Creating a Squidoo lens

In this post we'll be taking a look at a step-by-step process of creating a Squidoo Lens.Along the way, you'll also learn some great tips for getting your lens spidered by the search engines and increasing your page rank.

Creating an Account

1. From the Squidoo homepage, click Get Started.
2. Click on: Build My Own Lens
3. Select the option to create a new account.
4. Enter a subject matter for your lens.
5. Choose the purpose of your lens from four options:
   • I want to get the word out about _________
   • I'm gonna sell _________ stuff and earn $$$, for me or for charity
   • I want to make a list of my favorite things about _________
   • I just want to do my own thing ______________
   As affiliate marketers, you'll want to choose the second option.
6. Give your lens a title and choose a URL.
7. Pick a category for your lens.
8. Give your lens a rating — most likely G rated, but if you are unsure there is a guide you can refer to.
9. Choose your best keyword and then 3 others. The aim here is to make it easy for people to find your lens when they search.
10. Choose how to get paid from the option available:
    • Donate to Squidoo Charity Fund
    • Donate to Specific Charity
    • I just want cash
    • A combo of cash and charity
11. Confirm your account by entering the required details and creating password. Be sure to confirm your sign-up email before creating your page, otherwise you will not be able to publish.

Adding Content to Lens

The moment you've created your account, a template lens page appears. To begin adding information, click the Edit button for the section you wish to work with.
Before you start writing you might want to get some ideas by taking a look at the Top Squidoo lenses.

Reviews and articles all work well as modules, plus there are plenty of opportunities to spice up your Squidoo lens by adding RSS feed, YouTube videos and a guestbook, among other things.
Adding Twitter to your Squidoo lens is also a very good idea as it helps to encourage the search engines to spider it.

We also recommend finding Squidoo lenses on a related topic to your own with PageRank and adding a comment to the guestbook. Once your comment is approved by Squidoo, you'll get a link back to your own lenses via your username. Commenting on lenses with a page rank is particularly handy because it helps your own lenses get spidered faster.

How to Be a Good Squidooer — Some Tips

Squidoo doesn't want affiliate spammers so make sure you provide valuable content. As a rule of thumb, don't create more than 10 lenses per account.

You can have as many accounts as you want, but every account has to be set up with a new email address.

Make sure that you promote more than one site (or affiliate product) per account so that it doesn't look like your sole purpose is to drive traffic to one site.

Summary

In this post we took a quick look at the step-by-step process for setting up a Squidoo Lens. We looked at:

• Creating an account
• Adding content to the lens 
• How to be a good Squidooer