I see the heading “My Lens Needs a Blessing” often on Squidoo’s Angels Forum and it always makes me want to shout, “No, it doesn’t!”

Quite often the body of the post reads like the writer thinks an Angel’s Blessing is something to which he or she is entitled just by virtue of finishing a lens.

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Cat Mugs for Cat Lovers

My new lens, Cat Mugs for Cat Lovers, has been done in response to a Fresh Squids Challenge to Nail that Niche.

This encourages new lensmasters to drill down on a subject and make their lenses as specific as possible – covering a very small niche. The thinking is that the more ‘niche’ a lens is, the better the chance of not only getting targeted traffic but also making sales.

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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‘.