Effective Ways to Promote Your Squidoo Lens

So you have put a lot of work into it, created a Squidoo lens and now you need to promote it. Where do you start? What do you do? What will be a waste of time? These are important questions and I aim to answer them all in this article so you will not have to scour the web searching for the answers no one told me.

First of all, immediately after publishing your lens, click on it and review it. Look for any blatant errors. You would be surprised at the formatting mistakes that can be easily overlooked, especially when you are new to Squidoo. Double-checking now will increase your chances of efficient promoting since it is much more difficult to promote a poorly developed lens.

Now that you are sure it's ready to be promoted, be sure to bookmark it on Digg, del.icio.us and Stumble Upon, using the links available at the top right hand side of your lens. Being the first to bookmark it on these sites it will make it easier for others to do the same because who wants to take the extra time to write that darn description required for new submissions? Personally, if someone else hasn't already done that, I usually don't bother. Why these three and not every single social bookmarking tool? Quite simply, these are the most popular and widely used. If you have a lot of time, you can do more, but I suggest these three as an absolute minimum.

Email your lovely new lens to some close friends. I suggest finding at least five friends, talking to them and asking for their permission to send them links of every lens you create for them to click on and rate, Digg and Stumble. If you can secure five friends to do this, you will instantly see a boost in lensrank!

Double check your lens tags. Add every possible tag you can imagine. The limit is somewhere around 30 or 40, so go crazy with it! This will allow your lens to be more easily found in the Squidoo search engines and by Google.

Once your lens has been accepted by the Squidoo search engine to be promoted as an active lens, start joining groups. I like to think of this as signing your lens up for play dates. Joining groups will gain you fans, ratings, and comments from other lensmasters. All of these will help to boost your lensrank and make your lens more searchable from the outside and hopefully more profitable! This step can take time because it requires finding just the right groups that your lens will fit in with, but it is such an asset that I suggest joining as many as you have the time and the energy to find.

With all of these steps in place, your lens should be well promoted. The final step is simply maintenance. About once every couple of weeks, click on your lens and see if there is any way you can update or add to your lens. This might need to happen more frequently if you are still a newbie or if you choose to publish your lens long before it was really ready to be published. But as time goes by, once every couple of weeks should be more than enough to keep your lensrank high enough to remain promotable by the Squidoo search engine.

Please note that none of these tips include spamming your friends with unwanted messages, shameless promotion on forums not related to the topic of your lens, the use of automated surf sites, or any other method that goes against Squidoo's Zero Tolerance Policy or any other SquidDon'ts.