Our link building lesson continues today with a new assignment. Last week we went out and commented on at least three relevant blogs, adding to the conversation and gaining links to our Web sites in the process. This week, we’re going to build a Squidoo lens around the keyword phrase most relevant to your Web site.
Why Squidoo? For several reasons …
- Squidoo has a vibrant community of writers and readers, and it’s easy to get plugged in.
- Squidoo is considered an authority site, quickly indexed by Google. This is why Squidoo is valuable for building inbound links.
- Every lens has an RSS feed, and you’re going to take advantage of that by submitting the feed to RSS directories.
- Your lens is easily built using modules – little, if any HTML knowledge is required to build a great lens.
- You can earn money for yourself or the charity of your choice, simply by building and publishing your lens.
I built a lens about designing professional business cards over the weekend. I did this to help improve the ranking for a recent post on Zero To Sixty Marketing’s Inside Line. As soon as my Squidoo lens was complete, I linked to it from Facebook, Twitter and Delicious. The next step was submitting the RSS feed for the site to Feedage.com and Feedagg.com, two major RSS feed directories. Finding the actual RSS feed to submit was a little tricky, and if anyone asks how in the comments, I’ll update this post with instructions to make it easy for you.
Since the process of building a Squidoo lens is fairly quick and painless, I’ll repeat it for other blog posts featuring keywords for which we want to rank. Each lens will provide valuable backlinks to our site, plus we’ll gain readership on Squidoo, and as a side benefit maybe we’ll make a little cash for our efforts. Not a bad deal at all.
Your assignment for this week: Dive right in and build your first Squidoo lens. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect; just get it started. We’ll go back and make it shine later. Are you ready to Squidoo?
Squidoo is a great tool according to many webmasters I know. However, I didn’t manage to find out the greatness of squidoo. May be i didn’t get all the features, may be it was an ordinary lack of time or laziness. Actually, I am going to spend some time on squidoo promoting my websites. I will share my results (if any) with you then.
Sam Remo Guy, I understand what you mean. The first time around with Squidoo wasn’t real productive for me either. Maybe they’ve recently made it more user friendly or maybe I’m just more committed to making it work at this point in time. Either way, this time around I’m impressed. There’s a definite value to having a presence on Squidoo. Thanks for your comment!
Hi Shari…For each niche website, I use a different penname as my authority spokesperson. For article marketing, I create a different bio for each penname.
So, for Squidoo & Hub Pages do you suggest a new account for each penname or one account with a “read this great article on dog training from penname1″ type of approach?
Thanks, Joe
Shari…yes, please. thanks again, Joe
“Finding the actual RSS feed to submit was a little tricky, and if anyone asks how in the comments, I’ll update this post with instructions to make it easy for you.”
Hi Joe, most of what I’ve done is under my own name so I’m probably not the best person to answer that question.
Joe, thanks for asking about this. The RSS feed for Squidoo can be found by clicking on the orange RSS feed button in your browser, then hovering over the drop down menu to subscribe via RSS. Unfortunately, there’s no way to copy and paste the result, but at least you can see the feed address. For instance, on this No Tie Shoelaces lens (created for a client), the RSS feed address is http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/no-tie-shoelaces. This is the address that gets submitted to the RSS directories. To make it easier to submit other lenses, just adapt that address to the lens name. Hope this helps!
i have 20 squidoo pages which are mostly related to health and medicine. i enjoy making squidoo pages and sharing information