Squidoo Tricks
Massive SquidTop Revamp
I spent most of my afternoon today working with Captain Squid on SquidTop, which is a cool site where Squidoo lensmasters can make their own free blog about their lenses. Anyways, we completely revamped the site, and I must say it looks pretty awesome. It’s a really big improvement over what we had before I think.
Some stuff that SquidTop now has:
- A completely redesigned, more eye-appealing theme
- Site-wide search of blogs, posts, and comments
- An anti-spam captcha system using reCAPTCHA
- And more cool features on the way, including a friend system…
If you haven’t created a blog at SquidTop yet, you really should. Besides having a rather nice (and growing) community of Lensmasters, SquidTop is also very Google friendly. I blogged about a lens on SquidTop about a week ago and it’s already ranking high in Google, getting good traffic, and will probably very well start earning me some $ pretty soon! It does help a LOT to blog about your lenses, especially on a Google-loved site such as SquidTop.
Getting Around Squidoo Social Bookmarking Site Bans
While browsing the SquidU forums today, I came across a post about Propeller, which is a social bookmarking site created by AOL. Not too long ago, Propeller banned Squidoo for spam reasons, which was due to people promoting their lenses the wrong way and also for getting a flood of Squidoo submissions. A lot of people probably were being honest and professional about it, it’s just that with Squidoo having over 500,000 lenses made, even a fraction of those submitted to sites like Propeller would be overwhelming.
Anyways, The Captain had a brilliant idea. Why not join SquidTop, create your a blog (free) and write up a useful and informative post about your lens and then submit that to social bookmarking sites? That way, you’ll be able to get traffic to your lens and not have to worry about the “anti-Squidoo” people who have been burned by SquidSpammers downvoting or removing your submission. And, since SquidTop blogs are in subdomain format (ie, blog.squidtop.com), the same way Blogger blogs are instead of just the Squidoo.com/lens format, it will appear a bit less overwhelming because people won’t just see the same “squidoo.com” URL over and over.
The key, though, is to be conservative about your submissions–ie, don’t overwhelm the social bookmarking sites. Also, write decent descriptions, not just one-liners, and tag and categorize your submissions properly. I’m not sure if anything is hated more by social bookmarking site users than a submission that’s in the wrong category or is tagged wrong. If you take the extra few seconds to find a proper category, write up a quick (but decent) description, and tag well, your submissions to social bookmarking sites will be enjoyed by all and will stand through the ages like a beacon of hope for your Squidoo lenses.
