Use one to three words separated by a hyphen. (hyphens are easier to remember and faster to type than underscores) You will have more success if these are real words than gobbledygook, and even more if the words bear a remote resemblance to the topic of your lens.

People don’t really type URLs into address bars anymore (excepting root domains) so, while being memorable as a lens url is useful (like /tricks /squidconomy /basichtml and the like) it’s better to be bookmarkable.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that bookmarkable and remarkable are very similar? Probably not says the pirate in me.

It pulls all the info from the page and you just have to click submit.

Note: Make sure and click on the second tab of the submission window and ‘mark your tag as public’. This makes the link public and indexable by the search engines.

I’ve seen backlinks from Jumptags appear in both Google and Yahoo, so they both index the bookmarks and rather quickly at that.

As I was trying to submit a site to Yahoo’s Site Manager yesterday, I was instead redirected to a new Yahoo Bookmarking site at beta.bookmarks.yahoo.com.

Interested as always in a new bookmarking site, I thought I’d check it out. It turns out that Yahoo bookmarks has been around for some time, but in beta for the last year..

I installed the bookmarklet and hopped over to a few quick sites. The bookmarklet was very fast and I was able to bookmark and tag a page in probably under 8 seconds. (like bull-riding but backwards)

The interface as a whole has a lot of Ajax and seems to run a lot faster than del.icio.us

Why does it look like it’s hardly being used?

Is this a stealth Beta of some kind? They just released Yahoo Buzz yesterday, how many more products are up their sleeve ?

Why not remodel your existing Del.icio.us franchise instead of starting over with a new bookmarking platform?

What are your first impressions of Yahoo! Bookmarks?

Does anyone know why the exposure of this site is so small? Or have I been living in a cave or something?

1. You can now communicate directly to your visitors with little thoughts and tidbits. This is awesome.
2. You can announce new events or updates across the squidoo universe (well, YOUR squidoo universe)

This is good. Really good.

But how do you promote your squidcasts to others ? Each Lens’ RSS Feed will show the casts you send out for that lens.

This effectively means that you can get the RSS aggregators (Zimbio, Technorati, etc.) to treat your lens as a blog.

Wait a minute.. submitting ALL of my lenses to these sites AND writing casts for each lens? That will take forever and probably piss off all your fans with all those casts.

Wouldn’t it be nice to submit ALL of your squidcasts as ONE RSS feed? Yes, it would.

But wait, there isn’t a way to promote that RSS feed because it doesn’t exist…

That’s what the Captain’s for!

I have written a yahoo Pipe that allows you to create a feed for ALL your squidcasts. When you submit this feed to blog sites, your feed is updated every time you write ANY squidcast.

How to use it:

Go visit the Pipe here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/captainsquid/fan_feed

Enter your lensmaster name. Your SquidCast Feed will be automatically generated.

right-click on the ‘more options’ link and click ‘copy link location’.

Now paste your new uberfeed into whatever RSS submittor you want! Need some Ideas? Check out my posts on Free RSS Submission Sites and Using Zimbio to automatically promote your site.

Ta Da!

If you are looking for some more sneaky tricks, make sure and sign up for the newsletter. The first copy goes out this weekend!

-The Captain

JoePopular is another take on the Social Networking craze, but it is a simple yet functional set up.� You place your most relevant sites (or lenses) in several categories right on your profile page.� So when people visit they see right away what your best links are.

You earn JoeDollars from referring people and your JoeDollars can be used to advertise your profile page.� A very interesting concept that has great potential.

Sign up and check it out…..

Doug’s JoePopular Page�

The Isle is a Squidoo-only link directory that is open to anyone that has a squidoo lens as well as any websites that are dedicated to squidoo.

All the lenses are hand-reviewed by myself and my team (currently Doug Eby, Gypsy Pirate, and select other squidooers that hang out in the squidoo chat room).

In order to accept your lens, we are using the following guidelines:

1. lens is published and searchable in Squidoo (no WIP or adult lenses)
2. The lens has an introduction picture.
3. The lens has NO default module titles (no ‘New Guestbook’ type� titles)

In order to kick things off, we are offering a few promotions for your lens to get ‘Featured’ Status on Isle of Squid, which means it will go into rotation to be shown on any page on the site.

1. Submit 10 lenses to the Isle to have one of your choice Featured. You may submit as many lenses as you like, and each 10 will allow you to feature an additional lens.
2. �Add 3 reviews to lenses listed on the Isle. These need to be real reviews of at least a couple of sentences. Cheesepuff reviews that have two or three words will not count. For every 3 reviews you submit, you can have an additional lens featured.

I’m only giving out 100 Featured Spots to start off and over 30 have been claimed in the first 24 hours! So hurry up and head over to the Isle and build another great backlink for your lens!

-The Captain

Luckily, The Captain is here to come to the rescue. Below are 3 sites that can automate your lens promotion and build some serious backlinks along the way.

Note: In order to promote to social bookmarking sites, you need to have an account with them. Be prepared to sign up for a dozen accounts or more the first time you bookmark a lens. This could take up to half an hour. After that, it only takes a few minutes a lens.

Social Marker - This handy dandy site will walk you through 30 or so social bookmarking sites of your choice. I have my list narrowed down to 19 or so. You input your title, URL, description and tags on the first page and Social Marker auto-fills them for you as you bounce from site to site.

I had a problem with lenses breaking out of the frames every once in a while. If this happens just click the back button and refresh. you will have to fast forward to the last bookmarking sit you were on.

The fewer tabs with Squidoo loaded that I had open, the less it broke out of frames.

Social Poster - This site works almost the exact same way as Social Marker but has some different services that you can use.

Onlywire – this is basically one click bookmarking. You set up your accounts, and drag the button up to your toolbar. Click it and fill in the info and presto! instant bookmarks. The number of services available from Onlywire is less than either Social Poster or Social Marker, but it can act as a super quick bookmarker if you need to.