thefluffanutta’s burps

Back in June, Squidoo added themes for lenses. This week, they’ve added 2 more! Perfect for any Christmas lenses.

You can preview these themes using the Squidoo Toolbar or the Theme Switcher lens.

Christmas Theme

Winter Holiday Theme

Here’s a quick recap of some of the new tools and modules that have been recently created for Squidoo Lensmasters:

• 3 new modules, allowing you to add star ratings, bookmarks and ClickBank Ads to your lens.
• The browser toolbar now has easy access to these modules (it will update automatically)
• The Lens Workshop Addon for Firefox has also been updated (if you already have it, install the latest version)
• Squidoo HQ release a new Twitter mashup: TwttrList – see my example collection of space tweets.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the SquidUtils blog and follow me on twitter for the latest toys for Lensmasters.

thefluffanutta

If you’re looking for support, answers or just a place to swap ideas, come to the Squidoo Chat Room.

Hosted by Captain Squid, this is an ideal location to meet and interact with other Lensmasters. You don’t need any software, and you don’t need to sign up for anything – just enter your Lensmaster name and dive right in!

After building a number of lenses featuring top Wii games and wireless controllers, I decided it was time to build a group. I put together one for Top Wii Accessories because there didn’t seem to be one on Squidoo yet.

What is perhaps different about this group is the focus on content – the main body of the headquarters page is built around an article, with Featured lenses and affiliate products inserted at appropriate points. I hoping that will be considered to be good keyword fodder by the search engines, and bring some traffic to the group and the lenses that are featured.

(Now that the tag pages aren’t indexed, groups are now vitally important for getting relevant links within Squidoo.)

Affiliate Product Feeds allow you display products on your lens, so that they are always up-to-date. All you need to do is add a RSS module to your lens, and then generate of the feed using one of the tools featured on this lens. These RSS Feeds are optimised so that they look their best on your lens.

• Amazon - 3 different types, and 4 styles, for US and UK
• eBay - easy to build feeds, and for many countries
• eCrater - a simple pipe that improved the look of their feeds

There will be more affiliate programs added to the list soon, with new tools to generate the feeds for you. If there’s a particular program you’d like to see supported, please let me know.

» www.squidoo.com/Affiliate-RSS-Feeds

I have just released a bunch of new tools for Lensmasters:

• • Lens Health-Check Tool (read these excellent tips on how to use it)
  • Amazon RSS Feeds (tool updated, and easier to use)
  • Fanclub Widget (show off how many fans you have)
  • Table Generator (the easy way to make tables for your lenses)
  • Squidoo Enhanced (addon for Firefox that improves the Lens Workshop)

For the full details, read » New Tools for Lensmasters.

I discovered Squidoo Kingdom -Â where you can submit your lenses, and is quite similar to Lensroll.com.

Important: Do Your Amazon Links Work? Login to SquidUtils, and look out for a message about your links.

Searching for Squidoo lenses on a search engine can be a real pain sometimes, as the results are very often filled with non-content pages like tags. Here are two custom search engines that are optimised to only return the searches that you actually want.

» How To Find Squidoo Lenses and Groups

New post: Relevance is Key when it comes to building your lens.

Guest post: How To Use the Lensroll Feature

Last Week’s Blog Post: How To Put Amazon Affiliate Links on Squidoo from the SquidUtils Blog.

Discover the 7 Secrets of Squidoo

Find out more about me on my Lensography …