Squidoo is a great way to promote yourself and your book; once you have built a Squidoo Lens you can work on promoting it within both Squidoo and the search engines (like Google).

But let’s take a look at how to get from point A – creating your lens – to point B – promoting it…

Basic Squidoo Instructions:

Choose your lens title for branding purposes that are in line with the goals of your book or your writing career. Do you have multiple books planned? Perhaps the lens should use your name. Are you interesting in strongly promoting one of your titles or an issue? The lens should then reflect that.

Create your lens using original content and graphics because those are important to the search engines. To move forward from here, you’ll want to get some traffic to your lens, which you can do when you visit other lenses in your area/topic on Squidoo and post comments that invite those individuals to visit your lens. This will help you gain ranking and recognition on Squidoo and should be ongoing. Here’s how:

When you log in to Squidoo using the information provided to you, you can click on My Dashboard and follow the tabs across the top to edit information like in your Profile.

Under the Lens Title in your Dashboard, you can click on the options to View, Edit, Delete and Stats along with some additional information like your overall rank in Squidoo, and the last date your lens was updated. Don’t hit delete, ever – you don’t want to lose your lens!

When you click on the Edit link, you’ll see that Squidoo lens are created with different sections or what they call, modules. You can edit an existing module, and you can add modules. If you scroll down and look to the right, you’ll see an area that says “Export this lens.” This serves as your backup and you should do this regularly in case you inadvertently click on Delete.

Lens Promotion:

A cross-promotion within Squidoo is commenting on similar subject lenses and getting backlinks to your lens and in some cases your book added to their lens. Typically after you visit another lens they will visit your lens and leave a comment in turn. Not only do you gain exposure on Squidoo, you can make some valuable contacts.

You can also join Squidoo groups in your areas of interest to continue making contacts and promoting yourself on the site. For instance, if your topic is eco-friendly wellness, look up green living, health and fitness – you’ll find plenty of groups to join. Adding your lens to a group will create several more links to your lens from within Squidoo, and will help your lens get found from more places. In the sidebar of your lens will be a little link list (under the heading Explore More) with links to all of the groups that your lens is a member of. This helps your Google ranking if you are joining relevant groups. Joining relevant groups helps your lens because any visitors to the group (or to a member lens) can find other lenses on the same topic. Because you’re grouped with like interests, it’s that much easier for people to find you.

You can also set up your lens to send a Tweet to Twitter any time you update your Squidoo page – and this will help you with generating new content for Twitter.

Things You Can Continue to Do:

• Always save the modules you edit and republish the lens after every update.

• Every couple of weeks add or change content in a Write module (even a sentence makes a difference). A small change will work to keep you on the radar of Squidoo and Google.

• Lensroll it on your other lenses. If you don’t have additional lenses yet, you can lensroll favorite and relevant lens by other lensmasters. On your lens, you’ll see down the side of the page, the word “Lensroll.” If you click it, you’ll be taken to a page where you can choose one of your other lenses from the list and pressing to confirm will create a ‘lensroll’ link to your new lens from your old one. The link will be featured in the sidebar either under the heading “More Great Lenses” or “Lensroll.” Use this to showcase your related lenses to your visitors. It helps your lensrank too!

• Email your list (if you have one) and ask them to visit your lens, rate it, sign the guestbook, and bookmark it in return for some sort of freebie, like a 5-page report.

• Start being an important part of the Squidoo community. Visit other lenses with the same topic and sign their guestbook, rate their lens, and ask them to come visit your lens, too. Be yourself, don’t spam other lenses with gratuitous promotions, you wouldn’t want them to do it to you!

Moving Forward:

You will find tons of helpful information at: http://www.squidoo.com/theanswerdeck/hq

There are two free e-books there to help you master lens crafting. These two free e-books were written by the Squidoo staff including its founder, Seth Godin.

The first e-book is called Calamari: the Official Squidoo How-To. It walks you through lens making from conception to publication and beyond. The second e-book is called The Joy of Squidoo: the Official Recipe Guide. This e-book deals more with what your target audience is looking for.

Another thing that you can do to increase traffic after each new change, is to go to: http://pingomatic.com/ and fill out the first three lines, click on Check Common and then Send Pings. This alerts the Google spiders that a change has been made instead of waiting for them to find you. You don’t have to create an account; it’s very simple!

Update your lens regularly with small snippets of information or articles. Social networking is about having conversations with people who are interested in the same subjects as you. Find existing conversations (lens) and add value to it (by commenting on their lens). You’ll find Squidoo is a great way to continue building your brand!

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