How I Met Your Mother Tees Part 2

Okay, it appears we have some Squidoo competition as the search function wasn’t working properly, but that’s okay.....usually I check in with Squidu at least once a day to see if there are any issues, but.....

Anyway my lens is published (and is already on the front page of google) and I have used Amazon, Allposters and Zazzle for this lens. Amazon is great if you haven’t used affiliates before because you can just use the Squidoo modules – the spotlight one is the best one to use for sales conversions. If you’re an Amazon associate you can use your own link, but we’ll get to that on another post.

The first affiliate program that I want you to join (if you don’t already belong to one) is AllPosters – Why? It’s a great way of being able to use pictures. I didn’t think I’d ever make a sale with them, but being able to illustrate my lens was enough – at first anyway. I have since learnt how to make money with them, but more on that one later.

I have only recently joined Zazzle and so far all of my earnings have come from referring products, but we’ll touch on Zazzle at another time. It is another great resource to use that has the potential to earn you money.

Now if you go to my How I Met Your Mother Tees lens I will take you through it. All lenses start with the introduction and you really should have a picture here and because I’m with Allposters I could use one of their posters as an image. I copied the picture from Allposters onto my hard-drive and then uploaded it, for the link to Allposters I copied the html from Allposters and placed it at the bottom of my lens I then deleted class="APCTitleAnchor" that was at the beginning of the code. I then deleted everything after the at the end of the first url before the word target. I added a > typed in what I wanted to have as my hyperlink (in this case the word here) and then typed in < / a > (leaving out the spaces in between, I've had to do this for the blog to accept it!).

Next is a poll module, this is good to get some interaction with your visitors. It’s not always necessary, but I felt (after I’d done the rest of the lens) that the lens needed something to engage people with.

We then have three text modules – I used three different text modules because I wanted to use the headings. Using these headings will help Google recognize what the lens is all about so it’s a good idea to use keywords in here….I actually haven’t done that with all of these, but I think the headings are good at the moment and if we get some link juice we may be okay with the ones I’ve used. The great thing about Squidoo is that you’re in control so we can go back and change things as we like.

I have filled these text modules with Zazzle products. Take a look at Zazzle, if you see products there that you’d like to use then it might be a good idea to join up as an associate – you do not have to publish your own products if you don’t want to. I’m an associate and I have just clicked on the products that I’ve liked and then pressed link. I chose the second option which actually uses div codes which aren’t allowed in Squidoo, but instead of taking them out I’ve just copy and pasted the code into a text module and then pressed save.....Squidoo automatically takes out the code it doesn’t like and you’re done. Now I must admit I deleted a little more because it would normally have a link underneath taking you back to the person, but leave that in there for now (unless you know your html), we’ll touch back on ways of formatting Zazzle products another day.

Next we have an Amazon Spotlight module. When using this module any sale that you have you’ll split the commission with Squidoo. It’s a great way of adding products when you’re not an affiliate yourself. All you need is to find the code on Amazon for the product you want to use and pop it into the module. You can add text and change a few things like showing customer ratings etc. There are a lot of different Amazon modules that you can use, but the spotlight seems the best for getting sales. It has a larger size image for starters.

I followed this up with another text module that was going to include a link for Allposters, basically I just copied and pasted their html code into the module. It didn’t work, I’m not sure what’s happening at the moment, but a lot of people are having a problem with this at the moment. I decided that I wanted to leave the small piece of text in there and then I uploaded the text with big picture module. Now I could have just replaced the text module with this one, but I wanted the text above the picture. I copied the picture from Allposters to my hard-drive and then uploaded it to the text with big picture module. I used the first url that is incased in “” that appears in the html for Allposters and I put this in the link for the picture, this means that anyone clicking on the picture will be taken to Allposters to buy it (using your referral code).

I then added another Amazon Spotlight module and followed this up with a guest book module.

I then hit publish and voila! What you have before you is the lens thus far.

There are more things we need to do like lensrolling, discovery tool, tags and promoting, but you’ll have to come back next time for these :)