A Guide to SquidooGroups Changes: Part Two

Many Squidoo groups have been disbanded in the last few days, indicating that many groupmasters don’t feel up to the challenge of making their groups great. Although it us unfortunate to see many of them go, it does free up the URLs, and new lensmasters will be able to use them once SquidooGroups open up for creation again.

In the meantime, many of us are rising to the occasion and polishing up our groups to meet the new standards. I personally find the challenge refreshing, and I’m looking at my own groups in a totally new light. Just as no lens is ever complete or perfect, groups need a lot of attention if they are to be successful.

If you’re not ready to close or transfer any of your own Squidoo groups, make sure you read up on the new guidelines from “Making Groups Great: Do you have what it takes?”. There is also a handy list of things that the SquidTeam will be looking for when reviewing groups, and what they hope not to see.

Here are the highlights from “Seven ways to make your Groups rock“:

1. Make your group HQ pretty.

There are plenty of ways to improve the appearance of any Squidoo group beyond that of the default HQ page. Though there aren’t very many modules to choose from, most of them do have description areas that you can use to display interesting pictures that will enhance your group’s front page.

You can use your own photos or scanned artwork, and of course there’s AllPosters.com links. And the internet is swimming with all kinds of free clip art as well.

Many lensmasters are also very generous with their images, and offer up plenty of great pictures especially for use on Squidoo. Check out Free Spacers and Fillers and Borders and Dividers for Use on Squidoo for some examples, and links to other great clip art lenses. (Please remember to give credit and link back to your sources. You can do this with a featured lens module, or with a hyperlink at the bottom of your lens.)

If pictures aren’t your thing, or you want to do a little bit more, try using some fancy CSS Tricks. To make a group even more impressive, combine your favorite CSS with the amazing palette of colors on HTML Tips for Color. For some pre-made module titles and more, grab yourself some Lens Candy.

2. Define the focus of your group.

Groups need to be about more than just the basic Squidoo category. Instead of a “Travel Group”, we need to have a “European Destinations Group” and an “RV Vacations Group”. The more specific your topic - and therefore collection of lenses - is, the more potential you have for visits, clickouts and return traffic. Why be the whole phone book when you can be the dog-eared restaurant guide?

When starting a new group, it’s a good idea to use one of your own lenses as a jumping off point. Start groups about topics that you are interested in. This will help you define your group’s area of expertise.

To fix a group that is too broad, try taking a look at the top five or top ten lenses in your group. What are they about? Check out the primary tags for each of them. Is there one that is used more than any other? Use that tag to set the main topic for your group.

For instance, in the top 100 list of an incredibly large group dedicated simply to music, more than half of the top ten lenses have the word ‘songs’ in the title. This groupmaster could redefine his or her group by changing the topic to ‘songs and lyrics’.

If you change the subject of your group, you will inevitably have to let some lenses go. But that’s okay! That’s what the SquidTeam wants you to do.

3. Go ahead. Fire people. We dare you.

See?

Being a good groupmaster is a tough job. Although the small power trip one can get from rejecting lenses that don’t meet guidelines can be fun, it’s much nicer to be able to thank a lensmaster for their wonderful submission. Booting lenses altogether is hard to do. Luckily, the SquidTeam is backing us up on this one, so we don’t have to worry quite as much about offending others.

If you’re removing lenses because you’ve narrowed your group’s focus, you could write a generic message and send it to those lensmasters who’s lenses will be removed. If your group is huge and you’re firing a lot of people, just post it on your HG page and hope for the best.

There are other reasons why you may want to remove a lens from your group. Perhaps the quality of content has dropped, links are broken and it hasn’t been updated in months. Maybe the lensmaster is MIA, since they have not made anything new or done anything to their profile page since you added them to the group last year.

To keep a good group going strong, take some time now and then to weed out lenses that don’t contribute to the quality of your content.

4. Give lensmasters something to talk about.

Of the small selection of modules available from group pages, most of them are interaction modules like the guestbook and plexos. These tools are there to make your groups more than just a place for people to dump their lenses and get a visit from you.

Amazon Voting Plexo - Find some Amazon products that are directly related to your topic. Ask your visitors to vote for the ones they recommend. Remember to keep plexos items down to a minimum. Huge plexos aren’t flattering to groups or lenses.

Group Discussion - This is just like the guestbook module on lenses. You can have a comments section for members and visitors, and you can also use it to get tips or ask questions. Ask your visitors to leave their opinion on your group subject. If your group is about gardening, ask your readers to leave a tip for growing their favorite plants.

Link Plexo - These can be used to feature your group’s lenses - giving them a nice backlink - or you can ask visitors to share their favorite links related to your group topic. There’s nothing worse than a link plexos with totally irrelevant or spammy links, so make sure that you police your list. This will make sure that you’re providing a good resource for your visitors.

Poll Module - The possibilities are endless - ask a question, compare items, get feedback. Remember to always provide options for readers who are neutral, such as “Maybe” “Sometimes” “I don’t know” or “None of the above”. This will make sure that each visitor has a chance to interact with your page, which is great for lens rank.

Text List Plexo - There are plenty of ways to use this module to enhance the value of your group. Make a list of tips that your members can vote on or add to, or create a wish list for lens ideas.

5. Show off your best faces.

What’s the point of joining a group if your lens is just going to get lost in the crowd?

Use the featured lenses and links plexos modules to display some or all of the lenses in your group. If you’re visiting groups before approving them anyway, it takes only a few seconds to copy the URL and add it to your group page.

By breaking your group’s lenses down into categories, and displaying them in the appropriate section, you help your visitors find what they’re looking for. To see this method in action, check out the Family Time Group. If you're using categories, you should also know how to create a group table of contents.

There are also some modules for showing off your very best group members.

6. Keep it current.

You wouldn’t let your lenses go stale, so why neglect your groups?

The easiest way to keep a group fresh is to add new lenses to your feature modules when they are accepted. You could also change the lens picture once in awhile, add a poll, or write an article or blurb to enhance your content. Keep your page looking new with an RSS feed to a related blog (though new posts don’t count as updates).

7. You’re responsible for your members.

If you’re displaying lenses by someone whose conduct leaves something to be desired, it makes your whole group look bad. Set up some guidelines for lensmasters, not just lenses. Many groups require that lensmasters show some activity in the Squidoo community before being accepted.

Before approving a lens, check out the lensmaster’s profile. Look at how long they’ve been a Squidoo member, and how many fields they have filled out on their profile. Do they have contact enabled? Have they uploaded a picture and written a blurb about themselves? Do they have 10 lenses about acai berries or other spam bait?

Remember that your group is only as good as it’s members. Try thinking of yourself as an employer interviewing applicants for a job. Don’t hire people who don’t have the same ideals that you do. Try to encourage your members - and rejected applicants, too - to be active Squids with quality lenses that improve Squidoo.com as a whole. That’s what SquidooGroups is all about.

5 Ways to Use SquidUtils RSS Feeds

Many lensmasters are already aware of the great tools and tricks available from SquidUtils. When you sign in, you can do things like: create affiliate links that work with Squidoo HTML rules, do a Squidoo only Google search, or check backlinks for your lenses.

You can also view and grab RSS feeds of your lenses and groups, your latest updates, your Squidcasts or your favorite lensmasters’ Squidcasts. This is an incredibly handy resource, but what can you do with it? Plenty!

Here are just five things that you can do with your lensmaster feeds:

1. Add to your lensography, groupography or plexography.

The next time you create or edit a Squidoo-ography about yourself, add one of your Squidoo feeds to show off some of your lenses and groups. Use the recently updated feed to show readers what you've been up to.

2. Add to your Yahoo home page.

If you’re using Yahoo for Flickr, MyBlogLog or email, you can add RSS feeds to your home page. Throw up a feed of your latest lens updates and your favorite lensmaster Squidcasts.

3. Add to your Tweetfeed.

You can add additional RSS feeds to your Tweetfeed home page. Why not use thefluffanutta’s new Pipes program to include feeds of your lenses by category or tag? Use the same keywords as your Tweetfeeds.

4. Add to your Lijit content.

You can add many RSS feeds to your Lijit content or network. Keep your Lijit searches up to date with a feed of your lenses and groups.

5. Add to your blog.

Place a feed to your latest Squidcasts on your blog or other website. Be sure to see pmolinero’s tips on adding backlinks to your Squidcasts. This will allow you to highlight important updates and information from your latest lens, and help draw in readers from outside of Squidoo.

5 Ways to Update a Stale Lens

Making sure that lenses are updated frequently with new content is a full time job. At the very least, a once monthly update is recommended to maintain a healthy lens rank. Not only does Squidoo appreciate your efforts to add new information, but your readers do, as well.

The trouble is, not every lens focuses on a topic that makes it into the news every month. Some lenses present a single concept, recipe or idea that leaves little room for written improvement. And there are only so many products on Amazon that any one subject can relate to.

So once you’ve eradicated every single typo, polished every bit of HTML, and added as many hyperlinks as you can think of, what is there to do?

Here are just 5 of the things I like to do when a lens needs it’s monthly brush up:

1. Change the lens photo.
It’s great to have a clear, relevant and interesting picture in the introduction module, and even better if your fans and readers recognize it when they see it.

Your profile picture should be like a familiar (and hopefully trusted) face, but lens photos don’t have to be. In fact, changing your lens photo once in awhile might encourage previous visitors to stop by and see what’s new.

2. Add a poll.
There are a million and one ways that polls can fit into all types of lenses. Polls allow your readers to compare products or ideas, answer questions, give feed back or rate a list of items. When I can’t think of anything else to do with a lens, I sometimes add a poll or a duel module.

3. Edit the lens bio.
You can add or change the greeting that is displayed in the bio area of your lens, or add some links to your lensography, blog or other places you’d like readers to go.

4. Optimize your pictures.
Are your lens pictures turning up in searches? If you’ve added the alt tag, then you’re probably already seeing Google traffic for your pics. If not, you need to check out Traffic from Image Searches.

5. Add a Lijit module.
Having a Lijit account is like having your own personal search engine. It includes only content that you make or recommend. When you add a Lijit module to a lens, you can create an account right in the workshop, and automatically add all of your published lenses to your network.

Lijit is a great way to let readers find other lenses, blog posts and content that you’ve created, and you can get keyword ideas and other stats with the traffic information that your account provides.

So, whenever you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare, you can do one of these things to your most stale lens and have it smelling fresh by the next rank update.

Sending Better Tweets

Twitter is one of the best tools available to lensmasters, not only for promoting their lenses, but for staying connected with Squidoo friends, finding ideas and learning new things. There’s a space for your Twitter page in your Squidoo profile, a Twitter feed module, TwttrStrm, and of course you can Tweet your latest lens update using OpenID.

Many lensmasters use the “Tweet Your Update” button that appears in the workshop after publishing a lens. It’s handy if you want to get your lens out there without logging in to Twitter, but is it the best way?

When you tweet your update, the message that appears in your Twitter profile is generic: “I’ve just updated my Squidoo page…” It tells your followers what you’re doing, but it doesn’t give much incentive to visit your lens.

To really advertise your work, sending a customized Tweet is essential. You can copy your lens URL, or use the Twitter button when viewing your lens, and write a blurb about your updates to invite your friends and followers to see what you’ve added.

“I’ve just updated my lens” can become “I’ve just added a new Design Direction Duel” or “Add your gardening lens to the new plexo!” or perhaps “Don’t miss my Mother’s Day gift ideas!”

Using keywords in your Tweets is a good idea, because it will allow your lens Tweets to show up in searches and Tweetfeeds.

"Red Face, Blue Bird"

Search Engine Calendar

Submitting lenses to search engines is often one of the first things we Squids do once we’ve successfully published a great new lens. Those experts that recommend this practice also say that it’s a good idea to re-submit every 4-6 weeks, or any time your lens has a major update such as new information, links or a fresh layout.

This may seem like an easy task when you only have a few lenses under your belt, but the job of keeping your lenses up to date with Google and Yahoo can become overwhelming when your list of lenses continues to grow. How do you remember when you last submitted your lens on humming birds, and did you forget to submit your latest lens on diaper bags?

My solution to this problem is a simple text file that sits quietly on my dashboard. Whenever I make a new lens I open up my “URL Submissions” folder and paste the complete url for my latest masterpiece. Then I type in the date, and head on over to the
Big 3 and beg for a crawl.

After doing major updates, I will open up the file and check to see when my last submission was. If it’s been more than a month, I will copy the url of the lens I want to refresh and re-submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN. By typing in the date, I’ll have a record of my activity for next time.

As a bonus, this handy little file contains urls for all of my lenses, so I don’t have to remember them all. I can usually recall the addresses for each of my lenses if I think about it, but to date I’m only at 27. Remembering what I called my latest page on beads might be more difficult when I’m working with 50 lenses or more. Being able to quickly link to your lenses on other sites is key to promoting your work on Squidoo.

Of course, you may be one who believes you should not submit your lens to search engines. It's probably true that backlinks are better for promotion than hand submission. I like to use both!

Squidcast Abuse

One of my habits as a lens master is to check in with my “Favorites” tab to see what people have been up to. It’s usually what I do between lenses, when I can’t decide what to do next. There’s usually an interesting Squidcast or two to check out.

Recently, I found that nearly every item on my Favorites page was from the same lensmaster. I won’t name any names, but this person constantly sent updates about the same lenses and groups, without any indication that there was new content to be seen. They usually seemed like generic advertisements.

I’m not one to judge what a person uses the Squidcast for - to each their own. What bothered me about it is that there were so many, all of the other people I am following were getting bumped before I could get a chance to see their Casts. There are so many things that I could be doing while I have a chance to sit down at my keyboard. Flipping back through pages and pages of Squidcasts is not one of them.

After a few weeks, I finally got up the nerve to head on over to the lensmaster’s profile and leave the fan club. I’ve never unfavorited anything before, and I didn’t exactly enjoy doing it, but enough was enough. I wonder if I should send along some advice on how not to annoy your fan club?

Dressing Up List Modules

In an effort to push up the lensrank of my holiday lenses, I've been trying to find ways to update them everyday. Ideally, this means adding new content, but the ideas don't always flow, so sometimes a tweak here and there is all I can make. A new lens photo, tag, or Amazon description is usually where I start.

I was looking over That's Creative: Unique Gift Baskets, trying to think of ways to improve the exsiting content. The entire lens is made up mostly of list modules, and I thought it was time to give them a little more pizzaz. The logical choice is, of course, pictures. Visual content is essential for a great lens, even when the information is already in easy-to-read point form.

Because Unique Gift Baskets has so many examples where a photo would fit, it would be pretty overwhelming to take dozens of photos of candy and gift items. That's where Allposters comes in. The difficult part is getting the posters to fit into the list modules in a neat and tidy way. But I did it, and now I'd like to pass on the method to other Squids.

Step 1 - Find your picture.
Once you've added your lens to your list of Allposters websites, and located an appropriate poster, highlight the HTML for a thumbnail with no printing or framing links.

Step 2 - Edit the HTML
Remove all of the code up to the first img tag. You will be left with something like this:

a class="APCTitleAnchor" href=allposters url target="_blank" title="Close View of a Reddish Colored Giant Or Humboldt Squid at Night"
img src= allposters url Close View of a Reddish Colored Giant Or Humboldt Squid at Night" border="0" height="86" width="115"

Step 3 - Set Alignment
To place the picture to the left of your list text, replace
border="o" height="86" width="115"
with
style="float: left; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;"/

Step 4 - Add Text
You need at least 6 lines of text and/or spaces to make sure that your list items all line up evenly. Use a BR tag in the seventh line to break up the list items and add a little space.

And that's it. You'll end up with list items that look something like this:


The Humboldt Squid at Night
This reddish colored squid photo was taken by Brian J. Skerry.
Isn't it neat?

The more text you have in each list item, the better it will look. It's a great way to dress up tired list modules, and add some color to your lens.