My Day 11 - Building A Squidoo Lens

Today I built my first Squidoo Lens.  I must say it does help to have a little html background for this one.  In Caro’s video she mentions that it’s not that big a deal, but some of the things she just copied and pasted kind of blew by me and I had to watch the video in slow motion to catch exactly what was going on.

How To Build A Squidoo Lens?

It says build a Squidoo Lens in three steps, but that’s not really the case.  Make sure you get signed up and have a Squidoo account.  Creating the account is very straight forward.  Go to create a Squidoo Lens and fill out the first (I believe) 3 steps (very straigt forward).   When you get to the module area it might get a little confusing.  Here are my pointers:

• The default view has a bunch of modules.  You can delete and add modules any way you’d like.  After watching the video I noticed that Caro (as she mentioned) only used 4 modules and deleted the rest.
• HTML - adding html is simple if you know the tags, however, not all the tags worked.  I wanted to add header tags h1, h2, h3, etc., but it wouldn’t register.  I did a little research and found the following: Your Lens title is an h1 tag, module titles are h2 tags, and module sub-titles are h3 tags.  Apparently you can’t use header tags in the text area (although I didn’t try an h4).
• I’m not too sure how Caro added her affiliate image, but here’s what I did.  I added the image by pulling it from my dogadoptionsrescue.com server by using the following tag <a href=”http://locatereviews.com/1324519995″><img src=”http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/585adeb70258014.jpg” /></a>.  The <a tag creates the anchor to my affiliate site and the <img tag links to the affiliate image on my server.
• One final pointer is I created a different affiliate link by going to the Thirty Day Challenge website and creating a trackable link using the TDC Stat Tracker.  This way I will know how many referrals come from Squidoo and how many come from my Dog Adoptions website.  The unfortunate part is I won’t know which site a conversion is coming from.

Overall, I just need to play around a little more with Squidoo to get comfortable.

Market Samurai Finding Content

The updated version of Market Samurai is pretty much a no brainer.  It’s pretty straight forward and an easy way to find more information and I can now use it to create some RSS feeds for my Squidoo Lenses.

After all this if you’d like to take a look at my Squidoo Lens head on over to  Dog Adoptions and let me know what you think.  Leave me a comment in my guest book, click through to my Dog Adoptions blog or be a pal an purchase my dog adoptions affiliate so I can grab my first sale.

That’s it for today.  I’m heading over to SocialMarker to let everyone know about my new lens!