The Nicher

Squidoo is one of the best tools available to anyone who wants to get their feet wet in internet marketing, or who simply wants to make a little cash on the side.  You’ve probably heard that building a lens is “so easy” but found that it’s actually quite confusing.

Well, building a lens is very easy, and it is also confusing when you first start out. My very first lens sat fallow for several months before I decided to just charge in and figure this thing out. But once I did, I saw how simple it really is- once you know what you’re doing.

So here is a step-by-step instruction manual for building your first, simple Squidoo lens.  Not a Squidoo member yet? You can sign up for Squidoo here.

Before you start building, you’ll need to log in to your dashboard. That just means going to Squidoo.Com and logging in. Squidoo will take you straight to your dashboard, which should look something like this.

Of course, at this point you won’t have so many lenses listed, and you won’t have a picture in the corner (that’s for another lesson).

To start building, you can either click the “Make a lens now!” link on the upper left of the screen, or scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Create a lens now!” button, which looks like this:

Clicking the link or button will take you to this screen:

Step 1: For the sample lens I decided to build a lens about tea, but you can make your lens about anything- purple elephants, internet marketing, pudding snorkling, whatever.  What you’ll want to remember is that this part is actually your main keyword- so think about what someone searching for your lens would type in.  When you’re done, click the “Go to Step 2″ button.  That will take you to this screen:

Step 2: You really don’t need to worry about what your lens is for (marketing, making money, etc) because all those choices mean is that Squidoo will set up specific modules for you to fill in. While it’s a good idea, most lenses won’t use all the modules included, or will need others. Leftover modules make your lens look messy, and for new ones you’ll need to learn how to do this anway. I recommend checking “I just want to do my own thing.”. Then, click “Go to Step 3″, which will bring you to this screen:

Step 3: On this page you will choose the lens title (I chose Health Benefits of Black Tea), the URL that you want your page to have (You may have to try several times to get one that isn’t taken. Remember -’s are good for attracting search engine traffic, while havingwordsruntogether is easier for people to remember).

The section that says to pick your category is a drop down menu. It has choices like TV & Movies as well as Travel, Music, and many others. I could have chosen Food and Cooking, but instead chose Health & Medicine since my lens focuses on the health benefits of tea rather than what it tastes like. Categories are for people searching within Squidoo and (I believe) doesn’t affect search engine traffic.

You also have to rate your lens. G is for everyone, R is for anything that children shouldn’t see including swear words, tobacco, and alcohol. X is pretty much self-explanatory.

When you’re finished, click “Go to Step 4″, which will look like this:

Step 4: When you get to Step Four, the section that says “The Best Keyword Phrase” will be filled in with the description you used in Step One. You can change it here.

Then, you’ll fill out three more keyword/keyphrases below. I chose “health benefits of tea”, “tea for cancer” and “tea for weightloss” as they’re sections in my lens that I think people will be searching for when looking for information that I have on my lens.

Next, you’ll enter the Captcha phrase (Squidoo has some doozies- you’ll get a good laugh at what they come up with such as “pigslap” and “squidsnog”), and click “Done!”. That will take you to:

Step 5: Just as an empty Word document is the most terrifying sight to a writer, and empty lens workshop is terrifying to a lensmaster. To solve that problem, you’ll want to click the button that says “Add modules” at the top of the screen. That will take you to this:

Step 6: For this basic lens, we’re staying in this first section marked “Starter Package”. I recommend choosing Guestbook, and one or two Amazon modules. You do this by clicking “Add”.  If you hover your mouse over the Add, Squidoo will pop up a little window explaining the module that you’re looking at. Link List is very useful as are several others, but for this basic lens we’ll stick to the…er, basics. Click on “next” in blue near the bottom. That will take you to:

Step 7: I recommend choosing several Text/Write modules (when you click “Add” it will change to “Add Another”, which you can keep clicking to get the number you want). I counted up the sections I wanted in my lens, and used that many. You can add other modules, but they’re not covered in this tutorial. Don’t worry, if you don’t have enough modules to finish your lens, you can always come back and add more.

When you’re done adding, look down at the bottom of the screen. It will tell you what modules you’ve added.  Then, click “Save”. That will take you to back to the main workshop page where you’ll see all your empty modules. Click “Reorder Modules” near the top of your screen.  That will take you to:

Step 8: This is the easiest way to reorder your modules. Most people build their lenses with the Guestbook at the bottom, and I prefer scattering small Amazon modules (one or two items) among the text both to provide color when I have no pictures, and because it’s more attractive and more likely to attract interest than having one large list of Amazon products somewhere on the screen.

To change the order, click on the arrow buttons on the left of each module, and drag it to the location you want it. Squidoo can be a little glitchy here, so you may need to drag the module several times to get it to “stick”.

When you have the modules in the correct order, click “All Done!”, which will take you back to the workshop screen.

Step 9: On your workshop screen, the very first module is called the “Introduction”. Click “edit” You will see the screen above. This is really as easy as filling in the blanks. Just name your introduction, and then fill in how you want your lens to start and then hit save.  If you want to include a picture, click “edit” again, then “browse” and choose the picture from your computer. Then click “upload photo” and “save” again.

As you can see, I filled in the introduction and used a picture of a cup of tea to complement the lens.

Step 10: For your text modules, click “edit”. The process is the same as with the introduction module. The “Title” section will be a header for this section of your lens, and you search for a photo the same way (though they’re not required), but there’s no need to “upload”, simply “save”.

Step 11: When you click the “edit” button for the Amazon module, you’ll have the option of titling the module and giving it a description, which is just like the title and text of the text/write module. Then, below, you’re given the option of letting Amazon choose products for you based on your search terms, or choosing the items yourself. As Amazon has a very strange idea of what products match, I prefer to pick my own.

You can do this either by pasting in the URL of the product you want to sell, or by clicking “help me find products”, in which case a box will pop up allowing you to search Amazon’s inventory. Adding items is as easy as clicking “add product”, though you’ll be limited to 5.  Don’t forget to save your module!

Step 12: When you’ve filled in all your modules (or deleted the ones you didn’t use), go to the bottom of the workshop page and click “Publish!”. If you don’t want to finish your lens just now, you can choose “Keep this craft” instead, and access the workshop again through your dashboard. Of course, you can edit a published lens as well through the dashboard.

Done: After you hit “Publish”, Squidoo will send you to a congratulations page (but only the first time you publish, after that, you stay on the workshop page), where you have several options available, mostly in relation to promoting your new lens.  To see the lens, just click “View lens”.

Want to see the lens being built for the Squidtorials? Click here to see more on the health benefits of tea.