The day we all knew would come has arrived. Squidoo groups are dead and buried, never to be seen again. Weep weep, kinda.

WHEN:

Just a few days ago, Squidoo converted all groups into regular lenses. You can no longer add your lens to a group, and your existing lenses are no longer members of any group.

WHY:

Because groups were turning a bit spammy and useless, and nobody really got any great benefits out of joining a group except the groupmaster. This really isn’t how it should be, so goodbye groups.

BUT DON’T WORRY:

If you had a group, it all still looks pretty much intact, with your modules in their places, and your URL has stayed the same. So links you’ve set up to your group will still work, and Google will continue to index it as before.

GOOGLE RANKING:

So what can you use to replace the wonderful Google Ranking Power of a Squidoo Group? Right now you just have lenses. Groups ranked so well partly because you had instant backlinks to your group just by people adding lenses to it (every lens added linked to your group from their sidebar).

So to replicate the Google Ranking Power you just need to build more backlinks.

How hard can it be

Lewis

If you’ve put Guestbook modules on your lenses, and you have 10+ published, you’ll be very familiar with the kind of comments I’m talking about here.

If a guestbook comment doesn’t say anything interesting, and add to the conversation, DON’T FEEL BAD ABOUT DELETING IT.

Don’t think just because someone left you a comment you have to publish it for all the world to see.

We’re not interested in having our lenses full of rubbish comments, are we?

Every time you approve a comment that isn’t useful or unique, you risk diluting the content on your lens.

Don’t be afraid of offending anyone. The kind of comments you should delete will be from people who write so many of them they won’t notice anyway.

I delete all comments that say nothing but:

+ Well done, great lens
+ I rated you 5*
+ Please check out my lens
+ This lens is good
+ Thanks for the info
+ This was helpful thanks

Well meaning, yes, but pointless.

Here’s a good general rule:

Only approve comments that will be useful to other readers.

That’s what I’m sticking to…

- Lewis

According to Seth Godin’s blog, Squidoo is hiring a sales pro.

Here is what the official lens says:

“Squidoo is one of the largest websites in the world, with millions of pages, half a million members, more traffic than cbs.com and more than 20,000,000 page views a month. We’re hiring someone to run our ad and promotion sales efforts.”

Those are some impressive numbers! Half a million members! Crikey!

Squidoo aims to work directly with advertisers instead of just posting Google ads and Glam ads on your lenses, currently meaning some middle-man ad networks share the profits. This is good for us lensmasters because it will mean more ad money each month per lens.

Squidoo has a lot of influence and is going to use it to get a better deal.

But here’s the interesting bit….

“We’re focusing on more than just banners, leveraging our deep long tail of information combined with legions of motivated and talented users.”

What does that sound like to you?

I highly doubt ‘Paid Reviews’
Possibly a sponsored lens theme
InText links
Tag Page Specific Adverts

Interesting… Veeeery interesting…

Tiffany Dow, Social Media Smarty and my business partner at BuildMyLens.com, has posted a great tip on her blog.

How to get free [and easy] content for your lens from YouTube:

“Many marketers are being taught that video is a required element of their online success (and I agree). So if you go to YouTube you’ll find thousands (millions?) of videos for your niche on there by experts. Those video are able to be posted and shared on your website, correct? So here’s what you do.

Take a video in your niche, transcribe the words into text, and post the text on your [lens] WITH the video. You don’t want to just swipe the content alone because that’s stealing. But the perk you get is that Google will crawl your textual content and it can help you in the SERPs (search engine results pages). With the YouTube video, you’re only getting the description and title counting toward your content, but a full transcript gives much more fodder for SEO purposes.”

Add a relevant video using a YouTube module, transcribe the text into a Text module or into the youtube module itself, and you have extra content for Google to scan and rank you for.

EXCELLENT ADVICE!

You can see the full post and comments here.

Lewis

P.S. Tiff found the tip in the WarriorForum War Room [a password protected area you only see by paying].

Squidoo and Twitter have quite a nice little relationship going.

You can feature your latest Tweets in your lens, you can build a Twttrlist list lens, or a Twttrstrm lens, and of course just promote your latest lenses on Twitter!

So I thought I would put together a nice and easy list of….

Some ways to automate your Twitter account:

1. Schedule Tweets: With TweetLater.com you can set up as many tweets as you like to post on set dates in the future. Beyond the obvious ones like Christmas and other Holidays, you could do things with special offers, promoting your relevant webpages and lenses at the right time of year, every year, and even keep your profile active while you go on vacation or something. Scheduling Tweets sounds trivial but it can prove to be very useful indeed.

2. Automatically Follow People Who Follow You: Twitter is great at connecting you with a huge audience… but the strains of a huge audience are obvious. How can you possibly keep up with everyone who follows you? Twitter is meant to help you do the things you do right now, but better! It’s not means to steal hours from you every day. If you follow me on any of my Twitter accounts you’ll see me follow you back within minutes, automatically. Very useful indeed. This is from TweetLater.com also.

3. Automate Direct Messages: When you follow me on any of my accounts, and I follow you back automatically, you will get a Direct Message from me saying hi. You can set your own automatic direct message to say whatever you like. Advice: Don’t just say hello and ask them to check out your website. That sucks. Connect with people instead. Try asking a question, and maybe asking for them to @reply instead of DM reply. Note: I have turned this feature off now, just because I hate Direct Messages. People were replying to me and I would never remember to check to reply.

4. Turn any RSS feed into Twitter posts: This will apply to you if you post content on any of the following sites – Wordpress, Squidoo, BlogSpot, Tumblr, Typepad, HubPages, EzineArticles, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, actually pretty much any modern website! Use TwitterFeed.com to set up an “RSS Feed To Twitter”. It’s all automatic from then on!

5. Unfollow People Who Are Not Following You: If you follow people on Twitter in the hope they will follow you back, and sadly find out that some don’t, you can use buzzom.com to help you unfollow them. It’s a bit weird only following people in the hope they will follow you back, but life is like that sometimes.

6. Use TweetAdder: If you are looking for something a LOT more powerful to automate your Twitter Tasks I would recommend TweetAdder to you!

I have just started using TweetAdder, and I would recommend it highly. It does exactly what it says it will do, and will help you do everything you could possibly imagine to automate your Twitter account.

It is like the Holy Grail of Twitter account management.

And that’s how I roll

Question: In what ways do YOU automate your Twitter account?
Question: Do you think automating your Twitter account will bring you bad twitter karma?

Lewis