How to Promote Your Lenses Without Being Labeled a Spammer

Proper promotion is the key to success in the marketing world. You can make the coolest, most awesome, wonderful website (or lens), but if nobody knows about it, it won’t get any visits. And therefore no sales and no money. I know firsthand all about this. I’ve made really cool sites in the past, before I knew a thing about promotion. I would just make them and wait for the people to start pouring in to visit and buy things. This might be possible with a brick-and-mortar business on Main Street, but on the Internet, you gotta promote your site aggressively to get traffic.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to promote your web creations. One way could get you good traffic and good feedback from visitors, another way could get you labeled as a spammer and a nuisance. I like getting comments on my Squidoo lenses, and it’s always fun to wake up in the morning with an email saying Squidoo: You have new comments! and seeing that someone left a quality comment that contributes to my lens and also links to one of their lenses on a similar topic for further reading.

I really don’t mind when people leave a link to their related lens if they leave a good comment and the lens they link to is relevant. However, I despise commenters who post a garbage comment on my coin collecting lens like:

“Hey! Nice lens! Now check out mine on wrinkle cream!”

Huh? Since when did coin collecting and wrinkle cream have anything in common? Plus, you didn’t even contribute anything to my lens. Why should I approve your comment? DELETE! In my book, people who do this are spammers, the same people who send me unwanted emails selling me pills–they contribute nothing. This is definitely the wrong way to promote lenses.

Squidoo lenses are really liked by the search engines, and that feeling of affection is increased by building backlinks to them by using social bookmarking sites and writing articles with links to them, for instance. Unfortunately, there are people who maliciously take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us who work hard.

Because of them, the same people who post useless comments on my lenses, sites like Propeller, which was once awesome for building backlinks to lenses, have now banned Squidoo lenses. There are other sites that have begun to shun Squidoo, and Squidoo’s reputation has been permanently damaged because of people who promote their lenses the wrong way.

If you’re going to comment on someone else’s lens and link to one of yours, make sure it’s a quality and relevant one. Really, it’s worth it in the long run to take 20 seconds to type out something useful and link to one of your lenses that’s similar in topic. The same applies to social bookmarking and other linkbuilding–don’t overwhelm the site with links to your lenses and be sure to write decent descriptions and tags.

The right way to promote your lenses, the way that will get your comments approved by people like me, and the way that will get you backlinks and search engine love is to contribute something of quality. Like it or not, quality and relevance is becoming king now, and those who practice it will triumph in the end.