Squidoo lenses are, as we’ve already seen, a great adjunct to your blog. They can provide numerous promotional and money making benefits externally from your blogging platform to give you an edge over your competitors who do not use them.

There are still one or two tricks with Squidoo that we haven’t covered here yet. Well, tricks isn’t really the right word for them, as they’re more like clever but at the same time simple techniques that will increase your lenses usefulness to your overall online business.

One of these has to do with the actual promotion of your lenses themselves. Remember, the more popular your lenses are, the more traffic they will send to your blog(s) which will increase their rankings and make them more attractive to external advertisers.

So it’s all part of the money-go-round:

1. Blog owner wants to make money
2. Blog needs to attract advertisers
3. Advertisers need to see blog as attractive in terms of high traffic
4. Lens creates traffic to blog
5. But lens needs promoting to increase its own rank and therefore traffic

Well, Monika has already shown us how to use keywords to push your lenses up to the high pages in the search engines. We also know that using social networking to plug our lenses also drives traffic there. We can also send some very targeted visitors over from forums we belong to.

But we still need a bit more and can do a bit more to help ourselves, because let’s face it, external traffic can sometimes be somewhat unreliable.

Here’s a way of doing that in addition to the usual avenues of promotion. I’ll call it internal promotion, or do-it-yourself bumping up! To do this, you need your own self hosted blog.

The reason?

You need multiple domains in order to own several professional email accounts. You don’t need many, four or five is enough.

Oh, did I mention you will also need a lot of time and patience to do a lot of writing? Well, better be prepared to work hard at this!

Then you create four or five separate accounts with Squidoo using a different email account address and user name for each one. In each account you should then create at least one lens, but two or three or more is better. Remember, each lens must be populated with a good deal of original content and it has to be informative and interesting or you are just spamming and no one likes that. It’s also a good idea if the lenses are all loosely connected to the same niche, although if you have multiple blogs in different niches, they should all be catered for with a lens or two each.

Once your lenses are content rich, which should also include keyword rich but not keyword stuffed - between 1% and 5% keyword density is ok, then you can move on to the next step.

Each lens should link directly to all of your blogs that match it’s niche. That way you create a network of one-way links to your blogs. Very good for search engine Page Rank.

DO NOT link back to you lenses from your blogs or you will nullify the technique.

Then you have to work out a circular series of links between all of your lenses. For example, Lens-1 links to Lens-2, then Lens-2 links to Lens-3… etc always link forwards and not backwards. That way all of your lenses gain one-way links too, improving their chances of a decent ranking with the search engines.

With Squidoo, you’ll need to keep all the lenses as current as possible, which will mean updating them as often as daily if possible. That’s another reason not to create too many of them! That way, you’ll achieve a reasonably good internal Squidoo ranking for your lenses. But to increase that internal ranking, you need to show traffic visiting those lenses. Better if it comes from within Squidoo.

How do you do that, especially as Squidoo is now penalising members who exchange links, ie I’ll rate yours if you rate mine?

That’s where your multiple accounts come in.

You log in as account-1 and visit all your lenses not in that account. Then you log in as account-2 and go visit all your lenses not in that account. Then account-3… etc. That creates a small handful of unique internal (Squidoo member) visitors to each of your lenses which is enough to tilt the balance in your favour. It keeps the visitor momentum going in order to get your lenses high enough in the search engines so that traffic eventually becomes self-perpetuating.

So there you have it. It’s not underhand or devious.

Just usin’ your noggin!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

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Filed under: Internet Marketing