more articles to your lens. HTML is allowed in this module, so you can add links, pictures, etc.

The “Big Arrow Link” Module: The Big Arrow Link module allows you to put more focus on a specific link. It has two big arrows pointing to a link, in which you will obviously place your affiliate link or a link to a pre-sell page, review page, opt-in page, or your own sales page. (Increases click-out rates)

The “Blackbox” Module: This module is just a big black box with a title and description of your choice. You can use this to display a specific point you are trying to get across, or you can even include a link to the page you are promoting. It stands out from the other modules and draws attention to it. (Increases click-outs if you include a link in the description)

The “Talk Bubble” Module: This module does not allow you to include many characters, but you can put in small quotes that stand out. Put little notes that you want people to remember in these so that people skimming the page will see it and remember it.

“The Most Important Thing” Module: The Most Important Thing places an orange box around the text, so it stands out. You want to put “the most important thing” in here, as people skimming the page will see it and read it first, and are much more likely to remember whatever you put here.

These are the most important modules, and many of them will help you to increase your click-out rates and make your module more appealing, so people are more likely to actually read your lens.

Claiming Domains:

When choosing a name for your Squidoo lens you need to have your keywords in your domain. Once you have determined what keywords you are going to target, it is wise to go and claim the domains with the keywords in the URLs before someone else does.

To get maximum effect out of Squidoo, your Squidoo URL must contain your keywords. For this reason you should claim the URLs immediately, even if you are not going to create the lenses right away.

This is especially important for new products and new trends that emerge. If you are can claim the major keywords before anyone else does, then you can outrank others. Claim your domains for all the major keywords and it will be easier for you to outrank your competitors.

If you are ok with being mean to your competitors, you can claim the domain with just the keywords, with hyphens between the words (for keywords longer than one word), and with hyphens between just a few of the words. These are the domains your competitors will want, as they will rank the best. If you claim all of these domains (even if you don’t use them), then your competitors will be left having to add letters and numbers to the end of their keywords and they will not be able to rank as easily.

“Force” Visitors to Leave:

As said earlier, Squidoo lenses have a very low click-out rate. So when creating your Squidoo lens, it is important to do everything you can to get people off the lens through your links. If you don’t specifically attempt to get people off your lens, then they will not click on your links and they will most likely click on the Adsense or go look at other lenses on Squidoo.

There are a few things you can do to “force” people to leave your lens through your links. The first thing that you can do is to make sure to include a link to your website or blog in EVERY text module. Yes, it makes the links do very little for ranking your main page, and it may appear a little bit spammy, but it helps get people to your site, where you can then make sales, which is the whole point of this process.

The next thing to do is to always include the modules stated above, especially the Blackbox and Big Arrow Link modules. These catch the users attention and give the visitor a link to get off the page to something that will hopefully solve whatever problems they are having.

The third thing you can do is make every picture on the lens clickable. I know Squidoo gives you the option to upload a picture with the text modules, but they are not clickable, and people LOVE to click on pictures. So instead of using the option Squidoo provides to upload a picture, use HTML to insert a clickable picture that will take the visitor to your site.

If you do not know how to do the HTML, then simply use a WordPress blog and insert a picture with a link in it, and then copy the HTML that WordPress automatically creates and paste it into the text module.

If you do these three things, your click-out rates will increase dramatically, and you will make more sales from your Squidoo lenses.