Are you trying to make a living with Squidoo? one of the most effective business models you can pursue is to go around town and build lenses for local businesses.

When done properly, you can have lenses about {Small Town Name} Pizza or Dentist or Tanning Salon shoot straight to the top of the results. That kind of targeting has very real, very HUGE value to small businesses and frankly, they are willing to pay for it once they see the results.

But before you can get there, you have to know how to build local lenses that are going to rank AND convert. And that’s what I’m here to help you do over the next week or so.

Next, Anatomy of a Local Lens

Why do we tag lenses?

Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.

What is Indexing and why is it important?

When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses).  It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.

If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.

So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.

Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.

Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.

What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.

Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.

If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.

So,

DO

Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic

Use tags that are present on other lenses

TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*

DON’T

Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.

use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.

Questions?

Evergreen Module – A squidoo module that can be updated either automatically or by interaction on a lens without entering the workshop. In addition, an evergreen module is indexable by bots/crawlers/spiders even if they can’t read javascript.

What does this mean?

If a squidoo module can provide ‘fresh’ updated contact on your lens that you don’t have to physically add yourself and the search engines can see those changes, I call it evergreen.

Examples -

• Google Blog Search
• RSS mashup
• Amazon Plexo (even if nothing can be added, Yes, changing the order of products counts!)
• Featured Lens module (set to ‘random’ with more than 5 lenses)
• Yelp
• Hometown Stats
• Twitter Search

Any Questions?

A group of highly similar lenses that all have unique content related to one topical ‘theme’ or niche. These lenses are all connected to most or all of the other lenses in the cloud using either static or dynamic linking resources within Squidoo such as lensrolls, Discovery Boxes, Featured Lenses modules, Plexos, Link Lists etc.

While not required, many lens clouds have an associated overview page, similar to a lensography. This overview lens can range from being a resource itself to simply serving as a directory style area to easily link to other lenses in the cloud.

What exactly do you use a lens cloud for?

I’m going to expand on these more in the future, but at the very core, lens clouds enable you to target the audience you want while at the same time allowing you to maximize your penetration and visibility for many extremely long tail search queries.

Example:

here’s an example lens cloud about Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. The ‘front page’ of the cloud links to each of the lenses in the cloud while internally, each lens is interlinked through the plexo as well as appearances in the explore more boxes.

Why you would build lenses like this:

The number of Tom Petty related keywords I rank for in this example is wayyyy higher than normally achieved with just one lens.

it looks good and is easier to browse through than just a single lens.

pageviews and advertising opportunities are obviously increased.

It’s profitable.

Why most people don’t do this:

It takes a lot of work initially.

Summary of Lens Clouds

Choosing how detailed you go is crucial to making this work correctly. If you did a cloud on Tom Petty and then built a lens for every single concert he ever performed that would probably be a bit overboard. However if your lead page is just ‘rock music’ that is definitely way to broad.

if all of your cloud lenses are going to have the exact same content this is a waste of your time. You are trying to get traffic for as many phrases as possible.

This type of lensbuilding model works really well if you set it up to scale easily. Learning how to do that is probably a post in itself but is really learned just by jumping in and doing it.

Hope you guys found this a little insightful, let me know what part of the process your are murkiest about in the comments and I’ll write a few follow-ups to help explain better.

But here’s a little trick you may not know. When you start to try and tag a lens you can really get on a roll, pressing the ‘Tab’ key to cycle to the next keyword and tagging almost as fast as you can type (when you are doing the 10th or 15th lens in a niche, you pretty much know most of your tags already). This works great until you get to the end of the list. Now you have to Stop. Use the mouse to manually click ‘add’ a few (or a lot) more times before you can continue tagging.

�Don’t worry, I found a better way.

It used to be that if you were editing tags and pressed the enter key your tags would be saved and you would have to go back into edit mode. Now, when you are editing tags, and press enter, it will automatically add a new tag box.

This may seem small, but as more and more squidooers become Power Users and start building hundreds and hundreds of lenses, it’s little things like that that will save you real time.

Now if HQ would only let you import a tag list instead of entering them all manually…. (probably to easy to spam)

-The Captain

I’ve finally found a way to convert my training videos to a format that would upload on YouTube. If anyone is interested in seeing them again, or putting them on your lenses (hint, hint )� They can be found under Captain Squidoo.

The Next series of videos will be on using CJ to maximize your Squidoo Earnings. From the feedback I’ve gotten, this seems to be a subject area that many people wish to know more about.

The Newsletter Subscribers will get the first crack at the first video ‘Commission Junction Orientation’ , so make sure you’ve signed up. (psst.. the form is at the top of the left sidebar)

-The Captain

Lensbuilding 101 is a 7-part series that walks you through setting up a lens from start to finish. Most of the information is pretty basic, but there are a few little tidbits in there that I think most Squidoo users will be able to use.

The 7 videos combined are approximately an hour of free training on Squidoo. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

The best part? It’s completely free.� No Sign-ups, payment, subscriptions, etc. The basic Squidoo Lensbuilding 101 series is 100% free.

To Check it out in all of it’s glory, head over to the Training page.

Let me know what you think and what you would like the next video to be on!

-The Captain