by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 05, 2009

Squidoo is a Web 2.0 hosting site that offers the writer and web page builder a wealth of tools and opportunities with which to ply their trade and potentially earn significant income. The individual builds a page - or even better a series of pages - called a lens on Squidoo and monetises it in a variety of different ways.

The first step we have to take is to decide upon the subject of our first lens. This should be both something which we know a great deal about and something very specific. The lens should be about something we know well in order that we have plenty of material and potential future material and it should be very specific to minimise the competition and maximise the chances of us being found via the search engines.

Let us assume that we build models as a hobby. Creating a lens on "Building Models" would have a lot more competition than one on, "How to Paint Model Aircraft." It also means that we have a great many potential lenses for the future under the broad spectrum of building models.

We thereafter have to sign up to Squidoo. We will be guided through the process of building our lens in the first instance on a step by step basis. It is very important during this stage that we choose our URL wisely. This is the one thing which cannot be changed later and should be very specific to our subject. In the example above, I would use, "how-to-paint-model-aircraft" as the part of the URL which I determine.

When we have completed essentially but the skeleton of our lens and the sign up process, we have to - from our control panel, or "Dashboard" - select the edit mode for our lens and begin the process of putting some meat on the bare bones. We will have by this stage learned that each lens is made up of different sections, or "modules," each of which serves a very different purpose. Start off with the more popular ones and worry later about exploring all the different options available.

The text module is the first one which we have to consider. This is where we will be including the main content of our lens, the advice in this instance of essentially how to paint model aircraft. We should not, however, cram all our text in to the one text module. Rather, we should split it up in to logical sections of around five or six text modules. It is vital also to include some photographs on our lens. Take some of your model aeroplanes and download them via the tool in the text module to accompany each block of text. We then intersperse said modules with such

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