Hi All!

(just to show how much of a newb I am here I hadn't noticed there was 3 more pages of this thread and posted this having only read the first one!)

I was sorta invited along by TeamPlayer, so hope you don't all mind me crashing the party! Looks like a pretty cool forum so I'll have a wander around and you may see me popping up here and there on different threads!

I'm maybe not the most experienced or successful squidoo member, I've never got in the top 100 (overall, top 100 per category is easy in comparison!), but I've come close a couple of times and quite a few of my lenses get a good amount of traffic and some even earn me money! Hopefully I can share with you some tips to improve our output on squidoo. I'll cover a couple of things a few people seem to have in common, but I'll try and keep it short!

Modules - these are the bits that come pre-formatted with titles and suggestions for what goes in them - Make sure you do alter the default title of each module - If you don't want to put anything in the module, delete it. - Have a look and see what modules are available and what they do, there's dozens, if not hundreds! (many, many, many more than previously mentioned - just go to add module and scroll thru the tabs, each of which usually has a few pages too)

Content - same rules apply here as they would anywhere, without unique content you can forget about visitors, and the more content the better. If you have a lot of text, split it up and create a few more text/write modules to put it in. (it's rumoured that search engines like this as they give emphasis to the module headers in results), Add pictures to each write module, you know a sea of text isn't inviting.

Affiliate marketing - Feel perfectly free to make it as commercial as you like, include the same affiliate ads that you have on your website or add others. The only restriction here is it has to be HTML, no java or iframes, no gambling links, and afew other common sense conditions. Avoid making it too spammy as if reported as spam it may get deleted along with your account. If you're new to affiliate marketing using squidoo's product modules maybe a good start, though as the bucks mount up (they pay in dollars by paypal), you may start to resent them taking about 50% of it! Amazon and ebay modules do tend to perform well, though there are alternatives to using the squidoo ones. Squidutils provides a nice tool to create similair links to amazon which you can add your own affiliate id to and link to the UK amazon, which the normal squidoo module won't. The only downside using that tool is they take 20% of your clicks! You can also generate Ebay RSS feeds with your affiliate code and drop these in the RSS module to great effect!

There's dozens of links I could place here to give you tips, show you tutorials and give examples, though am not sure I can post links being a newbie! Where I'd recommend you starting was by having a look at the top performing lenses by seeing what's in the top 100 of the category you're interested in and seeing what they look like.
I'd also recommend looking at some of the squidoo tutorials, there's a great one on basic squidoo html, one on advanced squidoo html, one on tweaking the css, justfor a start and these will really show you how to alter the look and feel of a page and optimise the html/css available. One that I'd plug, (cos i made it!), is one about using ebay rss feeds with your affiliate id.

Seems you all are helping each other out learning the ropes together so I hope my input has been useful. Rolling each others lenses is a great start, as is joining each others fanclubs. One of you may even wish to set up a 'group' which will feature all your output on squidoo.

one other thing - add some module or other to get user interaction, whether it's a comment module, poll or duel, getting interaction with visitors improves squidoo lensrank, which in turn should result in a higher PR. Plexo's I find aren't great methods of getting interaction but polls are. Just make sure you alter the submission/participation settings so anyone can join in.

One final thing, when editing a lens, make sure in the right hand column you tick the button for 'cash' or you won't earn any royalties from squidoo!

I've been and starred, favorited and fanclubbed at least one lens from each of you so you should be able to find me and my squidoo content easy enough.

PS. once a lens is finished pop back every month or so and just freshen it up, this way search engines will give it favour again as they treat lenses a bit like blogs