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.