« Disclosures, Disclaimers, and Ethics of Affiliate Marketing

Are you getting the most from your Squidoo lensmasters profile page?

September 26, 2008 by John Dilbeck
Filed under: Promote Yourself, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, Twitter

Did you know that Squidoo made a big change in August 2008 when they greatly expanded what you can show on your lensmasters profile page?

Have you updated your profile to take advantage of the new features?

As an example, take a look at my lensmasters profile page. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There is a lot more information there than what you would have seen a couple of months ago and much of it can be customized by you.

Depending upon what you choose to show, your profile may show more or less than mine.

Some of the content is automatically generated by Squidoo, however.

Basic information, such as a list of your lenses and the number of lenses you have created, favorited, and ranked, and the members of your fan club, is shown automatically on your profile.

You can add additional information such as your bio, lenses you want to feature, and links to your blogs, other websites, and social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. Other links can include your CafePress shop, eBay store, and more.

That’s a lot of information that can be shown on one page, and Squidoo even creates an RSS feed for your lenses, although there seems to be a problem with the correct link right now. When I clicked the RSS icon in my browser’s URL box, it took me to an invalid feed, but there really is an RSS feed of all my lenses that can be read in a newsreader and/or syndicated on other sites.

If you haven’t updated your Squidoo profile, what are you waiting for?

That’s an important page. It is already linked to from each of your lenses and from any lenses you’ve favorited. You should be linking to your Squidoo profile from your other sites and blogs, too.

I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it, but after reading Megan Casey’s SquidBlog post, New lensmaster bio page, live now!, I realized there was much more than what I was seeing initially.

Somewhat later, I found her lens, How to rock your lensmaster bio page, and learned how to make my profile page even better.

More sites, including Squidoo, are helping you link to your Twitter profile so you can grow your list of followers and also notify them when you’ve updated a lens or are reading one you want to recommend.

With some extra work on your part, you can include these updates using tools provided by sites such as FriendFeed.com or MyBlogLog.com.

With the use of RSS feeds and tools like Twitter, it is becoming easier to write once and publish (or promote) your content on multiple sites.

Even if you don’t add all the bells and whistles to your profile page, you should be promoting it wherever you can to get more exposure to your lenses.

But, why stop there? It will only take a few minutes to customize your profile and bio and get much more use from the page that Squidoo has provided us.

Act on your dream!

Tags: lensmaster, new, profile, Squidoo