6. Join relevant Squidoo groups

Squidoo is a neat, simple way to get your own web page up and running fast and at no cost to you. Squidoo call their web pages "lenses" as they each focus on one subject. Here are some tips for your Squidoo lens building.

1. Keep your lens visually interesting

Most people find large blocks of text boring and difficult to read. This is especially so on screen. Break up long paragraphs into shorter points. Use bullet points to put your ideas across. Use a picture for each block that allows one - you can get CDs of royalty free photographs or there are sites online that offer these as well.

2. Use different modules

Squidoo offers lots of different modules. The basic ones that near enough everyone uses are text boxes (called text/write modules) but there are lots of other ways to make your lens look interesting. For instance, there are widgets such as yellow "sticky" notes which are designed to look like an on screen Post It note. There are also speech bubbles and other ideas to break up your text.

3. Make it interactive

People like to think they're taking part in things. Nothing too complicated of course, but think about adding a poll to your site. This gives your readers something to click on and if you phrase your questions right it will also tell you which direction to write more about in your lens. While you're at it, make sure you include a guest book as the last item on your lens so that people can type in their comments about your subject.

4. Include affiliate links

Because Squidoo likes to think that your lens is the starting point for people to find out about a topic, it's fine for you to include links to other pages in your lens. Naturally some of these can be ones that earn you money in the form of affiliate links. When I include a link, I also make sure that it opens in a new window by including target="_blank" in the relevant part of the link. This opens the link in a new browser window and gives you more than one chanceto get a sale.

5. Link to other sites

These can be your blog or someone else's site entirely. The idea is to make your page useful to your readers. Squidoo rewards you in their own internal ranking system for - amongst other things - the number of times people click away from your lens. This sounds weird but goes back to the idea that the lens should be the starting point for finding out about a topic.

6. Join relevant Squidoo groups

These help with ranking your page both within Squidoo and also with the search engines. They're extra links to your page so all the usual search engine optimization rules apply.

7. Promote your Squidoo lens elsewhere

Write an article about your topic and link to your Squidoo lens in the author's resource section. Most article sites are cool with this and you will get extra links to promote your lens when your article is reprinted.