How to Use Wikipedia to Get Traffic To Squidoo

You've no doubt heard of Wikipedia, the online, collaborative encyclopedia of almost everything. When people want to know more about something or someone new and interesting, they often search "wikipedia" first. Here's how you can use the popularity of Wikipedia to get traffic to your Squidoo lenses.

The first and most obvious is to include information from Wikipedia about the subject of your lens, making sure you attribute that information back to Wikipedia as its source. While that's easily done with Squidoo's Wikipedia module, I often pull pertinent facts from the article and present them in a text module with the attribution in a link at the bottom, like this. If the Wikipedia article is well written, sometimes I'll use the Wikipedia module or use a text module and quote a portion and then link back to the source with a "read the rest of the Wikipedia article" link.

But what if you're writing about a topic that isn't on Wikipedia yet? (If you are, good for you - you may have hit on a nice niche of your own.) In that case, find a related Wikipedia topic to include in your lens. Use either of the above methods to include the information in your lens, but make sure to attribute and link back to Wikipedia. Then, chances are that when someone else wants to learn about your subject and they search the name of the subject plus "wikipedia," they'll find your lens.

What do I mean by a related topic? In my Voca People lens, I used Wikipedia to explain the meaning of the term a cappella. Now, the word "Wikipedia" is associated with "Voca People" and my lens has become the authority site for that singing group. Try the search, or see how I did it here.

The accuracy of information published on Wikipedia is a subject for another place, but if you're comfortable that the facts presented about your topic are, indeed, factual, by all means use this popular location - and search term - to help get traffic to your lenses. If you try it, do leave a comment and let me know how it works for you.