How To Use Squidoo To Promote Yourself As A Writer

Squidoo is a website founded by Seth Godin (a marketing expert, author and blogger) and is a website designed for any of it's members ("lensmasters") to create a page (known as a "lens") to promote, advise or inform other people on the internet. You can sign up for an account *here*.

I spend a lot of time on Squidoo, am an avid "Squidooer" and thoroughly enjoy my time on there. It is quite possible to make a very nice income from it and is also very good as a promotional tool.

This article will give you some basic tips on how to use Squidoo to promote yourself as a writer; although you must remember to mix Squidoo with other promotional tools to increase your visibilty in what is a fiercely competitive field.

1. You must sign up and make a lens. (Do that *here* .) You make a lens using building blocks called modules. A lens can be about anything you want, as personal or impersonal as you want and as long or short as you want. A good lens is thought to be “unique, useful and updated”.

2. Make more than one lens! Why stop at one? The more lenses you have, the better for you because if you make ten or twenty or fifty (or more) you can link them together and make an entire network of your interests. People are then more inclined to read your lens and visit another one if they like it rather than just hitting upon your one lens and leaving as quickly as they arrived.

3. SquidU is the Squidoo forum. It is a great place to listen to advice, learn new tricks, ask for help, share ideas and successes and you can build up a profile of yourself as you interact with other users. If you create a good image in the forum, it's highly likely that the impression you leave there will follow you around the internet.

4. Read other lenses and comment on them. Squidoo is a pool of information and by reading other lenses you can learn incredible amounts. Commenting and rating these lenses is considered the norm and it is usually reciprocated. This then drives more visitors to your lenses and promotes you and your talents. However, be aware that rating swaps or using traffic exchanges are highly frowned upon and can result in lens or account deletion.

5. Stick around! There are many people who use Squidoo, make a couple of lenses and then hope it is enough. It isn't and it probably never will be. A Squidoo lens is something that must be maintained and nurtured until it is ready to bring out the best in you. It must then be maintained a little more to keep it at that level. Squidoo isn't about publicity stunts; it's about sustainability and the one thing about most of the top 100 lenses is that they have been there a while. They are stable, receive a lot of traffic, sometimes make sales but most of all are “unique, useful and updated”.

6. My final recommendation would be to set up a lens as a portfolio of yourself. Showcase your talents, link to your masterpieces and give a glowing report of who you are. You can even use it as a landing page to any potential employees or create it to supplement your resumé.