Lens Research & Targeting

Before you build a lens, I recommend doing some research on Squidoo to see what others are doing and to find out what is working.

Look for the search bar in the top-right:

To start, just search for a phrase relating to your niche. I'll search for down comforters. I'm looking to find other related lenses to find what is working the best.

Look right below the title of a lens:

You can see how many comments it has received, as well as likes on Squidoo, Facebook and more. Some lenses will also show you a ranking. If they do not have a ranking, they may be in the Cozy magazine, so just gauge popularity based on the other information there.

Try to pick out six relating lenses that are also popular. However, go for relational pages over popular ones if there is a limited selection in your niche.

Open a notepad file and record the URLs for these six pages.

Examine those six pages closer to see what type of content they have provided. When you find one that is popular and also has advertisements on it or links out to other pages, take note of how they did that because it was obviously done in a way that didn't offend the visitors of the lens. This research may also help to give you some ideas for creating your own lens.

One particular thing to look at on each of those pages are the Related Tags. This can be found on the right-hand sidebar of a lens, although it is possible that a lenses has not provided tags.

Copy and paste the tags into a Notepad file to use for reference later.

Some lenses may contain a “More” link in the bottom-right of the Related Tags section. Be sure to click on that to expand the entire list of tags.

Here is the list from one lens I have viewed:

Pretty much anything listed here would also make a good tag to use for my own lens. On top of that, Squidoo may sometimes display your lens on other lenses under the Explore related pages section:

I will talk more about this during the lens creation tutorial, but for now, I can tell you that using the same tags as popular lenses can help to get your lens to show up on some of those lenses in this section. Beyond that, it can also help with your search engine rankings and even obtaining search traffic from Squidoo.