How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 1)

So you want to make money with Squidoo: you have read a few articles explaining how to monetize Squidoo lenses, you have visited and been seduced by a few lenses and now you want to have a go at it too. The good news is that it is fairly easy to build a Squidoo lens, Squidoo lenses give you the option of using various income streams and Squidoo lets you create as many lenses as you like. Of course there are a few tricks to building successful Squidoo lenses, but these can be learned fairly quickly and when you have mastered a few, you will find that Squidoo is one of the few websites that can bring you a nice little online income; be careful though, you may have so much fun making money on Squidoo that you could soon become a squidaholic!

If you want your lens to be popular, pick a popular topic. Do a keyword search with Google on a topic you would like to talk about and see how many searches there are for that particular keyword; you don't have to go for the most popular topic as the higher you go the more competition your lens will get, but anything over 100,000 is good in my opinion.

After finding your topic you will need to give your lens a URL. Including keywords in a URL is one of the basic SEO methods successful webmasters use. When you start creating your Squidoo lens, you will be taken to a page where you will be asked what you lens is about: be very careful with this one as this is going to be part of your lens' URL and it cannot be changed later; try to include your main keyword in there. It doesn't have to make sense as you do not have to use this as your title, but choose carefully as Squidoo lenses' URLs cannot be changed.

The next step is to choose your lens' title. Your title should include your main keyword while being at the same time original and attractive; think of the words that trigger people's imagination, choose a title that you think would appeal to them and make them want to visit your lens.

Within your Squidoo lens, you have a great choice of module types to choose from: whether it's text, photos or a list of links, try to include your keywords in each module, without making it sound repetitive: keyword stuffing is penalized by Google and if you bore your lens' visitors by repeating the same words over and over, they will not want to return, which goes without saying that your lens will miss out on ratings, lensrolling, bookmarking, being emailed, etc., and this will adversely affect your lensrank. A trick you can use for the photographs that are displayed on your lens is to save them first on your computer hard-drive and include a keyword in the name of the file under which the photo is saved; when you upload the photo from your computer onto your lens, the name of the picture will count as a keyword even if this doesn't appear on the lens.

Squidoo has the perfect utility that lets you tag your lens accordingly to your chosen keywords, so make the most of this and include as many relevant keywords as you can think of. You can choose a maximum of 40 tags to add to your lens so use and abuse the tagging utility to make your lens SEO friendly.

These are only a few of the tricks I have learned to make Squidoo lenses SEO friendly; keep in mind that SEO is just one aspect of successful lensmastering as you also need to promote your lenses and update them regularly in order to get a constant stream of visitors but if you are new to Squidoo, start with these as they are the easiest in my opinion and you could be on your way to making a small fortune online.