Squidoo - How To Most Efficiently Utilize It?

[Blackthorne]

I haven't done a lot with Squidoo as of yet. I'm thinking about creating a few strong links from there in addition to my Infobarrels and HubPages.

How do other people on the forum utilize Squidoo? Do you build one really large 'authority' lens with a handful of backlinks?

Or do you use lenses to just put your standard 350 word articles on with only 1 or 2 backlinks?

I'd like to hear your thoughts and experiences.

[Leo]

I use Squidoo primarily as a secondary way to acquire links...much like blogspot, wetpaint, and other free hosted sites. I have never had good luck with squidoo in terms of ranking without putting in the work with it so it doesn't do much good in terms of testing niches (at least not for me) from a "free" point of view.

From a residual income point of view, it does absolutely squat.

[Blackthorne]

Yeah that's how I intend to use it.

So you create 400 word articles on it per lens then?

[Leo]

Yeah that's how I intend to use it.

So you create 400 word articles on it per lens then?

As small of a lens as I can get away with...lol. I also will tend to daisy chain lens in a straight line fashion to try to accumulate Page Rank to the last one and then point it to the page I am trying to rank.

If you can get a lens ranked, it is a good source for mining keywords, much like infobarrel, eza, and hubpages.

[ramirezhenry55]

You must create a unique and useful lens so others would want to rate and comment on your lens and they can also subscribe to your rss feeds.

[Froggy]

I make a few quick lenses as part of my keyword research and see how they do in a couple weeks. No promotion or linking from outside of squidoo at all. Youtube videos & a few of their other modules are a great lazy way to add content without actually having to do anything.

If they don't do well I'll just use them for links. Most of them end up this way.

The ones that get a decent amount of visitors, but not doing well on squidoo ranks, help inspire other things I'll make eventually

If they do well (enough to hit the 2nd tier or close), they get a bit of a makeover to not suck. I'll throw in a small article, resource directory, affiliate links if it has a good chance of making a sale, etc and turn it into a "real lens" instead of a junky one. And of course some of those resource links would be mine . These can get quite a bit in monthly payouts from squidoo if you have enough of them.

Squidoo can be surprising sometimes. I spent 3 minutes on one lens, no promotion at all, over 150k visitors in the next couple months. Wish I had noticed before it was too late to monetize well

[JackBloodstone]

nah i use squido0 to pass page rank..daisy chain or butterfly chain to secondary site..

[BenK]

Squidoo has crap interlinking so they don't pass on much juice or funnel traffic between lenses very well. But you can do it yourself. Create 5 or so squidoo lenses and link each together in a daisy chain link. The last lens has the ONLy link out to your money site, with the ancho text you want. Send about 10-30 links to that specific squidoo lense that links out. If you can stomach it, build up a handful of links (non squidoo links) to the other 4 lenses too.

Bam, (in time) you've got some real link juice now coming out of the final lense.

[Tel]

Yeah, it works but be careful with the niche. I was getting a lot of juice to my weight loss network until the Squidoo team decided my weight loss lenses were spam and they deleted them. You'll be fine with mama's cookie recipes and grandpa's woodwork tips, but anything getting close to anything on their spam list and you risk losing it.

There is only one network that you can be almost sure of hanging onto when it comes to backlinking and that's your own (as in domains you own and host yourself). Anything else can be taken away from you at any time, even wordpress.com blogs (I just lost some to their spam police wankers) and blogger too.

Treat all free stuff as expendable and if you lose some, don't sweat it, just shrug and build more. But put all your real energy into building your own sites cause they're the ones that you own and you call the shots and they will be the ones that make you the real money in the long term.

[JackBloodstone]

which one more efficient to daisy chain..specific niche to general niche or general to specific or long tail?