Tons of New Squidoo Categories

Well, Squidoo is up to their tricks again. This time they’ve created scads and scads of new categories (which they are interchangeably calling topics). This is very cool. Let me tell you why.

1. Relevance

You know how I’m always talking about how you should make your product, and you keywords as relevant as possible. That goes for your tags as well. Each time you put a lens into a category it creates a tag. Now you will have more tags that are even MORE relevant to your lens. That’s a good thing.

2. Size

Food and Cooking is a category on Squidoo. I’m sure there are literally thousands of lenses in that category. The top 100 lenses have probably been there for a while, and my guess is it would be pretty tough to bump them out of that position. (while we don’t really spend a lot of time trying to make Squidoo’s top 100… stick with me). As the categories get smaller, there will be fewer and fewer lenses in each category. So, while it may be impossible to make the top 100 in food and cooking, it may be quite easy to make the top 10 in tv cooks and celebrity chefs. This will get you more traffic from squidoo, as well as set you up to be on other lenses that are super related ~ which can also drive traffic to your lens.

3. Relevance:

Yeah I said this once before, but this time it’s relevance in a different way. They talked about this on the Squidoo blog when they announced this change, and it’s a big deal:

Once we release this project, you will have 3 levels of categorization available to you.  In the example above, you could pick the top level topic which will be renamed to Pets & Animals. Then you can pick a subtopic, Dogs. Then a subsubtopic, Large Breed Dogs. That’s 3 levels of topical focus for your lens.

In this new scenario your lens will now sit next to other lenses about large breed dogs. That’s better for you and better for people who are looking for the information you have to provide. It means there could also be new rankings and conversations within a topic you really care about.

As you can see there are some huge benefits to this change. Now all you have to do is run over to Squidoo and change all your categories!

Now, don’t worry. For the next couple weeks they are going to make it really easy on you.They have a “bulk categorizer” in your dashboard right now. If you click the link to recategorize your lenses (you can’t miss it ~ huge ~ at the top of your dashboard) it will bring up all your lenses, with drop down menus to choose your new categories. Just click ok at the end and you’ll be good to go. No need to go to individual lenses etc.

They mentioned this tool will only be available for a couple weeks so I’d get on it. It’s going to be a bigger pain in the butt to have to go to each lens individually to do this (which you will always be able to do).

Hey guess what…

You get points for recategorizing all your lenses. So if you’re still trying to unlock the sidebar widget or other tools that are now off limits until a certain point range ~ this could do it for you. WIN.

I made a quick video to show you how to do what I just explained above. Here it is:

Well there you have it.  New categoris. Head on over to Squidoo and get yours changed today. I’ve got my work cut out for me lol. If you have questions or comments feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

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Get a Jump Start On Next Year

I’ve got too many lenses. I love to build them and I build and build and build. The problem with this is that I don’t always get around to doing all the promotion that needs to be done to make my lenses successful. I do the basics, which gets them indexed and ranked ~ some as high as the top of page 2, but with so many I just don’t have the time to do enough to get them all to page one to do the very best they can.

Here’s what I’ve decided…

I’m going to sell a few to give YOU a jump start for next year.  I’ve picked 10 of my lenses that are getting some (not a ton) of traffic from Google, and with a little love could be getting a lot more. Some of these lenses have already made sales, some even have money waiting in the dashboard.

They aren’t going to be immediate money makers, but the research has been done, the lens is built, and all you have to do is build some links. (hint… none of these have an EZA article written for them yet. That one link could probably do a lot of good)

Here are the lenses I’m willing to part with:

Bron Original Stainless Steel Mandolin Slicer

Flat Screen Computer Monitor

Glamour Dollhouse with Lights and Sounds

Boos Cutting Board

Citizen Dive Watch

Cricut 29 0001 Personal Electronic Cutting Machine

LadyBug Crib Bedding

Little Tykes Toys

XPV Super Terranator

Electric Downdraft Cooktop

So there they are…

I’m selling them as is. You’ll need to go in and change the amazon links ~ and when necessary the affiliate id in the visual call to action.

How much?

That’s the big question right?

1 lens for $75

2 lenses for $125

5 Lenses for $275

All 10 for $500

All purchases are first come first serve…

If you’d like to buy one or more of these lenses please send me an email (momtohanna [at] gmail [dot] com). I will put together an invoice for you, and you can paypal me the money ~ as well as the email address of the Squidoo account you want them sent to.

Once I’ve received your payment I’ll transfer the lens(es) to your account.

Simple as that.

Then you can build some links for better search engine placement and be on your way!

5 Quick Ways to Make a Better Lens

Creating a lens is  as much an art as it is a science. Yeah, you can do all the keyword research you want, and you can follow all the SEO “rules” but there are some things that will help your conversion that have to come from a place other than the numbers and rules… they have to come from you.

Here’s some tips to get your lenses to convert better.

1. Pick something you care about or think is so totally cool that people really SHOULD have it.

yeah, you can pick any keyword or any product, but when you choose to write about something that you have great feelings about it comes through in not only what you write, but how you write about it. This difference comes through to you readers.

2. Make sure the product you’re offering is exactly what they are looking for or exactly solves their problem.

If you find a certain model of a certain thing has great search volume ~ then make sure when people click away from your lens they go to that specific product. If you are talking about one thing on your lens, and they click and land on something similar ~ but not quite ~ it feels a little bit like bait and switch, which doesn’t instill buying confidence.

3. Tell a story.

Now don’t make up a story, but it shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate a story if you’re totally digging the product you’re talking about.

Here’s an example:

My mom has these boxes, boxes and boxes of notecards filled with our family recipes. Recipes from my Grandma, and her Grandma, and probably her Grandma too. I wanted to somehow get ahold of those recipes and create an actual book that would be a little easier to navigate, and actually find recipes and also would stand the test of time.

Well… I happened to find a place that did exactly that. It was wicked cool. You could upload your recipes from home, or even from another site and then create a recipe book that they would send you ~ a real hard back book. The binding would open so you could continue to add recipes as time went on.

Well I thought this was perfect for my situation, and I just thought it was a hella good idea. So I dug around and found a nice keyword that had some good search volume. I didn’t know if it was going to convert, because it didn’t really seem like a buying keyword, but I was really digging the product so it was fun to do, and didn’t take much time.

In the lens I told a little bit of my story. I showed the site, how it worked, how you put your book together (I mean, it’s 3 little steps). Friendly, interesting, informative.

This lens doesn’t do all that great most of the year, but come the holidays… it ROCKS.

It’s now ranking for quite a few keywords and in the past 7 days received 786 vists, with 245 click throughs to my merchant and 38 new sales.

Stories sell people.

4. Provide REAL information that people can use.

This is easier if you’re promoting physical products, but if you’re still promoting clickbank products make SURE your content is good. Not just well written, but informative. Helpful. You will NOT make sales if people come to your site looking for some help or information and all they get is a big “BUY THIS” to get your questions answered. It will not work.

5. Add images.

Fancy up your lenses. The nicer you can make them look, the better. Yeah, there’s a point where too many things to look at can decrease your clickthrough rate, but if you keep your images relevant, and allow the PICTURES to help tell your story, they will serve you well.

There you have it, 5 things to help your lenses do a little better, and make a few more sales.

I realize I give you a “blueprint” to follow… but realize it’s just a beginner’s road map. A place to get started. Once you’ve done a few of these, allow yourself to stray a little from the blueprint. Allow YOU to shine through your lenses. As I’ve said before (and I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing) people buy from people, not websites, or pages.

OH one more thing… if you’ve just got the orange squidoo guy as your image in the about section, go to Squidoo and change that right now. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone wants to sell you something but hasn’t taken the time to be a real person. really. I mean it. Go now if you’ve got the orange guy.

If you’ve got a lens you think should be doing better and you don’t understand why it’s not I’d be glad to do a lens review for you and tell you what I think is going on.

If you’re still struggling to get your lens built, the Squidoo Christmas Cash Video Series is available, where you can watch over my shoulder as I walk you through the entire process of building a lens (the way I do it).

Hopefully your lenses are doing well for the holidays… the rush is upon us. If you’ve got questions regarding Squidoo and how to use it please feel free to ask.

New Squidoo Module: Recipe Module

For all of you recipe lovers out there.. you’re going to be jazzed! Squidoo now has a new module. It’s specifically designed to use with recipes. Let’s take a look.

You can find the module under “all modules” and then under R ~ it’s the recipe module.

Once you’ve added it, open to edit.

You’ll need to give the module a title ~ I went with the recipe name. You can also provide a description here as well. If people can buy this recipe somewhere you might want to include a link in the description area.

Next step is the recipe stats: you know, how many people it serves, how long to prep, how long to cook. All that good stuff.

Next is the actual ingredients. They’ve created a form to fill in. One ingredient per line and if you need more lines just click the “add more items” link on the bottom left of the section.

Once you’ve added your ingredients there’s space to add your instructions. I skipped a space between each instruction… we’ll see how that comes out. You’re welcome to experiment to find the way that works best for you.

After the instructions you can add an image for your recipe. You can also link the image to another place, so if you’re selling a book with this image you will want to use your link with the image as well.

When you save the recipe your image will be shown with the stats about it right below the image. You will see bullet points for each ingredient, and if you’ve left space between the instructions, that will show up as well.

You can check out this recipe on my 7 Quart Slow Cooker Lens. You’ll see there are a couple recipes on there using the old way, and the Ropa Vieja recipe is the one using the new module.

Good luck! I’d love to see some of your recipes lenses using the new module. Feel free to come by and drop a link to your recipe lens once you’ve tried out the new module.

Adding Tags to Your Lenses

Tags. What are tags? Tags on Squidoo are basically short words or phrases that tell people what else your lens is related to. When you add a tag to your lens one of two things happens. If the tag is already present in Squidoo your lens will be added to the current “tag page”. If it is a new tag to Squidoo a new tag page will be added and your lens will be listed there.

Why are tags important?

1. Each tag creates a link back to your lens from the tag page. (backlinks are always good)

2. The tag pages themselves can get indexed and ranked in Google so if you are on a popular tag page you can get additional traffic that way.

3. Keywords in the anchor text of a link is a good thing in Google’s eyes. It lets them know even more what the page is about. Each tag turns into an anchor text link pointing to the tag page on your lens.

Let’s take a look…

When you’re creating your lens you’ll find the tags area in the right hand side of the workshop.

Your primary tag should be your targeted keyword. You should also add your targeted keyword to the “other tags” list as well.

You can have up to 40 tags for each lens, however, I suggest you start your lens with 5 or 10. You want to pick a few “big” topics to get your lens on a well established tag page, but you also want to add tags that are other keywords people are using to find information on your topic. These could be more competitive keywords, keywords that don’t make perfect sense in a sentence. Don’t do research on this ~ just grab some related keywords from the keyword tool.

I say only use 5 or 10 of your tags now, because once you start getting traffic you’ll be able to see what keywords people are using to find your lens. You want to add those keywords to your lens as well ~ which you will need space for.  Adding these keywords as tags will help you rank even better for that keyword, because you will have the exact keyword on your page.

Where do I see the keywords people are using?

1. Hover over the lens you want to work on. Links will pop up under the listing. Click on the “stats” option.

2. Once in the stats area you’ll see some tabs. Click the “traffic” tab.

3. Scroll down past the graph and you’ll see a pie chart with information about where your traffic is coming from. On the right you’ll see a list of keywords that have been used to find your lens in the search engines.

The keywords will have a + next to them if they are not currently being used as a tag on your lens.

4. Click the plus sign and the keyword will be added to your lens tags. You will need to go to your lens, click the edit button and republish for it to show up.

5. Only add keywords that are relevant and discussed in your lens. As you can see in the above image someone found my lens by entering “exersise postural scolioza” while they may have found the lens with that keyword, it’s not something I want to target because it’s not what my lens is about ~ nor is it mentioned in the lens. So I would not add this keyword to my tags.

Check in every so often and see if you have new relevant keywords in your list and if you do add them to your lens. This is an easy way to update your lens.

Once you’ve added your tags to your lens you’ll see them in the sidebar under “related topics”. These are actually the tags you’ve added!

Adding tags is an important part of your lens, but don’t make it into a big thing ~ it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. Just think about other alternatives to your keyword ~ pull a few from the keyword tool, and then leave the rest available for updating.

If you have any questions about Squidoo tags ask in the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Finding Content to Post to Your Posterous Network

Hopefully by now you’ve got your Posterous network set up.  In case you didn’t see it, you can also add wordpress blogs you host yourself to that network. So if you have a wordpress “Christmas” blog (one that is on your own hosting account) or something similar you can add that to your network.

This can save a lot of time updating your “Christmas blog”.

I wanted to talk today about the content you send out for your network. You don’t really want to just send links out pointing to your stuff. You want to add some other related information, resources, topics.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to create this content! That’s what makes it really fun and easy. You can use other people’s content to help fill in your network.

Here’s some places you can find content:

Article directories ~ post the article (including the author links) in your post

Youtube ~ make a comment about the topic then add the video

Blogs ~ you can make a comment about the topic of the post and then put in a link to the full post.

About.com ~ they have tons of information on every topic ~ talk about an article from there and then link to it.

Anything that has an RSS feed ~ I’ll show you below how you can easily keep track of multiple RSS feeds.

This is just a few ideas to get you started. If you want a simple way to keep track of all of this you might want to use an RSS feed reader, like Google Reader. I’ve recently started doing this and it makes it very easy to scan through all the new information in my niche and quickly share it with my network if I choose to.

Here’s a video (thanks Ed) that will show you how to use Google Reader for this purpose.

Once I had my Google Reader set up I could quickly go through it and find some interesting things to send out to my network. If I found a bunch of things and didn’t want to send them out all at once I star them ~ and then I can just clicked starred items and find the things I wanted to post later.

Hope this gives you some ideas about content for your network. If you have questions please ask in the comments section and I’ll do my best.