I’ve writen about the advantages of being an Amazon Associate on Squidoo before, and it is still my favourite affiliate program for making money from lenses. If you’ve not seen the tools I’ve created for Amazon, then check out that post to catch up.

For Lensmasters that do already put affiliate links on their lens, here are two new tools to help improve click-through rates and sales. First up, is the large “poster style” banner ad for any product you want to promote, with a bold call-to-action:

Features:
- Automatically generated from Amazon ASIN codes
- Automatically updated daily (to comply with Amazon’s rules)
- Display’s product image, rating, price, % savings, and free shipping *
- Ready-to-Copy HTML and free hosting of images
- Track all your impressions and clicks (optional)

Here’s how it works: You provide an ASIN (or ISBN) and your Associate Tag, and press the button. It will then get the information about that product direct from Amazon, and use that to build a poster ad for you. All the HTML you need will be provided, and all you need to do is copy-and-paste that onto your Squidoo lens.

The second tool will generate banner ads for categories on Amazon. Loosely based on the Carousel widget, these banners are fully compatible with Squidoo, and are optimised for the width of modules. Here’s an example (click for full size):

Here are the links to these new tools:
- Amazon Poster Ads
- Amazon Banner Ads

Have fun!

Related posts:

1. Being an Amazon Associate on Squidoo
2. Do Your Amazon Links Still Work?
3. Statistics for Your Amazon Links

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Many of you are familiar with the Squidoo Lens Workshop Addon for Firefox and Chrome – if not, click the link for more information. Anyway, today I have released a new version: v1.4. This is mainly to provide increased support for Google Chrome, but it has also been slightly improved for Firefox users too. I’ve fixed the mess with the dashboard banner (sorry), and removed the now defunct support for Groups.

Firefox Users: If you already have Greasemonkey installed, then all you need to do is install the script again (step 2).

Google Chrome Users: The latest version of Chrome (4.0) has built-in support for Extensions, so all you need to do is install it.

Don’t forget, the Cleaner SquidU script still works on Firefox and Chrome.

If you have any questions, problems or ideas for new features, please let me know.

Disclaimer: this is a 3rd-party addon for Lensmasters, and is not supported by Squidoo.

Related posts:

1. Squidoo Releases New Lens Workshop
2. New Tools for Squidoo Lensmasters

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The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on Twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted. You may have already seen buttons like this one appearing on this and other blogs all over the ‘net:

« Here’s a working example. Give it a try…

Now, you can have it on your Squidoo lens too. Best of all, you don’t even need an account on Twitter, but you can help your visitors spread the word about your lens for you. This looks great in either the Guestbook module, or the Lens Love widget, or anywhere else you like.

And here’s the code you need (edit as required):

<a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=URL of lens&source=username" target="_blank" title="retweet"><img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=URL of lens" alt="retweet" width="51" height="61" align="left" /></a>

Notes:

• You must put in complete URL of your lens, for example: http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo. Don’t forget to put in both places, once for the link and again for the image.
• If you have a twitter account, then put your username after &source=, so that you get credit when others do a retweet. Otherwise, leave it blank.
• The code above will display the button on the left, with any following content wrapping around it. You can change it to be align=”right” if you prefer, or remove the alignment altogether.
• If you get a big question mark after adding it to your lens, you should double-check your code. Make sure there aren’t any spaces or blank lines were there shouldn’t be.
• Login to TweetMeme.com with your Twitter account, and see stats for all of your the lenses that have been tweeted.
• Don’t feel you have to add this to every single lens you own – start with just the few that get decent traffic and a semi-technical audience.

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Post tags: buttons, retweet, squidoo lens, thefluffanutta, traffic, twitter

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Recently, Squidoo updated their tag pages to be more useful to visitors and search engines.

If you’re not familiar with tag pages, these are pages that list lenses that use a particular tag. Have a look at the Lensography tag page for an example. There are hundreds of thousands of tags on Squidoo, providing an additional method of navigating and linking between related lenses.

Here’s a summary of the main improvements:

• 20 lenses are displayed (it used to be only 10), with snippets from the Introductions. This will make the tag pages a lot more ‘content rich’, which the search engines will appreciate. The title of the page is also improved.

• Priority is given to the lenses that use the tag as their primary tag, so that those lenses will be listed first, followed by the other lenses that use that tag. This means it’s more important than ever to pick a good Primary Tag.

• Tag pages link to other related tag pages, based on the lenses that use them. This provides the perfect system for navigating through the tags to find the right ones to add to your lens. But, remember: less is more when it comes to tags, so choose your tags wisely – limit yourself to just 10 – 15.

• Finally, in stark contrast to my sensational post this time last year, tag pages are once again indexable by search engines. As a result, your lenses will get a share of the PageRank and search traffic that these pages get. With any luck, this will also boost the overall authority and traffic to Squidoo.

In other news:

The Discovery Tool is back! Well, kinda…

Related lenses are shown to first-time searchers, in a scrollable box on the right-hand side. This placement is much better than where it used to be under the Introduction, and is an interface visitors will be familar with.

If you visit a lens while logged in, or via a link from another website, you won’t see them. Search engines won’t see them either (but this may change in future).

And finally, eBay no longer allows you put affiliate links on your lens (see blog post from Squidoo). You don’t need to worry about this if you’re using the official eBay module, or the eBay RSS Feeds from SquidUtils, as these will still earn revenue for your lenses. If you’ve used your own affiliate links or feeds from eBay, you will need to remove them.

Related posts:

1. Relevance is Key!

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Post tags: lens primary tag, primary tag, squidoo tags, tag pages, tags

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Recently, Squidoo updated their tag pages to be more useful to visitors and search engines.

If you’re not familiar with tag pages, these are pages that list lenses that use a particular tag. Have a look at the Lensography tag page for an example. There are hundreds of thousands of tags on Squidoo, providing an additional method of navigating and linking between related lenses.

Here’s a summary of the main improvements:

• 20 lenses are displayed (it used to be only 10), with snippets from the Introductions. This will make the tag pages a lot more ‘content rich’, which the search engines will appreciate. The title of the page is also improved.

• Priority is given to the lenses that use the tag as their primary tag, so that those lenses will be listed first, followed by the other lenses that use that tag. This means it’s more important than ever to pick a good Primary Tag.

• Tag pages link to other related tag pages, based on the lenses that use them. This provides the perfect system for navigating through the tags to find the right ones to add to your lens. But, remember: less is more when it comes to tags, so choose your tags wisely – limit yourself to just 10 – 15.

• Finally, in stark contrast to my sensational post this time last year, tag pages are once again indexable by search engines. As a result, your lenses will get a share of the PageRank and search traffic that these pages get. With any luck, this will also boost the overall authority and traffic to Squidoo.

In other news:

The Discovery Tool is back! Well, kinda…

Related lenses are shown to first-time searchers, in a scrollable box on the right-hand side. This placement is much better than where it used to be under the Introduction, and is an interface visitors will be familar with.

If you visit a lens while logged in, or via a link from another website, you won’t see them. Search engines won’t see them either (but this may change in future).

And finally, eBay no longer allows you put affiliate links on your lens (see blog post from Squidoo). You don’t need to worry about this if you’re using the official eBay module, or the eBay RSS Feeds from SquidUtils, as these will still earn revenue for your lenses. If you’ve used your own affiliate links or feeds from eBay, you will need to remove them.

Related posts:

1. Relevance is Key!

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Originally posted on SquidU Forum as The Importance of Primary Tags.
This post was published on April 21st, 2008 and updated on July 23rd, 2009.

The Primary Tag is the first tag you are asked to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and poorly utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points you should know.

Over half of the lenses on Squidoo have poorly chosen Primary Tags!

It is important for Lensmasters to choose good keywords for their Primary Tag, as it can have a significant effect on the ranking of the lens. Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens, as well as creating a relevant link from the tag page.

More importantly (and relatively recently), the tag page gives priority to lenses that use that tag as their Primary Tag, listing them before all of the other lenses. This means that for one well chosen tag, your lens will get the prime spot on the tag page.

There is also the lens directory here at SquidUtils, which automatically collates lenses by Primary Tag. Only those tags that have 3 or more good lenses under them will be featured, so there’s another reason to pick yours carefully.

Here are some tips to help you pick the right keywords:

1. Your Primary Tag wants to be the most important key phrase that you can think of. For example, if your lens is about a person or a product, stick to just their name.

2. Keep your tag to just 2 or 3 words, where possible. One word is not always specific enough (unless the subject is a strong brand like Pepsi), and more than 3 words can sometimes be too specific. Of course, it does depend on your subject matter.

3. Don’t simply repeat your Lens title again (even though this is the default when building a lens). Your title should include as many keywords as you can sensibly fit (no keyword stuffing!), while your Primary Tag is about your key phrase.

4. Format your Primary Tag nicely – keep it Capitalised, spelt correctly (!) and don’t include any special characters or quotes (”). Use spaces between words, and not dashes or underscores.

5. Pick a Primary Tag which is popular, i.e. people will be likely to be searching for it and other lenses are might also have the same Primary Tag (but not too popular).

If you have Firefox then the Lens Workshop Addon will highlight the tags in the workshop based on their popularity. Avoid any tags that are highlighted in red, as no other lenses use them.

6. Group related lenses under the same Primary Tag – this creates strong links between them, and helps them all to rank well for the target key phrase.

Here are some (random) examples of good Primary Tags:

» Harry Potter
» Xbox 360
» Dog Training
» Digital Photography

Bad examples:

» The Whole Lens Title Again
» Kee Frase Speled Wong
» lowercasewithnospaces
» “Phrase in Quotes”

Once you’ve got your Primary Tag picked out, you will then need to think of some good keywords for the other, ordinary tags. Start with the Primary Tag, and then think of variations from there. The regular tags can be shorter or longer, but you should keep them as relevant to the lens content as possible. Single word tags tend to have poor relevance, but good PageRank. Avoid tags that are runtogetherwords, unless they are commonly used, e.g. videogames.

Happy tagging…

Related posts:

1. Making the Most of Squidoo Tags
2. 4 Out Of 5 Lenses Have Poor Health!
3. Relevance is Key!

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The very first tool was the Lensmaster RSS Feed. I remember requesting this on the forum, but a month later I had given up waiting and built my own solution instead. Shortly afterwards, I shared this with other Lensmasters so that they too could get a feed of all their lenses – perfect for syndicating on a blog or directory.

Since then, the RSS Feed has been improved and made more widely available, and is now served directly from Squidoo HQ. Find out how you can make use of yours by reading How to Use Your Lensmaster Feed.

That was just the beginning…

About that same time, I had signed up with Amazon as an Associate. While you don’t need to be an Associate to make money with Squidoo, I was enjoying the flexility of having product links embeded within my text. This was fine until Squidoo removed support for IFrames in July (and with good reason too).

Suddenly I wasn’t able to use Amazon’s code on my lenses, so I had to come up with something that was compatible. This saw the birth of the Amazon Link tool, and later the Amazon RSS Feeds – both of these provided a way for Associates to feature products directly on a lens. Learn more about Being an Amazon Associate on Squidoo.

All of this time, I had been serving these tools from my personal website, which wasn’t easy to find. So, on the 1st of August 2007, I registered the domain SquidUtils.com, and transfered all of the tools across to a new web site. This was probably when the Advanced Dashboard was introduced too.

Fast forward to April of 2008, and I finally gave in to the idea of a blog and wrote my first post (ever). This would be where I would write about the tools on the site, as well as other lens building tips. A few months later I was forced to migrate to a dedicated server to keep up with all the demand, and to provide a more reliable service.

Since then, SquidUtils has seen the addition of a lens directory, some new tools, as well as a browser toolbar, to make life even easier for Lensmasters. Along the way there have been some collaborative projects such as Squidaholic and the Health Check Tool.

Anyway, there is the brief history of SquidUtils. Thanks to everyone who has supported the site, and provided me with the inspiration to keep it alive. Hopefully, with any luck and a fair dollop of free time, I’ll be making some more tools to add to the list.

I’ve already got a couple things up my sleeve.

Stay tuned…

thefluffanutta

Related posts:

1. New Tools for Squidoo Lensmasters

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Post tags: Add new tag, lensmaster rss, lensmaster tools, squidoo tools, squidutils, Tools and Utilities

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You may have already seen this on other peoples lenses and profiles.
If you want to know how to add this to your own lenses, here’s how:

1. Go to the Lensmaster Feeds page.
2. Type in your Lensmaster name, and login.
   (this is your username, not your real name or email)
3. Copy the HTML Code shown near the bottom.
4. Go to your member profile, and edit your Default Bio.
5. Paste the code where ever you like, and save it.
6. The counter will now appear on your profile,
   and every lens that uses the default bio.

Note:
On lenses, only the first ~225 characters will be shown (not counting HTML tags), and everything after that those will be hidden behind a ‘More…’ button. So, bear this in mind when pasting in your FanClub Counter code…

(This is the first of many Quick Tips that I’ll be posting, with step-by-step instructions of how to use all the tools here at SquidUtils).

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Post tags: default bio, fan clubs, lensmasters, squidoo fans

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SquidUtils provides two custom searches (powered by Google) that are optimised to only return the searches that you want to see. Click on the ‘Squidoo Search‘ link on the homepage, and enter the keywords you wish to find.

This functionality can also be found on the browser toolbar for Lensmasters »
Simply click on the down arrow next to the search icon to select lenses or groups, and type in a search query.

For advice on finding the right groups to join, visit A Lensmaster’s Guide To Groups.

Related posts:

1. 4 Out Of 5 Lenses Have Poor Health!

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This toolbar is designed to make the job of a Lensmaster easier, by putting some of the most used functions along the top of the browser.

Here are the four main features:

• Notification of Lensrank updates
• Instant switch between multiple accounts
• All the social functions in one place »
• Easy access to all the tools at SquidUtils

The toolbar had many other features as well, including quick links to all your lenses, groups and comments, a list of all the lens types you can build, plus a quick way to paste tags on to your lens.

All this and more is described here on the SquidUtils Toolbar lens.

Enjoy!

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Post tags: browser, firefox, Squidoo News, toolbar

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