Tim ‘thefluffanutta‘, has made many great Squidoo tools. Every one of his creations has a dear place in all our hearts…

And they just keep getting better!

His latest creation is the Lens Love Module.

How many times have you visited a lens, got to the bottom of it, and forgotten to rate it? If you’re like me, probably lots.

Tim’s Lens Love module will put a nice row of stars at the BOTTOM of your lens as well as the existing ones at the top, which means your lens visitors can get to the bottom and still rate your lens without forgetting.

You can click here to add the Lens Love Module to your lenses

And you can click here to see a live example and read Tim’s explanation of it

Oh beautiful wonderful Tim, what’s next!

Lewis

P.S. have you added this module to your lenses? Have you noticed more ratings than normal? Do you put it at the bottom, or somewhere in the middle? What are your thoughts?

Do you treat your lensmaking as a hobby or a business?

I would guess that more than 99.9% of lensmasters treat their lensmaking time as a hobby. It pays rather nicely if you hit upon a great niche idea and write up some great content, but most of the time people are making lenses it’s probably more fun than work.

If it felt like work they probably wouldn’t do it as much, in their free time no less!

For the casual Squidoo Lensmaster making lenses as a hobby, the hope of earning some extra pocket money and getting some friendly guestbook comments is enough of an extra incentive to keep them going.

But what would happen if you took a pen and paper and wrote down some goals for your Squidoo Income?

If you began to treat it more like a mission than a hobby then some really magical things would start to happen. You would be motivated to make more lenses and make more profits, write more useful information, learn more money-making ideas, and really start to devote enough time to your lensmaking to do some REAL damage.

Let’s say you set yourself a task of building 5 new lenses a week to earn an extra $500 a month from Squidoo.

You could start by:

Making a lens about anything you buy online
Making a lens about anything you search google for but find no useful results
Making a lens about different places to visit in your home town or country
Making a lens about each book you read
Making a lens about each film you see
Making a lens about different affiliate products which inspire you
Making a lens about a celebrity
Making a lens about a favourite charity
Making a lens about your friend’s business
Making a lens about a question that’s been bugging you
Making a lens about the best software to do XYZ
Making a lens about making lenses!
Making a lens about your favourite recipe
Making a lens about anything you think will sell!

And before you know it a year has gone by and your 5 lenses a week have turned into an impressive roster of 260 lenses.

Out of all those lenses you will have made some absolute winners, and also some absolute duds. But it’s the only way to learn what will and won’t succeed.

Also, it won’t take you long making lenses about things you know to realise that some topics are more profitable than others, and you will naturally be drawn to them.

I have a lens that I wrote one day just for fun that has earned me over $7500 in the past 2 years (from affiliate sales). And I only struck upon the topic by making a load of dud lenses first and just thinking it would be cool to make a lens about so-and-so.

When you start to focus on reaching income goals with your lenses you can start to see the whole process in a whole new light. That lens really opened my eyes to what is possible. That one lens has earned an average $300+ a month for the last 2 years.

Do you see yourself as a real Internet Niche Marketer and are you treating your online money-making as a real business? Or is making money on Squidoo just an extra-pocket-money hobby?

Lewis

P.S. don’t get me wrong. Both are fine. Hobby or business. But if you are looking for the big bucks online… treat it as a goal-worthy business. That’s the only way you will make it to 100, 200, or 500+ lenses.

Are you building a mailing list from your lenses?

When someone lands on your lens, how many chances of a sale do you get?

Mostly the answer will be… one.

If you get the person to look at a couple of your lenses then your chance of a sale doubles and triples.

But what if your lens visitors said to you ‘Hey! I like your style! Here, take my email address and send me cool stuff!’

If you could get your lens visitors to opt in to your newsletter or niche list then you would really start to turn yourself into a savvy niche marketer.

You can see this in action on many of my lenses.

I actually have one single lens that I have used to build a mailing list of over 4000 (FOUR THOUSAND!!) people, all interested in the same thing.

Now when I make a lens about that same topic… I just send them all a quick email letting them know. And voila. Instant audience. Instant income from any sales.

Are you wasting the chance to build an email list asset from your lenses?

I use an autoresponder company called Aweber. I highly recommend them, and they are the best at what they do.

And I’ve also put together a step by step guide on how to get live opt in forms onto your lenses which you can get from www.SquidooTricks.com.

If you are missing out on extra visitors and extra income from having your own fanbase, this week can be the time you change all that.

Lewis

P.S. there are companies like aweber which offer a free service, but it is most often a case of ‘You get what you pay for’. But for someone just starting out the free option at getresponse.com might be enough.

Yesterday Squidoo launched their newest clever creation. It’s called TwitterStorm and is a clever merge between a lens and Twitter.

You make a question lens, kind of like Yahoo Answers meets Squidoo, and people can write and vote answers via Twitter.

When they participate by answering your question a link to your lens appears on their Twitter profile page to all their Twitter followers. And if those followers participate then their followers see the link too. And on it goes…

It’s a viral creation. And it’s really rather slick. The Squidoo HQ people are quite a clever bunch.

You can see a nice example of a Twitter Storm lens here, and you can make your own here.

The whole Twitter Storm concept has given me some really cool ideas.

Yahoo answers gets a ton of visitors from google when people search for the same question, not just the keywords. For example instead of searching for ‘Best BlackBerry App’ they might search for ‘What are the best blackberry apps?’.

So I’m thinking.. I make a bunch of lenses to test this out and turn Squidoo TwitterStorm lenses into yahoo answer-type google traffic magnets. Phew! That’s something of a mouthful.

Handy use of guestbook modules, polls, and the Twitter storm tool itself could result in a really interactive, useful and viral page.
It’s definitely worth testing.

I have made a list of about 50 questions I am going to turn into lenses.

And if it turns out that a guestbook would have worked better than the new TwitterStorm tool then that’s something we will have to investigate…

How are you going to use Twitter Storm?

Lewis

P.S. you can follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/mrlewissmile

What will get your higher up in the search results? Backlinks.

A backlink is when another webpage or blog or lens links to your lens. They ‘link back’ to you, as if they are voting for you by linking to you. They trust you, and are willing to link to you.

A backlink is also known as an Inbound link, or an Incoming link.

When Google determines how high in the results to put your lens they look at how many backlinks it has, as it helps determine what is worth looking at.

In an ideal world every lens and blog post you write would be so utterly fantastic and groundbreaking that hundreds of people would be compelled to link to you. But this isn’t the case, because in an effort to compete in different niches you will target the keywords people are searching for.

So you will need to be proactive and generate as many backlinks as you can yourself.  As the old saying suggests: “If you want anything done, do it yourself”

Over the next few weeks I will be posting some great ways to build your backlinks. I will review some sites, recommend actions for you to take, and we’ll work on getting ranked higher in Google.

The one thing every lens will benefit from is more traffic. It’s funny – where else but in Internet Marketing is ‘TRAFFIC’ a good thing?!

Lewis