I have a number of Squidoo Lenses, some get a fair amount of traffic and some don’t. I’ve recently learned that there a number of things you can do for Squidoo Lens Optimization.

I have one lens, that’s not in the internet marketing arena, did surprisingly well. This lens was getting a fair amount of traffic everyday and made me a little money.

It didn’t make me a lot of money because I think it’s in a niche made up of people who are wanting information and help for free.

Anyway, this Squidoo lens was doing very well, but started slipping over time. I really didn’t do much to keep the traffic up on the lens and just figured others had entered the same market and had pushed me down in the search engines.

It was no big deal since this market is not good at spending money. As a side note, there is a lesson here – you need to research markets to determine whether people are spending money or not before you do too much work.

Determining if people are spending money or not, is too much for this post, perhaps I’ll talk about it later.

Since this lens is not a great money maker, I’ll let you have a look at it. It’s all about sinus infection symptoms. Not very exciting, but something I have to deal with once or twice a year.

I had pretty much given up on this lens, until I came across a free, cool Squidoo tool that helps you optimize your Squidoo lens.

I don’t remember all the changes I made, but I do remember something very important I learned about optimizing Squidoo lenses.

You probably know that you can add tags to your Squidoo lens. In case you didn’t know, your Squidoo dashboard contains stats, including suggested tags.

These are tags that were used by people searching for certain terms, and these terms (tags) lead them to your lens. Here’s how Squidoo explains it – “These tags, or keyword phrases, delivered your lens to searchers. See one you haven’t used? Add it to your lens.”

Every time I saw one of these suggested tags with a “+” next to it, I added it to my lens. What I didn’t realize was that you can only add 40 tags to your Squidoo lens. So, I was adding tags that were really no good. I was adding very long tail tags that would probably never be searched on again, and I used up my 40 tags.

I continued to believe I was adding tags, but they weren’t being added and I didn’t realize it – oops!

The Squidoo Optimization tool made it clear that I only had 40 tags, and I could see that many of them were junk. So I removed many of the bad tags and by using my Squidoo Dashboard stats could determine better tags to be using.

With the new tags, and changes the Squidoo optimization tool directed me to make, I was able to resurrect this lens. That lens was getting about 90 hits per day at its peak. Then it dropped to about 5 a day. Now it’s back up to about 40 a day and growing.

Plus, my lens is now #111 in Health & Medicine – not bad for a lens that gets little attention. I just wish people spent money in this niche.

Anyway, I used the Squidoo optimization tool on all of my lenses, and every one of them needed some changes. So, I suggest you run your Squidoo lenses through this Squidoo tool.

Mike

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Do you have a Tell A Friend form on your website? If you do, spammers may be taking advantage of you.

Tell a friend systems can be a good part of your website strategy. Tell a friend is much like referrals in the offline world. In the online world, you’re giving your customers an easy way to recommend your services or products to their friends.

Unfortunately, as with any good online strategy, sooner of later spammers will find a way to use something good, and turn it into bad for the rest of us.

I run a URL shortening, hit counting service. Most of my customers are great, and are using the service as it is intended. Then there are the .01% who use it to try to mask their destination URL.

Recently I’ve had a couple of complaints about customers using my service as part of their spam campaigns. That’s how I found out about the spammers also staking advantage of tell a friend systems.

Here’s how they work.

They find a tell a friend form on some website, it doesn’t even have to be a website related to the product they are promoting. One spammer was using a medical site tell a friend form, to send spam promoting their make money from home product.

They submit their emails to be delivered through the tell a friend system to emails they have gathered – emails to people who are obviously not their friends.

They promote their product in the email, using 2 – 3 short url, or url redirection services to try and hide their final destination.

My guess is they are finding tell a friend systems that they can use a bot on, to automatically submit email after email through these tell a friend systems.

So, if you are using a tell a friend system, do you know if it’s being abused?

Here are some ideas I can think of to keep this from happening.

1. Get rid of your tell a friend system. Instead ask your customers to personally send a few close friends an invite to view your services or products.

2. Use a tell a friend system that makes the referring person, confirm their email address by sending them an email with a confirmation link. Do this for each tell a friend request. Yes, this makes things a little more difficult for your referring customer. But, spammers will not be able to confirm if they are using a fake email, and they will not take the time to confirm again and again and again.

This secure tell a friend script is one that may work for you.

3. At the very least, have a tell a friend system that will email you when someone has used your tell a friend system. If you suddenly have several tell a friends notifications, you know you have a problem.

Using tell a friend systems to send spam is nothing new, but I think it has reached a new level with the ability to automatically fill in forms and send hundreds, if not thousands, of spam emails.

Mike

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I am trying to focus my time and energy better, so I am selling many of my websites. Some websites are established and some are relatively new.

I am also selling some of the domains I had plans for, but will probably never put them to use – so you can pick them up.