What is a Lens Cloud?
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!
A Lens Cloud is:
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.
Did you enjoy today's Squidoo related post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to the Captain Squid RSS Feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader or email inbox for free.
Comments
I thought you were going to say something about one of those word cloud thingies, but you just put a name to something I actually started doing by accident when I realized I had way too much information for one lens. I never thought about the natural SEO that would occur as a result, but now that you mention it, I’m going to take a second look at my plans and see how I can make my clouds better. Thanks!
This sounds similar to what I’ve attempted to do with http://www.AllHorses.us … users are invited to choose a topic from http://www.squidoo.com/horseexpert or pick their own, and all of us benefit from the interconnectedness … at least, that’s the idea! 
I think this is what I actually started with my Christmas decoration lenses and as you say, it is initially a lot of work. But I think it will pay off in the long run.
I finshed now 4 lenses about this subject and as they all belong to one lens cloud - I learned a new term today - I also gave them all the same design. I interlinked them with the featured lenses module as well as with lensrolling them with each other and I am putting a few static links, where it is possible. I am planning to make an overview lens for this as well, after i finished all planned lenses, in the moment the Christmas decoration group is doing like a kind of overview for this.
I think I had an innate sense of this when I first started here but can’t quite seem to grasp it yet.
Yes, it makes more sense now, re-read the article and looked at your lens example again, similar to a lensography but more focused
[...] 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 [...]
I think I’ve been doing this to some extent without even knowing it. I do my lenses on self defense and safety and link them all together. Who knew I was such a genius… thanks for pointing it out for me.
I’m already doing something like this to several of my lenses.
My question would be, ethically, do we count a cloud as a whole lens? Or each page of the cloud as individual lenses. Seems like it would be too easy to start up a cloud and hit the 50 lens perequisite, then be disappointed when the powers that be decide that you shouldn’t be a giant squid…
Just a random thought…
I need to know how to link the lenses. Someone sent me an HTML code and said to use the featured lens, but I couldn’t figure it out. Or lensrole, I just can’t figure it. The page on Tom Petty is great. What I want to do. Thanks.
I agree, lens clouds have worked best for me in terms of traffic and sales. And chances are if you’re writing a lens cloud, you know a lot about that particular subject so it’s going to be fun for you to write that lens series.
Leave a comment
Makes a lot of sense, Cap’n! Using the featured Lens modules seems to be a very effect way to do this. Music related Lenses are the easiest way to do this since you can make Lenses about the artist, their albums, songs, lyrics, videos and related artists. With a little bit of clear and focused thinking, this can be done with just about any topic.