Here are my secrets for Squidoo: there are none. I know , I know. There are tons of WSO’s and membership sites saying otherwise. They make it sound like there is some big trick to becoming a bigshot on Squidoo. Nope. Sorry. It’s just not like that.

I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail into what Squidoo is. If you don’t know follow this Squidoo link and start building a lens. It is simply a matter of adding modules and dropping in your content. Videos, text, pictures, and all sorts of moneymakers. You won’t get rich off your lens but you may see a few pennies trickle in from time to time.

Here’s the deal. Squidoo rewards you in their lens rankings by the amount of traffic your lens gets. The more you keep it updated and drive traffic TO it the higher the lens will rank. And guess what? The higher it ranks in Squidoo dictates how much attention the lens gets in Google.

My Lost Ball lens has Page Rank of 4. And what did I do to accomplish that? Nothing but keep the lens fresh and drive traffic to it. And really that’s the secret. You have to drive traffic TO your lens. Everyone is so focused, I think, on using the thing to drive traffic from their lens back to their blog or website. Taking a little time to build up your lens before you prostitute it will go a long way toward its usefulness.

I try to drive as much traffic to it as possible right from the start. Link some of your websites and blogs to it. Blog about your new lens. Put your lens URL in your forum siggies. Just drive traffic to it. You’ll start to see the lens rise quickly in the category rankings.

One thing that doesn’t seem to matter is what kind of traffic you send it. Well sort of. What I mean is that you can have a site on bird watching and send traffic from that site to your lens on pecan pies. It’s not like Google where it’s concerned about the anchor text link being on topic and all that hoo-hah. You lens will benefit by just getting the curious to visit Squidoo.

When you are building your lens and start adding written content, keyword research goes a long way. There are many examples but lets say you are looking up “tattoo and body piercing laws” in Google. Well it’s not a spectacular example but on the second page of results is an entry from a Squidoo lens. Do a search on “Day Job Killer” in Google. The Squidoo lens for DJK is on the first page of results. Bottom line: Google loves Squidoo.

Also you want to join as many groups as practical and trade links with other lens owners. Make sure people rate your lens too.

Once you have a highly ranked lens then you can use it as a stepping stone to link out to your affiliate websites and such. But at the start I’d focus more on getting your lens built up in the rankings. Wait until Google takes notice. You may not get much traffic from within Squidoo but for the different keyphrases you built your lens on you should get a lot of hits in the search engines. Like writing articles for EzineArticles. Just another type of Bum Marketing really.

So to recap. A successful lens is one that gets a lot of traffic and is refreshed often. Drive traffic to the lens. Join some groups. Trade links. Keep it fresh. Be interesting. That is the secret to Squidoo.

It really couldn’t be any simpler. Just how I like it.