How To Get Traffic To My Squidoo Lens

To ultimately be successful with Squidoo or any website you need to have a fair number of visitors, but how do you get that online traffic in the first place? Well, first you have to provide them with a reason for coming to your lens in the first place. You can have either one of two choices: an empty lens or one brimming with content. If you take the first option, you will fail. I've seen empty lenses and once you've seen one, there's not much to hold your attention. Any good website or Squidoo lens needs to hold your visitor's attention and spark their curiousity to explore more of your content.

Do You Want Some Examples Of Great Content?

You will hear about what great content means here at Squidoo Land or from anyone advising what makes a great lens. An empty lens is not great. It has great potential, but unused potential equals failure in my books. No one can create a truly fantastic and unique Squidoo lens (actually some can!) off the top of their heads. You need to plan out what you want to accomplish with this lens. You can make a lens about your pet dog with no real rhyme or reason. It may end up as a jumbled mess or a truly inspired portrait of Fido that anyone will enjoy. I've seen both types. Then there are those lenses that zero in on a moment in history and explain in a beautiful painstakingly detailed manner what happened. I want to point out a couple of examples I've found at Squidoo:

RMS Titanic, Ship of Dreams

Thirteen Days in October: The Cuban Missile Crisis

The one about the sinking of the Titannic is beautiful in design and contains an incredible amount of detail about the ship from it's beginning and construction to that fateful night in the Atlantic Ocean. The second lens concerns itself with an era that the majority of people may have heard of, but are not familiar with. A point in history where the world came so close to nuculear annihilation. The pictures help tell the story of confrontation, moment by moment, to it's conclusion.
Unfortunately neither one of these lenses are mine. They do certainly provide me with a ton of motivation to create lenses of a similar standard. I don't know if I have the ability to make such stunning lenses, but after looking at what these two different lensmasters have accomplished, I am chomping at the bit to try.

Great Content Alone Isn't The Success I'm Looking For

Don't get me wrong. I really like the two examples shown above. I would probably dislocate something trying to pat myself on the back if my work at Squidoo approached those two gems of lensmaking. What you want to do is create a lens that stops visitors in their collective tracks, but first, how do you get those visitors to your lens in the first place?

Ah, there's the rub. You can write and gather the most spellbinding content, laid out in intriguing fashion, but how do you get eyeballs on your work? Well, you can hope some shlep at Squidoo Land gives you a link, like I did above. What you need are links to your work. Links, links and then some more links. Otherwise you are just throwing a great party and forgetting to send out the invitations! People will find great websites and great lenses, but what you need to do is invite them to see what you've created.

Approach Lensmaking As A 2-Step Process

What you need to do is make that great lens. Update it from time to time. Tweak it, add to it or delete portions that don't add to it's overall appeal. That's all part of step one. Step Two? If you want longterm, continuous visitors to see your work of art, you need to let the other shoe drop. Market the heck out of it! Sure, you can expect visitors on Squidoo to find your lens, but what you want is hundreds beating a path to your lens or website. You can hope the the mighty Google will sniff out your content and reward you with such kudos as a page one rank. Rankings on Google have a tendency to fluctuate to an exasperating degree. I've seen some of my own feeble lensmaking efforts debut on the first page of Google, then sink away to page 10-20 or completely disappear altogether! Drat and double-drat!!

What you need to do is make sure that someone looking for the topic of your lens can find a link to you everywhere. Think of it like seeing a poster pasted on the wall. And under your windshield. And in your mail. And on the TV. You get the idea.

Basically you need to get the word out to everyone who is remotely interested in your terrific lens. Drive online looky-loos to look at what you have to offer. Some will take a quick look, but others will have the reaction you want: jaw-dropping appreciation. There is nothing you can say that takes the place of an enthusiastic response to what you've created. You want bloggers like Squidoo Land, websites, general online surfers, everyone to stop by and say hello. People will start to save it to their favorites lists, other Squidoo lensmasters will save your work to disect your lens because of the way you've formatted parts of it and they want to do something similar. You'll get links from bloggers who want to showcase what can be accomplished with Squidoo and use your lens to show how to get online traffic to visit your Squidoo lens.