For the very first time since I joined Squidoo, I’ve bought a lens. It’s about dolphins, one of my favourite animals, and it was transferred yesterday.

The transfer was so easy and quick which was a relief because I was expecting it to be time consuming and difficult. All I did yesterday was to remove the affiliate advertising. I haven’t replaced any of the personal affiliates with my own yet. I’ll do that later in the week or next week maybe.

Today I spent about four hours working on it. I updated some of the out of date news articles on there and added a lot more pictures – I got some good ones from Allposters.com. I don’t make many sales but the commission is between 25% to 30% so at least it’s a significant amount when a poster does sell. The main reason I use them, though, is that there are so many posters on such a huge variety of subjects, they are brilliant for illustrating web pages.

I took  the basic facts about dolphins out of the introduction and put them in their own module. I then wrote a proper introduction to the subject touching of some of the issues affecting dolphins and discussing our relationship with them.

I hope this lens is going to be successful because their conservation and protection is a subject about which I feel passionate. In fact, I’m passionate about conserving wildlife generally and, by that, I mean keeping them in their own natural habitats, not in a zoo or other artificial environment.

Continue Reading »

So there you are – you’ve got the brand new, shiny website, pages on a network or lenses on Squidoo and you sit back and wait for visitors. Maybe you check your stats regularly and they reveal a dismal picture. No visitors! Or maybe you have one or two but you’ve got a feeling that they were your mother and your bestfriend. As an easy, get rich quick scheme, you’re off to a bad start – without an audience, there’ll be no clicks on Adsense or sales on Amazon or other affiliates.

So what do you do? First, register your site, page or lens with Google, MSN and other search engines and directories. This probably won’t act like a magic wand unless you are very, very lucky so you can’t sit back and relax.

We are lucky now, there are so many ways to promote webpages. When I did my first site in 1998, webrings were the best known way. Google didn’t exist, the big search engine was Alta Vista.

Now you can use the social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, to promote your site. You can bookmark it on digg.com, del.ico.us, stumbleupon.com, mixx.com and scores of others. You can write a blog and promote it there. Watch out for a new one called Tagfoot, it should be out of beta testing soon.

You can’t just choose one of these. You’ve got to use as many as time allows. On the social sites, you’ve got to do the friendly stuff otherwise nobody will look at your entries. You’ve need to gather friends on many of them and by that I mean, ask other members to be your friend and then keep up with them. You’ve got to check out their links and reply to messages.

An important point is you must not, under any circumstances, spam these sites. You cannot flood them with your links. If you do, many of them will blacklist you. At best, other members will ignore your links.

If you are, like me, a member of Squidoo, there are many other sites you can use in addition to the ones mentioned above. See the Directory of Squidoo Lens Directories for links to them.

A simple way to promote your website or pages is to include a link in your signature. Be reasonable – if you have 10 webpages or lenses, don’t list them all, that would look silly.

Finally, the best way to keep visitors coming is to provide good content that people want.

Picture: My latest lens ‘Classic Poems for Kids‘.