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Power Promotion with Zimbio and Squid Utils

Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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Ok my Deckhands and Swabbies, it’s time to get down to business. Today The Captain is going to share a great promotional tool with you.

Promoting your lens can be one of the most challenging aspects of Lesmastering.

Many people tell you to make sure and ping all the blog services and submit to Del.icio.us and Digg.

I have tried this a few times and have seen pretty much zero traffic from these methods.

Why Pinging and Social Bookmarking don’t work that well.

The simple fact is that Squidoo lenses are designed to provide very targeted information. If someone is not looking for the information you have than it’s not likely that they will enjoy your lens, much less buy someting.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could submit your lenses to a place where pre-targeted visitors will view it? You can, Here’s how….

  1. Head on over to Squid Utils and log in using your lensmaster ID.
  2. Click on ‘Lensmaster RSS Feeds
  3. Right Click on the link to your Lensmaster Lenses RSS feed. It should look something like this: http://squidutils.com/lensmaster/loyalis/lenses.rss
  4. Click ‘Copy Link Location
  5. Paste this link into a notepad or Word document so you have it handy.
  6. Head over to Zimbio and sign up for an account. (What’s Zimbio? Learn more about it here..)
  7. When you set up your account, it allows you to add a blog. Copy and Paste the feed address of your lenses as the blog address.
  8. Zimbio will automagically search through your feed (all of your lenses) and add ones to appropriate Wikizines automatically.
  9. Add any that aren’t automatically filed away can be manually added by clicking on ‘My Dashboard -> My Articles -> My Queue’.
  10. Check back every few days and see if any more lenses have been pulled into Zimbio to be added to appropriate groups.

Why using Zimbio is good

  • This whole process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to do.
  • You instantly get a high PR backlink for all of your lenses you submit.
  • Zimbio gets over a million pageviews a month
  • People that read the teaser for your lens will want to click through to your lens. These users are already interested in your topic.
  • These interested users are targeted traffic which is much more valuable than plain old no-targeted traffic.

-The Captain

Captain Squid Toolbox update: Firefox DE now Tags

The latest release of the Squidoo Dashboard Extender by Magicality has added a fantastic feature. You can now ‘tag’ your lenses in order to sort them into groups. This is a great way to manage chunks of lenses instead of having to look at a giant lens list to decide what to do next.

Don’t have the DE yet?

Check out the lens for all the cool information related to it.

You can also download the plug-in from this link.

Don’t have Firefox?

You need it! All of the tools I am developing for you folks will be in Firefox and I can’t guarantee they will transfer into IE. So, Go get Firefox .

-The Captain

Squidoo Tip of the Day: Lens Fluffing for Ranking

Does your lens need a little loving to have its ranking boosted, and there isn’t a SquidAngel to be found?

Instead, go into your lens and change small, little things about it every day for a week, and republish it every day. Some great examples would be:

  • Update and refresh your keywords
  • Re-write your introduction module
  • Make sure your Guestbook has a unique title

A new lens is a lot like a baby pirate. They both need a little attention and care in order to grow up into big , strong , oceangoing Pirates and Squids.

Keep up the tinkering and by the end of the week you should be pleasantly surprised at the results. If you haven’t noticed any increase at all in two or three days, leave a comment here and we’ll examine the problem further.


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