You’ve heeded the call to action, written a few articles, and
then published them on Squidoo.
How do you now promote your new articles efficiently?
There’s basically two ways of getting readers to your
work.
The first is by advertising your article, and the
second is through networking.
When I speak about “advertising”, I’m not suggesting you
spend money on ads.
Advertising, in this
sense, means to let the world know your article exists and to invite others to
find and enjoy your writings.
Let's go promote!
How Do I Advertise My
Articles?
The first step is to “ping” your article every time you
publish or update it. Ping.In, Ping.fm,
Ping-o-Matic, or Feed Shark are some good pinging sites. Join Squid Utils, and use their Squidoo
specific ping service.
Next, bookmark your article on Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon,
RedGage and Best Reviewer.com. These
services bring readers from areas you’ll not reach using other sources.
Use Craigslist’s Community Page to place and a short storied
advertisement / link to your lens where your subject matter allows it. Craigslist will run your ad for 30 days for
free. Keep a calendar to track your ad
and place it in different parts of the country.
Use Squidoo keywords to link as many keywords as possible to
your article. Squidoo will allow you up
to 40 keyword phrases. Make sure you use
all of those spots. You can always
modify your choices later.
Update your work frequently. Updating doesn’t have to be time
consuming. Add a date line if needed and
change it a couple of times each month.
That’s enough to have the search engines revisit you. Every time you update you can re-ping your work. That keeps things fresh and moving towards
the top of the chart.
Networking for More Readers
The first thing you want to do is engage with other folks on
the site you’re publishing on, and in this case it’s Squidoo. Read articles, check out the forum, join a
club.
But if you’re like me, you don’t always have a lot of time
and some of these options take plenty of that.
So here’s how you begin to find folks to read your work by working
within the community.
Sign on to Squidoo and let’s find an article to read.
I don’t want you to choose something that’s currently
running on one of the main pages. Those
are too busy.
So let’s go to the search box and find an article on a
subject you’re interested in. Let’s say “rabbits”. Type in rabbits and up comes all the
articles where Squidoo lensmasters have used the keyword “rabbits”. Pick one that sounds good and go check it
out.
Be sure to choose one that has been either published or updated
recently. This tells you the author is still
quite active on the site.
Now, read the work, comment on the article, take polls and
quizzes, and finally be sure to “Squid Like” the article, if you enjoyed what
you read. Squid liking is
important. Do that for your fellow
lensmaster where you can. Doesn’t this
feel great?
Now pick another one of this author’s articles and do it
again. I usually try to read 3 articles that
I think I’ll enjoy from each author during each visit to his site.
If you’ve done this much, most people will respond in kind
and visit your page and read your work.
That’s why you want to make sure you’re reading articles
from an active author. In most cases, if
you take the time to read 3 articles, they’ll do the same for you. Any more than 3 and you’re probably pushing
it.
As you gain more articles, you can take this a step further
and maybe read some of their less popular articles listed towards the end of
their list. Most will then do the same
for you. If you’re interested in having
people read your most popular work, read and like their most popular
articles. Be nice to the world, and they’ll
be nice to you.
So picking an interesting subject gets you started in finding
an author to read, but after that a lot of good authors are found from the
comments they leave on others’ work.
What do I mean by that?
Look at the comment section of an article you enjoy. Do you see active commenters? We’re talking about comments from the last 6
weeks or so.
Those people are authors you’ll want to check out. It’s an easy way to find active Squidoo lensmasters
willing to engage and critique your work.
Go down the line and visit 5 or 10 people. Read, comment and like. You can also comment on their profile page
which is a good way to getting yourself known throughout the community.
Log on to Squidoo every day.
Look to see who’s visited your page.
Make sure you go back and visit that author’s work too. They may have found you before you found them
and you certainly want to thank them for their visit. If they’ve been kind enough to read several
of your articles, make sure you do the same for them. It’s only neighborly.
Keep a list of lensmasters whose work you like. Visit them often. Keep a list of lensmasters who visit your
page and visit and re-visit them. This
builds valuable friendships. Networking
can be a wonderful thing!
Visit, participate, and pay it forward. You’ll find you find friends, mentors, and
interesting articles this way.
Lastly, try using social media to provide a network of
readers. Start a Facebook page for your
work. Set up a Twitter account. Blog.
Share every article you write on these networks. Not everyone will come on by, but you’ll find
a few and you know they’ll love your work.
What Not to Do in
Promoting Your Work
There are a couple things you don’t want to do to promote
your writing because these tactics are against the Terms of Service of either
Squidoo or Google.
First, do not pay folks to come and like your article. Don’t hire folks from Fivrr or anywhere else
to Squid Like your article. It will get
you thrown off the site.
Second, don’t come out and ask someone to like your article
on Squidoo. They don’t want you doing
that either.
Third, don’t join exchange sites. These are sites where members visit each
other’s pages to run up their visitor numbers.
This practice cheats the advertisers.
Google will penalize you and so will Squidoo. It’s not worth the chance to do this.
@SanneCollins
