Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips

Google Analytics comes to Squidoo!

thefluffanutta — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:38:21 +0000

Here is some news that is sure to delight all you stats junkies: Squidoo integrates Google Analytics for Lensmasters. By this I mean properly integrated, with all that yummy Javascript goodness that we haven’t had until now. Why is this so exciting? Well, for two main reasons:

There’s a single place on set it up, and it automatically appears on all lenses (as well as your profile, trophies and other pages).
You get the full set of available statistics, much more than with the old image based trackers, including: search engines, keywords, referrers, bounce rates, length of visit, click events and much much more.

For more information about this, read How to Track Lenses with Google Analytics. There is also some additional tips on how to get the most out of GA, and how to interpret the results.

Now for some specific advice for Lensmasters looking to transition their stats:

If you are already tracking your lenses with Google Analytics using the old method, then you will need to remove all of your tracking codes before switching on this new method. Otherwise, you’ll get some visits counted twice.
Alternatively, you could create a new ‘Web Property ID’ to put in your profile settings, and collect a fresh set of stats there. You can the remove the old tracking code at your leisure, perhaps running the two sets in parallel for a few days or weeks.
If you don’t use GA at all yet, then now’s a good time to try it and see if you like it.
If you are using another service, and don’t want to lose the historical stats you’ve built up over the years, then you can continue using it as well as GA.

Have fun!

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Post tags: analytics, google, Squidoo, stats, traffic

New Lens Workshop and New Addon

thefluffanutta — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:04:00 +0000

This week Squidoo have updated the lens workshop. You probably won’t notice it looking any different, but it is now much quicker when editing and publishing lenses.

This means that the Workshop Addon for Firefox and Chrome has also been updated to keep up with the changes. This is also an opportunity to include some new features, such as filtering the points to see just sales or blessings.
If you are an existing user, you will need to update to the latest version.

Also this week, Squidoo HQ have unveiled their new official news portal. This will become the central place to get the latest official news and announcements, include Status Updates, Lens of the Day and Morning coffee. They have also opened up the commenting on the site, so that you can join in the conversation.

Be sure to follow @Squidoo on twitter, SquidooHQ on Facebook
or subscribe to the RSS feeds or sign up for email updates.

Here’s a quick round up of some other, older news:

Squidom lens directory is now run by SquidUtils. All Lensmasters are invited to create accounts and submit their best lenses. Don’t forget to visit other peoples lenses and vote for the good ones.
Another good lens directory to join is LensLike, run by DeeGator.
Amazon Poster Ads are proving very popular amongst many Lensmasters, and are working really well for them. If you’re an Amazon Associate and have tried them yet, read this post.
The Squidoo Toolbar has been updated, and should now work on Firefox 4 and Google Chrome.

That is all for now. Happy Squidding!

thefluffanutta

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Post tags: addon, chrome, firefox, Squidoo News, workshop

Saying Goodbye to ClearSpring Widgets

thefluffanutta — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:52:23 +0000

To those Lensmasters who were around last year, you may remember a platform called “ClearSpring”, which allowed Lensmasters to add their own funky widgets to their Squidoo lenses. Popular examples include Amazon widgets, opt in forms and music players.

Sadly, in December last year, Clearspring announced that they were discontinuing the platform after acquiring AddThis. A little while later, Squidoo also announced that they were phasing out Clearspring modules. Squidoo are unlikely to support the new AddThis platform instead due to security concerns.

Since then, we have not been able to add new widgets, but any existing ones have continued to work: “existing widget installations will continue to be served through January 1st, 2011 with their last known configurations.”

However, there are some alternatives for some specific types of widgets:

- for Lensmasters: Love This Lens (now an official module)
- for Bookmarking: AddThis Bookmark Widget (now an official module)
- for Amazon Associates: Product Links and Ads (including a Carousel-like widget)
- for ClickBank Affiliates: HopAds via RSS
- for Music Publishers: Yahoo! Media Player
- for Google Analytics: Track your lenses
- for Lensmasters: FanClub Counter
- for Twitter: ReTweet Button

If you have a particular widget you wish to keep using, let me know and I’ll see if there’s another way to do it.

SquidUtils Directory – Showcasing YOUR Lenses

thefluffanutta — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:46:44 +0000

Nestled at the back of SquidUtils.com is a lens directory, which features lenses in a hierarchy of categories and tags. What makes this directory different from others is that is grows automatically, including new lenses that it finds. Today it has a little over 23,000 lenses.

How does it work? Well, the key is in the Primary Tag. Whenever SquidUtils finds a group of lenses in the same category and with the same primary tag, it creates a page in the directory. For example, Harry Potter in Books.

A lot of lenses (over 90%) are not featured, often because they use the lens title as their primary tag but no other lenses do. Get your lenses featured by either picking a primary tag that is already featured, or by picking a new unique tag and adding it to 3 or more of your lenses.

To help you figure out the best primary tag to use, the Advanced Dashboard has a new feature – login and look up in the top right corner, and you’ll see a link that lets you sort by Primary Tag. You’ll be able to quickly see which lenses use the same tag, and which of those tags are featured in the directory.

Here are some examples:

1. Here are 4 lenses that are all about “Survivorman”, yet they each use a different Primary Tag. The gray next to each shows they are not in the directory. These would really benefit from having the same tag, e.g. “Survivorman”. If they did, then they would have green next to each of them.

2. In this example below, there are 5 completely different lenses, but each of them is using a tag that is featured in the directory, as indicated by the green s:

Watch out for primary tags that are too competitive – tags like ‘Squidoo’ or ‘Shopping’ have a huge number of lenses in them, and the Advanced Dashboard will highlight your lenses that use these tags with this warning symbol:

Not sure which primary tag would be best for a lens? Click on the symbol to the left of the lens title, and you’ll see something like the image below. It shows all of the tags on your lens, and highlights the ones that would be good as a primary tag. Sometimes this might require changing the category the lens is in, which will be noted in the Comments column.

You may also see some suggested tags underneath, a few of which you might want to add include on your lens. If you’re particularly interested in the SEO implications of the primary tag you choose, see my previous post about Squidoo Tag Pages.

Finally, once you’ve rearranged your lenses into the optimal Primary Tags, SquidUtils should automatically notice them with a day or so, and include them in the directory. You can give yourself a boost by bookmarking the pages that feature your lenses, on other directories, social networks, etc.

Have fun!

Update: There’s a thread on the SquidU.com forum that discusses optimising your primary tags in more detail, and includes a worked example to help clarify this theory.

© admin for Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips, 2010. | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dashboard, directories, lenses, SEO, squidoo tags, tools

New Tools for Amazon Associates

thefluffanutta — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:13:03 +0000

I’ve writen about the advantages of being an Amazon Associate on Squidoo before, and it is still my favourite affiliate program for making money from lenses. If you’ve not seen the tools I’ve created for Amazon, then check out that post to catch up.

For Lensmasters that do already put affiliate links on their lens, here are two new tools to help improve click-through rates and sales. First up, is the large “poster style” banner ad for any product you want to promote, with a bold call-to-action:

Features:
- Automatically generated from Amazon ASIN codes
- Automatically updated daily (to comply with Amazon’s rules)
- Display’s product image, rating, price, % savings, and free shipping *
- Ready-to-Copy HTML and free hosting of images
- Track all your impressions and clicks (optional)

Here’s how it works: You provide an ASIN (or ISBN) and your Associate Tag, and press the button. It will then get the information about that product direct from Amazon, and use that to build a poster ad for you. All the HTML you need will be provided, and all you need to do is copy-and-paste that onto your Squidoo lens.

The second tool will generate banner ads for categories on Amazon. Loosely based on the Carousel widget, these banners are fully compatible with Squidoo, and are optimised for the width of modules. Here’s an example (click for full size):

Here are the links to these new tools:
- Amazon Poster Ads
- Amazon Banner Ads

Have fun!

Updated Lens Workshop Addon

thefluffanutta — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:20:35 +0000

Many of you are familiar with the Squidoo Lens Workshop Addon for Firefox and Chrome – if not, click the link for more information. Anyway, today I have released a new version: v1.4. This is mainly to provide increased support for Google Chrome, but it has also been slightly improved for Firefox users too. I’ve fixed the mess with the dashboard banner (sorry), and removed the now defunct support for Groups.

Firefox Users: If you already have Greasemonkey installed, then all you need to do is install the script again (step 2).

Google Chrome Users: The latest version of Chrome (4.0) has built-in support for Extensions, so all you need to do is install it.

Don’t forget, the Cleaner SquidU script still works on Firefox and Chrome.

If you have any questions, problems or ideas for new features, please let me know.

Disclaimer: this is a 3rd-party addon for Lensmasters, and is not supported by Squidoo.

© admin for Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: addon, browser, chrome, dashboard, firefox, workshop

Adding “ReTweet” Buttons To Your Lens

thefluffanutta — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:53:10 +0000

The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on Twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted. You may have already seen buttons like this one appearing on this and other blogs all over the ‘net:

« Here’s a working example. Give it a try…

Now, you can have it on your Squidoo lens too. Best of all, you don’t even need an account on Twitter, but you can help your visitors spread the word about your lens for you. This looks great in either the Guestbook module, or the Lens Love widget, or anywhere else you like.

And here’s the code you need (edit as required):

URL of lens&source=username" target="_blank" title="retweet">URL of lens" alt="retweet" width="51" height="61" align="left" />

Notes:

You must put in complete URL of your lens, for example: http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo. Don’t forget to put in both places, once for the link and again for the image.
If you have a twitter account, then put your username after &source=, so that you get credit when others do a retweet. Otherwise, leave it blank.
The code above will display the button on the left, with any following content wrapping around it. You can change it to be align=”right” if you prefer, or remove the alignment altogether.
If you get a big question mark after adding it to your lens, you should double-check your code. Make sure there aren’t any spaces or blank lines were there shouldn’t be.
Login to TweetMeme.com with your Twitter account, and see stats for all of your the lenses that have been tweeted.
Don’t feel you have to add this to every single lens you own – start with just the few that get decent traffic and a semi-technical audience.

© admin for Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips, 2009. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: traffic, twitter, widgets

Improved Tag Pages at Squidoo

thefluffanutta — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:44:16 +0000

Recently, Squidoo updated their tag pages to be more useful to visitors and search engines.

If you’re not familiar with tag pages, these are pages that list lenses that use a particular tag. Have a look at the Lensography tag page for an example. There are hundreds of thousands of tags on Squidoo, providing an additional method of navigating and linking between related lenses.

Here’s a summary of the main improvements:

20 lenses are displayed (it used to be only 10), with snippets from the Introductions. This will make the tag pages a lot more ‘content rich’, which the search engines will appreciate. The title of the page is also improved.

Priority is given to the lenses that use the tag as their primary tag, so that those lenses will be listed first, followed by the other lenses that use that tag. This means it’s more important than ever to pick a good Primary Tag.

Tag pages link to other related tag pages, based on the lenses that use them. This provides the perfect system for navigating through the tags to find the right ones to add to your lens. But, remember: less is more when it comes to tags, so choose your tags wisely – limit yourself to just 10 – 15.

Finally, in stark contrast to my sensational post this time last year, tag pages are once again indexable by search engines. As a result, your lenses will get a share of the PageRank and search traffic that these pages get. With any luck, this will also boost the overall authority and traffic to Squidoo.

In other news:

The Discovery Tool is back! Well, kinda…

Related lenses are shown to first-time searchers, in a scrollable box on the right-hand side. This placement is much better than where it used to be under the Introduction, and is an interface visitors will be familar with.

If you visit a lens while logged in, or via a link from another website, you won’t see them. Search engines won’t see them either (but this may change in future).

And finally, eBay no longer allows you put affiliate links on your lens (see blog post from Squidoo). You don’t need to worry about this if you’re using the official eBay module, or the eBay RSS Feeds from SquidUtils, as these will still earn revenue for your lenses. If you’ve used your own affiliate links or feeds from eBay, you will need to remove them.

© admin for Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips, 2009. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: SEO, Squidoo, squidoo tags

How To Pick Your Primary Tags

thefluffanutta — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:20:56 +0000

Originally posted on SquidU Forum as The Importance of Primary Tags.
This post was published on April 21st, 2008 and updated on July 23rd, 2009.

The Primary Tag is the first tag you are asked to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and poorly utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points you should know.

Over half of the lenses on Squidoo have poorly chosen Primary Tags!

It is important for Lensmasters to choose good keywords for their Primary Tag, as it can have a significant effect on the ranking of the lens. Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens, as well as creating a relevant link from the tag page.

More importantly (and relatively recently), the tag page gives priority to lenses that use that tag as their Primary Tag, listing them before all of the other lenses. This means that for one well chosen tag, your lens will get the prime spot on the tag page.

There is also the lens directory here at SquidUtils, which automatically collates lenses by Primary Tag. Only those tags that have 3 or more good lenses under them will be featured, so there’s another reason to pick yours carefully.

Here are some tips to help you pick the right keywords:

1. Your Primary Tag wants to be the most important key phrase that you can think of. For example, if your lens is about a person or a product, stick to just their name.

2. Keep your tag to just 2 or 3 words, where possible. One word is not always specific enough (unless the subject is a strong brand like Pepsi), and more than 3 words can sometimes be too specific. Of course, it does depend on your subject matter.

3. Don’t simply repeat your Lens title again (even though this is the default when building a lens). Your title should include as many keywords as you can sensibly fit (no keyword stuffing!), while your Primary Tag is about your key phrase.

4. Format your Primary Tag nicely – keep it Capitalised, spelt correctly (!) and don’t include any special characters or quotes (“). Use spaces between words, and not dashes or underscores.

5. Pick a Primary Tag which is popular, i.e. people will be likely to be searching for it and other lenses are might also have the same Primary Tag (but not too popular).

If you have Firefox then the Lens Workshop Addon will highlight the tags in the workshop based on their popularity. Avoid any tags that are highlighted in red, as no other lenses use them.

6. Group related lenses under the same Primary Tag – this creates strong links between them, and helps them all to rank well for the target key phrase.

Here are some (random) examples of good Primary Tags:

» Harry Potter
» Xbox 360
» Dog Training
» Digital Photography

Bad examples:

» The Whole Lens Title Again
» Kee Frase Speled Wong
» lowercasewithnospaces
» “Phrase in Quotes”

Once you’ve got your Primary Tag picked out, you will then need to think of some good keywords for the other, ordinary tags. Start with the Primary Tag, and then think of variations from there. The regular tags can be shorter or longer, but you should keep them as relevant to the lens content as possible. Single word tags tend to have poor relevance, but good PageRank. Avoid tags that are runtogetherwords, unless they are commonly used, e.g. videogames.

Happy tagging…

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Post tags: directories, lenses, SEO, squidoo tags

How To Search for Lenses and Groups

thefluffanutta — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:08:53 +0000

Searching for Squidoo lenses on a search engine can be a real pain sometimes, as the results are very often filled with non-content pages. Finding the best groups for your lens to join can also be very tricky.

SquidUtils provides two custom searches (powered by Google) that are optimised to only return the searches that you want to see. Click on the ‘Squidoo Search‘ link on the homepage, and enter the keywords you wish to find.

This functionality can also be found on the browser toolbar for Lensmasters »
Simply click on the down arrow next to the search icon to select lenses or groups, and type in a search query.

For advice on finding the right groups to join, visit A Lensmaster’s Guide To Groups.

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Post tags: groups, lenses, search