I Had a Mini-Stroke
I’ve been away for 10 days on vacation and came back a week ago. I didn’t have access to a computer while I was away so I couldn’t update any of my Squidoo lenses. Actually, if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway – I was too busy enjoying my vacation.
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Google, Search, search engines, squidoo, updating lenses, updating web pages, Web page, Web search engine
We are now in the final few days of May and we really should be working hard on summer web pages for Squidoo or other web sites.
People are now thinking about their summer vacations, recipes, drinks, clothes and many other associated topics. We need to have the information ready and waiting for them now.
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.
Seriously, I’m not joking. You should not only be thinking about Squidoo lenses or web pages for Valentine’s Day on February 14th 2010 now, you should also be thinking about Easter next year too.
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‘.
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Aug 27, 2010 
