Squidoo Quick Tip of the Day - Save Your Changes!

Tip of the Day:  When you're in workshop mode, creating or editing a lens, make sure to "apply" or "save" once you've made changes.  This particularly applies to editing the workshop tools on the right sidebar, everything from the lens theme to your bio, to "How to you want to get paid?" and Dashboard Labels and tags. 

If you edit a module in the body of the lens, you have to save or cancel to continue editing.  There's no warning if you make a change in one of the categories on the right.  It's very easy to make those changes and forget to save them.  Always save and then publish the lens so your changes will take effect.

I don't have to tell you how I know.  :)  Hope your short-term memory is better than mine!

Another Reason to Choose a Great Intro Module Photo

Have you noticed that now you can choose SIX related lenses to feature in the right side margin of each of your lenses?  List them in the "Related Lenses" tab of the intro module in the lens workshop.  After your lens is published, check that right sidebar for the "Explore related pages" section and you'll see all six lenses displayed there, along with their intro module photos.  Very eye-catching and very cool!

If you don't specify six lenses, Squidoo will use your tags to choose the lenses that will display in that space.  If someone else who has a lens with a similar topic doesn't specify six lenses, it's possible that one of your lenses might show on that person's related pages section. 

So . . . Make sure your intro module picture is a good one.  You never know where it might show up! 

Squidoo Policy Changes and How They Might Affect You

There are a couple of recent Squidoo policy changes that pertain to everyone but are especially important for those of us with existing lenses.

First, the Intro module MUST contain at least 200 characters, so be sure your intro text is long enough! The intro must also contain a picture. IF YOU EDIT AN OLD LENS and the intro is too short when you hit "publish," the lens will revert to unpublished.  You'll get a message that your intro module is too short and you'll have to fix it. However, when you fix it and publish again, lensrank will start all over, which means your first lensrank will likely be in the millions. Since Squidoo ad pay is based on average lensrank for the month, even if the lens previously ranked in the top payout tier (from 1 to 2000), your average likely will be shot and you probably won't get that top tier payout. So be careful when you edit your lenses and check the length of that intro module!

The second policy change is that lenses may contain no more than 10 Amazon modules and five eBay modules. If you have existing lenses with more, don't worry because those old lenses are grandfathered into this policy; however, when you edit one of those lenses you won't be able to add any more of those modules, so just keep that in mind.  For new lenses, though, no one is exempt from this policy so plan accordingly.

To keep updated on important changes within Squidoo and how they might affect you, subscribe to the SquidBlog and visit the SquidU forum regularly. 

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.