Squidoo user names, the ones that appear on every lens as well as the lensmaster’s page, can tell us something about the person behind the name.

Many people, myself included, use a nom de plume and there can be many reasons for this. When I joined Squidoo, I predominantly wrote elsewhere and I wanted to keep the two activities totally separate so I chose the name ‘Stazjia’ for my writing on Squidoo. I did, however, put my real name in my information. I didn’t feel it was absolutely imperative to conceal my identity.

I can understand, though, why some people do feel it is essential. The reasons can be many and varied. Someone might be shy about their writing or perhaps write on a controversial subject and don’t want to become involved in arguments with people they know. One lensmaster writes about real life experiences of bullying affecting children she knows. She carefully conceals her identity and hometown to avoid any chance of anyone working out which children she writes about.

More recently, there has been an upsurge in strange user names. They are names like ‘malwareRus’ or ‘earn$$$quick’ or ‘gameboys-cheap’. These are names I’ve just made up and I hope they give you the idea of the kind I am talking about. Apparently advice has been appearing online and in e-books telling people to join Squidoo with a name that reflects the products they are going to write about in an attempt to add keywords to increase the chances of appearing high in Google searches.

I don’t know whether this strategy works with Google but I do know that I would never buy anything from somebody with this kind of spammy name. To me, it just screams SPAM and ‘don’t believe a word of this because I want you to buy something’. I’ve also noticed the content of pages posted in the Critique Me forum with these sort of names are, nine times out of ten, just copied and pasted from the original spammy page – against Squidoo’s Terms of Service.

My advice is ‘Give up the spam’ because it doesn’t work. There are too many people on the web who are far better than amateurs taking silly advice to use Squidoo like this. The network is also getting far better at detecting spam pages and closing them down. If you want to earn money online, honest, interesting content works better because most people can recognise spam for what it is.

Default logo and text on Squidoo Lens

I see many lenses by newcomers to Squidoo that are spoilt because they haven’t bothered to fill in their biography or put in a picture to represent themselves.

On the right you can see the orange blob and “Hello world. This is my bio. I can edit it later.”

This is what you get when you haven’t bothered to provide a picture of yourself or an avatar to represent you and don’t put in a little basic information. It doesn’t look good, does it? I’ve blotted out the lensmaster’s name to avoid embarrassment.

It looks lazy at best or as if you have something to hide at worst. On Squidoo, most people are either imparting information or trying to sell something, sometimes both. How can you expect anybody to trust what you tell them if you hide your identity behind an orange blob? If you can’t be bothered to edit your bio and apparently are happy to tell everybody this, how can anybody trust you to make sure that what you write is accurate?

I believe that all newcomers to Squidoo should add a picture and some information before they make their first lens. It doesn’t take long. If you don’t want to use a picture of yourself, you can use a cartoon or some other picture as long as you aren’t infringing somebody else’s copyright. Use a picture of your dog, cat, hamster, or goldfish. Some people use pictures of themselves as babies or a back view. Use a picture of some scenery.

Almost anything will do as long as you use it on all your lenses so people can quickly recognise it. Your lensmaster picture is like your logo.