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

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