Here’s my general philosophy on researching new squidoo lens topics (or new niches in general)

1. Don’t focus on just ‘one’ keyword to the exclusion of all others - I find this takes a very narrow minded view towards what you want to accomplish and doesn’t really result in the outcomes people are looking for (namely, traffic, attention, conversions, etc)
2. You don’t need monster niches – There are plenty of people that search for specific models, styles, etc that there is no need to target a monster market unless you have a monster budget. For example, instead of going after everyone that wants to buy an appliance, focus on a specific brand of dishwasher.
3. Target Buyers – Unlike most of the people reading this, nearly everyone spends less time on the internet then you. They aren’t up on the latest SEO news or conversion metrics or any of that stuff. They want to find something they are looking for, get good information about it, and buy it. Writing your content to focus on these people will astronomically increase your conversions.
4. What is available? - Although Amazon has pretty much everything for a lot of verticals it is more ‘broad’ then ‘deep’ in some. I’ll often pick new topics based on what advertisers on some of the affiliate networks look interesting or cool instead of what some research tool tells me I should.

It’s definitely worth a read. I thought it was interesting that there was a definite split between some who viewed the question as mechanical, i.e. what steps do you take in the workshop vs. theoretical or what thought processes your brain goes through before deciding to build a lens.

My answers leaned more towards the mechanical because by the time I get to actually creating a lens I usually try to have a plan in place for not only what that lens will be about but what the next ten lenses will be about as well.

It does show that it is possible to be successful with your lensbuilding through the use of a variety of strategies.

In fact, what causes one lensmaster to be successful is almost never what causes other lensmasters to be successful (except for the basic steps everyone should be doing).

Small words, big meaning. People get caught up a lot in ‘Squidoo is going to make me rich’ or ‘my blogs are going to make me rich’ or ‘my favorite GPT site / survey / ebook is going to make me rich’.

So far I’ve only found one thing that really set me firmly on the road to succeeding with anything in life.

Myself.

I think Squidoo is an equalizer and a differentiator at the same time. There are some lensmasters that build hundreds and hundreds of lenses with nothing but default settings and no unique content or insight of any kind and expect Squidoo to do all the work for them. There are others that spend all of their time on one or two lenses and expect to make wild fame, fortune, and riches off of 2 pieces of content that they constantly tweak.

Learn to build good lenses. This is done by building lenses. A lot of them. However, if you keep repeating the same thing over and over and over you aren’t learning anything. You have to try different techniques, topics, angles, etc. to find what works. I have probably 100+ lenses that get no traffic at all. none. zip. Were those lenses a waste of my time? Not at all. In fact, those are probably some of the most valuable lenses I have built because each one of them taught me something new. Without all those stubbed toes, I wouldn’t be getting ever closer to finding the right module combinations, topics, promotion methods, and little tricks and tweaks that work best for me.

Work. This is the difference between mindless repetition of anything you do and truly putting forth an effort worth talking about. Work is often associated with a negative connotation but that’s probably a result of people associating what they do every day when they go to ‘work’. Work is not a place, it is an action. A good action because it means you are putting forth effort. Effort + Knowledge = results. Every Time.

Scale. Perhaps another good name for this would be Focus. If you find something that works, figure out ways to duplicate that success. This can be the most challenging part of succeeding at anything (Squidoo or not) but I think it’s almost the most rewarding. You don’t achieve Scale when you can achieve excellence on demand. You achieve scale when you can help others achieve excellence on demand in ways that help everyone succeed.

Repeat. Once you conquer one mountain, it becomes a mole hill. One lens is a triumphant accomplishment when you have only one. Your first penny earned. Your first comment. Your first rating. Your first visit from google. Then it becomes the first 50 lenses, the first 100 visitors, the first $10 or $100 you make. It doesn’t ‘end’, it just changes.

I meet lensmasters all the time that say ‘i cant <insert thing here usually relating to traffic or ranking>’. I ask them how many lenses they have built and what is working on the others. Virtually every time, the answers are not very many and nothing is working because they are all the same. I’ll then tell them to go try and build a lens a day for a week, even give them ideas and module templates and affiliate program recommendations. Sometimes they do it and come back for more but usually i never hear from them again.

The ones that do return have usually learned something incredibly important. They’ve learned that challenging yourself to learn new things isn’t as bad as you remembered it in school and in fact it’s pretty rewarding.

I’ll admit it’s an imperfect world and it’s never the right time to start. But until you put your imperfect butt into imperfect gear and get the party rolling, it’s going to be hard to effect change for yourself or your cause.

oh, and I have a secret tip that if you just repeat it over and over and don’t even think about changing anything it will make you $47,000 a second. While I’m at it I’ve got some houses that you can buy for zero money down and never make a payment ever and you will be able to flip for millions in days. Check out my new site on all these great deals.

Widget Squid is a directory of widgets that can actually be used on your lenses. In the past, there hasn’t been any way to play flash games on your lens or use eBay to go Widgets customized for your lens. That all changes today.

Adding the widgets to your lens is easy as can be, simply click on the ‘get & share‘ tab below any widget you want to use and select the ‘Squidoo’ button (or any other button if you want to share it on another service). If there are any configuration options, you are walked through them before being able to drop your widget right on to your lens. The whole process takes about 30 seconds from start to finish, maybe less.

Super Sneaky Widgets that will make you more money

If you do nothing else, check out the eBay to Go widget for Squidoo that we’ve put together. You can enter your search terms and EPN campaign ID and BAM, a new module on your lens that looks amazing! You get all of the commissions from the widget and it sets up in about 5 seconds.

Squidoo Widgets Just in Time for Halloween

If you are trying to round out a Halloween themed lens and want to keep your visitors on the page longer, check out the Killer Pumpkin Flash Game Widget. You (the pumpkin) go around and scare as many kids out of their candy as you can before you get ‘carved’. It’s a quick little fun play.

Coming Next at Widget Squid

We are planning to try to launch at least one new widget a day for Squidoo Lensmasters to use on their sites. If you are into RSS, you can subscribe to the Widget Squid RSS feed and get the latest updates to your feed reader.

Thoughts and Comments

I’m really excited about Widget Squid, I think it brings a ton of exciting new possibilities to the creation of Squidoo Lenses. Take a look and let me know what you think or what kind of lenses you would like to see.

This was announced here first so you guys get the first crack at your choice of new widgets to start wowing your visitors! Enjoy!

1. Your ratings aren’t fooling anyone but yourself- every once in a while I’ll come across a lens with a lensrank of over 140,000 (Lensrank: the lower the number the better, 1 is best) and 80+ star ratings. With a lensrank that low, you are averaging 1 or fewer visitors a week and haven’t updated your lens in over 2 months. But hey, you somehow got 80 ratings from people that liked the page? I doubt it and Squidoo’s ranking system obviously doubts it as well. In this example, the lensmaster comes out looking very poorly and their other lenses are immediately suspicious in my opinion.
2. You are wasting your time – Instead of keeping up with swapping ratings, you could spend your time making more lenses or promoting the lenses you have to people who want the information you are providing. The ROI of ratings swaps is probably close to if not zero.
3. Ratings don’t make you money – Yes, having a highly ranked lens can make you money every month (up to $11 or so for the top lenses -see Squidconomy) but ratings aren’t the way to high lensrank utopia. The power of multiple ratings is dampened significantly if you don’t have any other metrics to back it up like sales, traffic, or user engagement outside of star ratings (polls, plexo voting, etc.)
4. Is a star a star? - I have seen no evidence to show that every star ranking is treated equally (or unequally) by Squidoo. Although if I was managing the algorithm then I would definitely have a function in there that weighs star ratings from accounts with no lenses differently from star ratings from accounts with many popular lenses. Wouldn’t you?
5. The Upside potential is low – okay, so lets say you go to every rating swap you can find and get 100 rankings on your lens and manage to squeak into the second squidoo payment tier for a whopping $1.80 or so…oh gee, what a great deal. Several hours of work to make a whole 2 dollars. and since rankings fade in value with time, unless you start getting some real visitors it’s probably a one shot wonder.

Tons.

I would say without a doubt the single thing that turns people off to lenses, hurts conversions, and causes visitors to hit the back button is how the page is written.

Common mistakes on lenses I run across all the time:

• Non-specific module headers – If I’m looking through your lens for information and your module headers are all sayings like ‘Here’s a thought..‘ instead of ‘5 ways to reduce your energy bill‘ it makes it hard for users as well as search engines to understand what the heck you are talking about.
• Repeating the same point in the same way - Don’t just re-hash the paragraph you wrote in your introduction and reprint it in 3 different modules throughout your lens. I’d rather have no text to read than the same 4 sentences repeated in different combinations. Squidoo has a huge pile of ways to make your lens interactive, use them.
• Random footer modules – I see a lot of lenses that have random modules tacked on after the guestbooks or a bunch of banners or buttons in a text module. If you are trying to tell someone about the best way to protect themselves from mosquitos, why in the heck is there a banner linking to a ringtone site? or a knitting circle? It doesn’t look as professional and it dilutes the overall relevance of the page. (Note: I’ve seen some people leave a ‘logo’ or ’signature’ in the last module, that can look good if done well and is not what I’m talking about.)
• Grammar…please? - If your English grammar needs some work or your spelling leaves something to be desired, Squidoo is a great place to improve your skills. That being said, I try a lot harder to read through a lens that is poorly written if the lensmaster says something about learning english in the lens. Sometimes very important points are lost in translation…
• Huge intro modules – Intro modules should be 1-5 sentences in my opinion. Max. no extra pictures, graphics, buttons, huge text, flashing gifs, or any of that other junk. 1-5 sentences telling me what the lens is about. Simple.

Do you have a pet peeve with lens  content that immediately turns you off?

Am I going crazy and the only one that notices this stuff?

Squidoo Lens Editing

Greasemonkey – This lets you add little mini scripts to your browser (don’t worry you have to push one button and that’s it). In a less frightening description, it makes web pages look and work cooler. As a corollary, you must download The Fluffanutta’s script that soups up your Squidoo Dashboard and Workshop. (It only works for FF right now, IE support is supposedly on the way..)

Scribefire - I’ve written about Scribefire before and what I said then still holds true. I use it all the time when flipping between tabs in FireFox and I want to keep data or content in one place.

Squidoo Plugin – The official plugin released by HQ. It allows you to add your current page as a link on any one of your lenses, placing it in either a link list or a link plexo. This is incredibly useful if you remember you have it available..

SEO / Analysis -

SEO For FireFox – Awesome plugin by Aaron Wall at SEO Book. Shows backlinks and other relevent data on top of your search results as well as lets you easily see which links are no-followed on the page.

SEO RankChecker - Part two of SEO Book’s must have plugins is the SEO Rank Checker. Use it to monitor your search engine rankings for specific terms on all three search engines by domain and by keyword. Awesome Tool.

Compete.com Toolbar (aff.)- Shows you estimated people counts and site rankings for whatever site you are on, also adds more cool information to your search results. This is a good one to check out if sites you are looking to submit links or content too actually get any traffic.

Bookmarking / Networking -

StumbleUpon Toolbar – I use this a lot for doing market research with StumbleUpon as well as for reviewing and tagging sites (and lenses). Don’t go ‘thumbing’ all of your lenses at once, but when used judiciously it can pack a punch. Oh yea, and it’s a great fix for when you are feeling burnt out.

I usually have another toolbar of whatever social bookmarking site I’m hot on at the moment, but the only one I’ve consistently used over the last year is StumbleUpon.

I would also advise getting a Google/Yahoo/MSN toolbar just for easy searching and bookmark management as well.

This isn’t a comprehensive count of all the plugins I use, but these are the ones I use most often. Try a few of them out and see if they improve your performance or researching for Squidoo.

Got a plugin I’ve clearly missed? Let me know!

So many of you folks have signed up with Pepperjam and used your Awesome Lensmaster Profiles as your websites that Pepperjam Actually added Squidoo as a Promotional Method in their System!

I think that this level of responsiveness is pretty impressive in any company, and especially so here when a lot of affiliate networks have a reputation for catering to huge clients that drive tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue a month.

If you haven’t headed over to Pepperjam to sign up yet or if you were afraid that they weren’t ‘Squidoo Friendly’ you might want to rethink it before the $10 sign up bonus expires at the end of the month.

Oh, here’s a little teaser to show you guys How well Pepperjam is working for me:

If you aren’t a regular, make sure and snag my RSS feed, I’m planning on breaking out how to build a lens using PepperJam to make money in a series of posts in the next few weeks. Yep, it’s 100% free, as usual.

So, with no further blathering, here is The Captain’s Dos and Don’ts with Squidoo SEO.

DO

• Write in clear, concise paragraphs that are easy to read and make sense. Use keywords in your content text.
• Use less than 3 keywords in your URL
• Build multiple lenses around a general theme and link them together with a directory lens.
• Think very carefully about tagging your lens.
• If you have text content in a module, use the subtitle with relevant words in it.
• Know your audience. Who is your lens written to appeal to? Where do they hang out? Find them.
• No-follow your affiliate links.

Don’t…

• RSS modules on Squidoo are rendered with JavaScript. Google does not see any links from an RSS feed in any of your lenses. Don’t believe me? Google one of your lenses and click the ‘cached’ link on the result. Instead, use the google blog search module or one of the other evergreen modules that Does have its contents indexed by G.
• Leaving drive-by links on lenses and blogs just makes you look spammy. Stop it.
• Do your followers on Twitter want to know more about your lens? Match your promotion to your audience, Twitter is full of ‘Digerati’ and is very tech oriented. You may have a bunch of followers that are rabid fans of German Polka Music and in that case you should share your German Polka Lenses with them. Don’t Share every lens you have on Twitter.
• stop looking for places to promote your lens where people will actually care.
• go bombard 25 social networks with the link to your lens. Try one you think is most appropriate first and see how that goes.
• Write huge introduction modules with a short novel and a bunch of pictures. 3-5 sentences in the intro, tops.
• throw a lens up in 20 minutes, come back in 3 months, and state unequivocally that Squidoo sucks and no money can be made using it and there is no value in Squidoo. You look silly.
• copy/paste your article or blog post straight into a lens. Most likely it will just be ignored or the search engines will rank the squidoo lens and demote your blog. Spend some time changing it around.
• think there’s only one definition of success on squidoo.
• links passed from nearly all directories and articles really don’t carry that much weight. Directories and Article (Bum) Marketing require a tremendous amount of energy for  the ROI. Find a better way.

I could go on but I’ve got to go now. I’ll try to expand on this list later.

For my second lens in the contest I chose to do a product based lens, specifically Rubik’s Cubes and Variants.

Good tips from this lens:

• Less can be more - Notice how I use fewer than the standard 3 listings in the ebay modules. This cuts down on choice but really cleans the look up. In situations like this where I’m featuring different kinds of similar products I’ve found I get better CTRs with this method.
• Use the Description Area of Ebay Modules – Since google will not index the actual auctions pulled in the module any information you can give to the spiders to tell them more about what’s going on helps a ton. Plus, it looks better.
• Picture Poll – I don’t use these very often but this was a perfect situation for it. Instead of a guestbook module I chose to use a poll with images. How did I do it? some simple HTML code with the <image> tag. I have a lens on HTML for Images, and I’m sure there’s a bunch more that describe the process even better (if you know one, post it in the comments!).
• Have fun – Since I am a huge nerd at heart, I love topics like this. It makes it easier to make the lens when you like the topic.
• Don’t be afraid of competition – I didn’t even look to see if there were other Rubik’s Cube lenses on squidoo when I made the lens. After I hit publish, it appears there are a few other lenses on it. That’s fine, more places for my link to hang out in discovery tools .  The more coverage there is on topics like Rubik’s cubes, the more that squidoo can build its reputation as a reliable place to go to find good information. And that’s better for everyone.

Comments or thoughts?

The Rubik’s Cube Lens can be found here.

If you are feeling really excitable you can even go to the main contest page and vote for the Captain in the plexo!