As you know, Squidoo is becoming more and more popular, and can prove very useful for the Marketers.

So, having decided you want to create a lens or two (or hundreds if you really want), how do you go about it? Simple, sign up at www.squidoo.com and create a lens.

Modules – these are the bits that come pre-formatted with titles and suggestions for what goes in them – Make sure you do alter the default title of each module – If you don’t want to put anything in the module, delete it. – Have a look and see what modules are available and what they do, there are dozens, if not hundreds! (many, many, many more than previously mentioned – just go to add module and scroll thru the tabs, each of which usually has a few pages too)

Content – same rules apply here as they would anywhere, without unique content you can forget about visitors, and the more content the better. If you have a lot of text, split it up and create a few more text/write modules to put it in. (it’s rumoured that search engines like this as they give emphasis to the module headers in results). Add images to each write module, you know a sea of text isn’t inviting.

Affiliate marketing – Feel perfectly free to make it as commercial as you like, include the same affiliate ads that you have on your website or add others. The only restriction here is it has to be HTML, no java, no gambling links, and a few other common sense conditions. Avoid making it too spammy as if reported as spam it may get deleted along with your account. If you’re new to affiliate marketing using squidoo’s product modules may be a good start, though as the bucks mount up (they pay in dollars by paypal), you may start to resent them taking about 50% of it! Amazon and eBay modules do tend to perform well, though there are alternatives to using the squidoo ones. Squidutils provides a nice tool to create similar links to Amazon which you can add your own affiliate id to and link to the UK Amazon, which the normal squidoo module won’t. The only downside using that tool is they take 20% of your clicks! You can also generate Ebay RSS feeds with your affiliate code and drop these in the RSS module to great effect!

There are dozens of links at Squidoo to give you tips, show you tutorials and give examples. Start by having a look at the top performing lenses and seeing what’s in the top 100 of the category you’re interested in and seeing what they look like.

I’d also recommend looking at some of the squidoo tutorials, there’s a great one on basic squidoo html, one on advanced squidoo html, one on tweaking the css, just for a start and these will really show you how to alter the look and feel of a page and optimise the html/css available. Another popular one is about using eBay rss feeds with your affiliate id.

Rolling others lenses is a great start, as is joining each others fanclubs. Join, or even set up a ‘group’ which will feature all your output on squidoo.

One other thing – add some module or other to get user interaction, whether it’s a comment module, poll or duel, getting interaction with visitors improves squidoo lensrank, which in turn should result in a higher PR. Plexo’s aren’t great methods of getting interaction, but polls are. Just make sure you alter the submission/participation settings so anyone can join in.

One final thing, when editing a lens, make sure in the right hand column you tick the button for ‘cash’ or you won’t earn any royalties from squidoo!

Star (rating), favorite and fanclub others` lenses, and they will often reciprocate. That way the higher up the rankings your lens will go, the more it will get seen, and the more money can can earn.

Finally, once a lens is finished pop back every month or so and just freshen it up, this way search engines will give it favour again as they treat lenses a bit like blogs.