I just built a "lens" but am not sure how to promote it to get traffic. See: http://www.squidoo.com/personalized-photogifts/ Any ideas? Thanks
Squidoo is pretty much banned from all the social media sites due to spamming. I would just throw a few links at it and then ignore it.
Spend an hour or so joining relevant Squidoo groups, and submit an article or two to a few article directories or blogs. As IR1st mentioned, Squidoo's lost a bit of it's authority lately, so setup a few links and give it time for your traffic to creep up.
That's not true! I see many keywords squidoo lenses rank well for top keywords...infact #2 & #3 position for one of my target keywords...kinda frustrating. One of them has just 12 backlinks and my site has like 800 backlinks...makes no sense!!
Edited for correction... This site ranks well... http://www.squidoo.com/mario-games/ keyword ranked well for: "free mario games" I just want to know how they have all the youtube backlinks, but whatever....
I'm making about $50/mo on it, but the pages I made required a LOT of hard work. It probably would have been better spent on individual sites.
Squidoo is back - its just more of a toothless tiger than the ferocious beast that it once was. But, a tiger still has claws. It has value - and articles can rank in the top few pages of google, but its not an overwhelming dominant force. Its still worth using IMO as part of an overall internet marketing effort for your site and to gain traffic to it. I have quite a few articles over there are showing up for longtail searches on google.
I wouldn't expect much traffic from Squidoo. Concentrate on link building instead. It will bring you a lot more visitors in the long term.
My experiences have all been positive with Squidoo. It is important to note that the list of benefits of a squidoo presence can be more than is evident at first. One unexpected result was the consistent networking with other lensmasters which can be just another way to find quality links. As for human traffic, while the numbers are sometimes low, the audience is generally targeted for a particular niche, which is what I am after. I think its also important to focus on keywords and build a lens for each mission critical keyword, paying attention to the url selection and tags. Poor choices of url, title and tags are not likely to gain Google's attention which in turn brings human traffic. My experiences have shown that many of my lenses ranked high in the past and still do. I actually track several lenses with the DP search engine ranking tool. Another good application for Squidoo is a place to enter deep links, and these can work to human increase traffic to those pages in cases where you need a specific audience. I think the key to Squidoo is that it is a good tool, IF you are willing to write original content and maintain the lenses. It may not be the perfect choice for someone that wants to set it and forget it.
LOL You said it.. One of my lenses used to get about 25K uniques monthly until Google intervened, and lately it's getting only 5-10K monthly which is, by my standards, more than great for free traffic source. Not to mention having direct aff. sales, shared revenue and tons of backlinks. And as a result of Squidoo tightening their spam policies, Google started showing signs of forgiveness and Squidoo slowly started to regain their first page positions. So, I am not complaining Everyone is free to leave.
Squidoo can send you some traffic. Squidoo still ranks pretty well in SERPs if it's good content ... at least and updated lense.
If you are absolutely focussed on wanting to build your lens - another thing to keep in mind is that Squidoo seems to really value updated and fresh content. As far as I've heard - the ranking mechanism internally is heavily weighted in favour of lens that are continually refreshed - if you don't update for a while you will find yourself sliding backwards. Dylan
You are right about that. Lenses need constant updates to gain/maintain rankings. If you neglect them they sink. That means more work is needed more often with more content.