5 Steps to Increase Holiday & Seasonal Traffic on Squidoo

Do holidays make a difference in your Squidoo traffic?  They certainly do with mine.  Easter is tomorrow and traffic stats this week show a steep incline, particularly on my seasonally-relevant lenses.

Without a doubt, Pinterest is the leader in referral traffic sources for my lenses and this week my Pinterest numbers have soared. I'm very grateful to all who pin and re-pin, and especially grateful to those who click through. 

Now the question is, how do I keep the traffic coming once Easter is history?  Here are 5 steps that I plan to take to increase traffic to my holiday and seasonal lenses.

1. Keep track of upcoming popular holidays and seasonal celebrations.  Mother's Day is next and summer is coming up fast.
2. Update existing topical lenses by updating keywords and phrases.
3. Make new lenses, taking a useful, unique, or even trendy approach to seasonal topics. 
4. Choose and use outstanding photos to catch the attention of prolific Pinterest users.
5. Make a promotional plan that includes my favorite social media sites. I don't want to depend on having all my eggs in the Pinterest basket. Facebook and Google+ are proving to be good traffic sources, too.

Are you seeing an upswing in your seasonal lenses?  Have any tips to share on how you attract traffic? I would love to read your success stories.

Marc Guberti's Squidoo Challenge

Lensmaster, Giant Squid, and boy wonder Marc Guberti (I use that "boy wonder" title in the most complimentary way) recently put pen to paper (well, fingertips to keyboard) to offer a solution to re-grow traffic to Squidoo.

Marc's only 16, but he's been a lensmaster for a couple of years now. In the same period he has established himself as a Twitter expert, has written several books and publishes a popular blog, and he's making his presence known on YouTube as well as spreading his wings to encompass other social media platforms.  I'm not privy to his master plan, but I'm pretty sure it includes becoming Guru of Everything.  Again, I use that title with the utmost respect; Marc is wise beyond his years and I respect him as a serious force in content creation, online marketing, and social media.

Back to Marc's Squidoo Challenge.  You can read it here, but to briefly summarize it's a seven-step plan that almost any lensmaster can follow to earn more traffic to their Squidoo lenses.  And, according to Marc, if large numbers of lensmasters commit to following the plan and follow through on their commitments, Squidoo's traffic stats should begin rising in no time with the goal of a million visitors a day in sight within months or even sooner. 

I like the plan.  In fact, a printed copy of the steps is hanging prominently from the bulletin board above my desk.  I've highlighted the three areas that I need to work on (the others I already do every day) and I'm happy to say that I've met my goals for this week including creating two new lenses, adding content to three old lenses, and pinging lenses that I update (a simple habit I'm not sure why I ever fell out of, but one I'm determined to reestablish). 

Whether the million visitors a day goal is reachable in the manner Marc lays out, I really don't know.  Whether tier payments will increase to their previous height, I don't know.  But I do know that my business can only benefit from following Marc's seven steps. And if I can help him spread the word and five, 10, or 1000 lensmasters follow suit, there's certainly nothing any of us has to lose - and there's plenty to gain. 

So what do you think?  Will you set a goal to follow Marc's plan for a month to see what happens?  If you will, visit his lens and let him know, and let me know, too, in a comment.  Then let's meet in a month and compare notes.

I'm in.  Are you?


Photo from Marc's Blog

Halloween Shoppers Haunting Squidoo!

But wait, that's a good thing!

Has your Halloween lens traffic picked up lately? Mine has and, I'm happy to report, so have Halloween sales. But I'm looking forward to more!

I was just glancing at the calendar, counting the number of shopping days, specifically weekends, before Halloween.  The timing actually favors last-minute shoppers this year, which means that it favors online sellers, too.  Amazon Prime allows for procrastinating people to order on the weekend of the 26th and still receive their costumes and other goodies a day or two before Halloween.  That's a good thing for those of us who feature last-minute Halloween ideas and easy trick-or-treat costume solutions. 

Savvy shoppers won't wait until the last minute, though, and the savviest of the savvy will be making their choices and placing their orders this weekend and next.  I'll admit that I still have a few Halloween lenses that are scary-out-of-date and need some freshening up.  How about you? 

Will you be updating your Halloween lenses over the next few days, too?  Or are you already set for shoppers?  If so, consider adding a lens designed specifically for last-minute Halloween shoppers.  It could pay off in scary-good sales this year!

Image courtesy Squidoo.com

Google Likes Me Again!

I haven't talked about it anywhere but at home (my poor sweetie has been so patient with me), but I've been struggling for months to get Google to like a particular lens of mine.

Today, it does!

Traffic overall to my lenses is up after a long summer lull, but I'm the most thrilled with this one particular lens that was only getting referral traffic, mostly from inside Squidoo.  For months!  Okay, for more than a year.  This evening I was perusing stats overall and noticed that today's traffic on that lens was up, so I looked at specifics and was pleasantly surprised to see some Google hits.

Yay! Finally!

Hopefully the drought has been broken and things will continue to look up for that lens as well as the rest of them.  Yours, too!  Happy day!

Why I Appreciate Cows

It continues to amaze me how many people find my How to Make a Cow Costume page this time of year.  You see, this coming Friday is Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-Fil-A and people really want free food!  To get it, all they have to do is dress up like a cow.  To do that, they need instructions.

Not sure why I'm surprised about the traffic.  After all, the point of the page is to show people how to make or where to buy a cow costume.  And the spike in traffic every end of June/early July is certainly tied to Chick-Fil-A's annual event.  In other words, the lens is working as planned! 

Of course there's a spike in October, too, as people plan Halloween costumes.  But actually this is a fairly popular lens that gets traffic year-round.  I guess people have other, year-round reasons to dress up like a cow.  And I certainly appreciate that!

Do you have a lens that gets traffic spikes that surprise you?  Leave a link in your comment!

Squidoo Tags - Have You Noticed?

Tags on Squidoo lenses are much more noticeable now.  Have you noticed? 

You'll find the "Related Tags" section on the right-hand side of each lens.  Each one is linked to a tags page, consisting of a list of all lenses that use that same tag. 

This week, Squidoo changed the display of the tags, making them much more noticeable.  The format practically screams, "Click me!"  And people will click.  I know I've been clicking on tag links, on my own lenses as well as others', ever since the change just to see what I can see. 

So, what will visitors to your lenses see when they click on your tags?  I already told you that they'll go to a tags page with a list of lenses.  So, why is this important to you?  It's important because when a visitor to a lens on a topic similar to yours clicks out on that lens's related tag, you want to be sure that your lenses on the same topic show up on that tag's page.   Why?  So those visitors will click on and visit your lenses. 

Make sense? 

Update your lenses with the right tags and see if you notice an increase in the number of visits to your lenses.  I'll be updating my tags and watching my stats, how about you?

Getting Social on Squidoo and What It Can Do For You

There are a lot of reasons to be social on Squidoo. By being social, I mean doing such things as visiting other people's lenses, joining fan clubs, leaving comments on lenses and on lensmaster pages, and participating on the SquidU forum. If you aren't doing those things, here's why you should.

Participation on Squidoo unlocks privileges. Leaving comments or voting in polls on lenses will help you earn points. The more points you earn, the higher your level will climb and the more privileges you will unlock. For instance, when you first open an account on Squidoo you do not have access to certain templates and even certain modules within Squidoo. As you earn points from making lenses, leaving comments,"liking" lenses, participating in polls on other people's lenses, etc., those templates, modules, and a number of other privileges become available.

Participation on the SquidU forum leads to more traffic for your lenses, which leads to higher lensrank and more visibility for your lenses. As you become active in conversations on the forum and people get to know you, they're going to want to check out your lenses. The more noticeable your presence, the more likely it becomes that people will find your lenses, join your fan club, leave comments, participate in your polls and leave comments in your guestbooks, and rate your lenses. That extra traffic and subsequent interaction with your lenses results in better lensrank.

As your lensrank improves as a result of more traffic from people ON Squidoo, search engines begin to notice the attention to your lenses. This ultimately results in greater respect for your lenses by the search engines, leading to higher visibility of your lenses in search results and, thus, more traffic from people OFF Squidoo. Getting traffic from the search engines, of course, is your ultimate goal.

Oh, and did I mention that social interaction is tracked on Squidoo and is part of lensrank calculation? That's a fact.

Can you see how spending even 10 minutes a day interacting with other lensmasters and their lenses is a good investment of your time? Your lenses benefit in so many ways. Besides, you'll meet some of the smartest and friendliest people in the world on Squidoo. It's true!

How about you. Are you social on Squidoo?

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.

Help Me Bump My Lens?

I guess nobody likes eBay videos or eBay humor anymore (and that is entirely possible).

Or maybe I've just ignored my lowest-ranking lens for too long.

Either way, it's number 169 of my 169 published lenses. I just checked and it appears that every single video link is working. That, frankly, is amazing.

I actually kind of like this lens. So I tweaked a few things, put a poll near the top, and twittered it. It'll be on its way to Facebook as soon as I finish here.

Lensrank is 282,491 today. What will it be tomorrow?

Want to help bump it up? Check it out.

What's Blogging Among Squidoo Friends?

Collaborative or co-op blogs, those with multiple contributors, are becoming quite popular in the Squidoo community and for good reason. We're all busy, so having multiple authors to help keep a blog updated on a regular basis is a good thing.

Top-Rated Gifts for Christmas is one such collaborative blog, a new undertaking designed for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Each post features a well-reviewed item that would make a wonderful gift, and each links back to a lens featuring that same item. Our hope as lensmasters and bloggers is that the links on the blog will garner traffic to our lenses and, of course, lead to holiday sales.

Are you part of a collaborative blog? Let us know by leaving a comment with your blog link and any tips or advice about what you do to make your group's blog succeed. If you're not part of a group blog, why not gather a few of your trusted lensmaster friends and get one started? When you do, we'd love if you'd report back and let us know.

A collaborative blog just might be a good addition to your business plan. After all, a community that blogs together makes money together. Or at least we hope it works out that way!

Get More Traffic from the New Squidoo GreetBox

Greetings! If you've been around Squidoo awhile you might have noticed a recent drop in referral traffic to your lenses from within Squidoo. Some of that traffic used to come from links on other, related lenses. With the lens layout changes from a couple of months ago, those Squidoo-generated links ceased to exist.

Where did they come from in the first place? They were a result of a lensmaster's opting in to the Discovery Tool, which is found on a tab in every lens's intro module. The tab is still there and, I'm happy to report, the Discovery Tool is now working again, although in a different way.

Click on the Discovery Tool tab for any lens and you'll see space for three different lens URL's. It's up to you to provide links there (if you want to) to lenses related to your own. Naturally you're going to want to include your own lenses, or you can choose somebody else's lens.

So what happens to those links? With today's introduction of the GreetBox on Squidoo, when someone finds your lens by way of a search engine and clicks through, they will see your lens but with a GreetBox at the top. The new, non-logged-in-to-Squidoo visitor will be greeted and provided with links to three lenses that, in case your page doesn't actually provide what they were looking for, they can visit instead. While this may sound like an invitation to exit your lens, well, in a way it is. Squidoo wants to provide what the searcher was looking for and if your lens doesn't fit the bill, the visitor can either hit the "back" button - or he can choose one of those three lenses instead of yours. I vote for the latter choice, wouldn't you? Let's keep our visitors on Squidoo!

If you'd like for one or more of those three alternate lens choices to be your lenses, then make sure you opt in to the discovery tool and provide related links. That's the good news. The better news is that if you do opt in (and all of your lenses should already default to the opt in), your lens just might appear as a related link on somebody else's lens. However if you opt out, don't expect traffic from anyone else's GreetBox because your lens won't be eligible to appear there.

The GreetBox is in an experimental stage on Squidoo right now. Read more about this exciting new traffic tool on the Squidoo blog.