Show Expertise on your Organization's Cause, Use Squidoo Part 1

Show Expertise on your Organization's Cause

Lets face you, no one knows quite like you do about the cause your organization is focused on right? You spend most of you're time keeping up with the latest of your organizations subject matter. Most organizations not only want to know a lot about their cause, but they also are focused on letting others know about their cause.

This is where Squidoo comes into play for your organization. Without getting to caught up in the details, Squidoo was founded by Seth Godin to provide a platform that the users of the Squidoo site can use to create pages on the areas that interest them most. When someone like your organization creates a new page to put information on a particular subject matter, they are creating what Squidoo refers to as a "Lens".

Short Answer: Why is it worth my time to create a lens?

If your organization creates the right lens, and maintains it properly, you can easily boost your search engine rankings for particular words, increase the visibility of your organization, and potentially make your organization money by maintaining your lens site. Increase traffic, awareness, and money in the bank; that's why.

First Steps To "Lensify" Your Organization

The first thing that you should do for your organization is go over to Squidoo and do a few quick searches to see if there are already any lenses on your cause. Even if you do find a lens that relates to your cause, your organization can still create its own lens. Spend just a little bit of time seeing what is already out there and what is missing. Maybe there is a void that your organization could easily fill? You don't need an account to just mozy around and see what lenses other individuals have already created.

Creating an Account

In order create a lens for your organization, you must first create your organization an account. The red box outlines the link you can click to create a new account when visiting the following link (http://www.squidoo.com/member/login).

Squidoo will step you through the processes of creating your organization's user account (be sure to make mental note of your username and password) in a nice wizard format. After finishing up with creating the user account, you will be able to create the actual lens.

Creating The Actual Lens

Creating your organizations lens is just a matter of 4 really simple steps and one fairly simple (though more work is required) final step. The first four steps should be completed as follows:

Step 1: What your lens is about. You should put in plain english exactly what you want this lens to be about. If you are an animal rights group, you might enter that your lens is about "How to reduce the number of companies testing products on animals"

Step 2: What do you want to do with your lens? This question will just help the folks at Squidoo pre-configure your lens a little bit to help you accomplish exactly what your goals are. You are most likely going to want to pick the first option which happens to be "I want to get the word out about ...(easiest option)". Don't stress too much about this question, if you are not sure what to pick, then picking the first option is fine.

Step 3: Title and URL. Your lense title should prepopulate with what you entered in the first step. This should be sufficient. The next part of this step will help with the search engine ranking for specific keywords. Think about what keywords you want your lens to show up on when a person searches for those terms. The first part is to pick what your "URL" will be. When you link to your lens either in blog posts or anywhere on the web, you will use this exact URL to link. Keeping with our fake lens for an animal rights group, we might want to enter something like "animal-testing" in the box next to "www.squidoo.com/". Take heed of the warning that this cannot be changed once it is created. .The last part is to pick a category that best matches your lens. This most likely will be "Nonprofit & Volunteering".

Step 4. Keywords. The final page will allow you to associate a few keywords to your lens. Be careful to pick meaningful keywords, as this will help with search engine ranking for those particular keywords.