Today, you will build your first Squidoo lens.

The steps involved are:

* Creating your content
* Planning your links
* Picking up the CHD awareness content
* Setting up your lens
* Populating your lens with content

Step 1: Creating your content

Write at least one high quality article on your topic for each keyword - or have it written for you by a ghostwriter.

Do not be obsessed with achieving a certain keyword density. Instead, focus on making your writing as attractive, useful and captivating as possible for readers. But make sure your main keyword is mentioned a few times!

Each article should be around 500 to 600 words (if longer, break it up into 2 parts, because the WRITE module only accepts 2,500 characters at maximum).

Include a mouthwatering offer that a reader will find hard to resist. This could be a free gift, a valuable service, an exclusive membership or anything else that will get your ideal prospect excited about clicking the link and signing up to your list or visiting your website/blog.

At the end of each piece of content is a good time to ask readers to

* bookmark your lens to their list of FAVORITES
* rate your lens by clicking on the STARS at the top of the page
* TELL A FRIEND about your lens
* join your mailing list to receive updates

Step 2: Planning your links

Include links to the next lens in your network, especially if you are writing a multi-part content feature and it makes sense for the reader to continue to the next part.

Link to other parts of your ‘Squidoo network’ - the set of Squidoo lenses you’ll be building over the course of this challenge, and beyond.

Link to your main website, blog, sales page, opt-in newsletter page and other relevant/useful links.

Don’t forget to include links to the Congenital Heart Defects Awareness website, to support “A Day for Hearts” - the link is: http://www.CHDinfo.com/chdaware/

In a separate text file, save the text you will use in the ‘Text Links’ module. This will save you time as you quickly copy-paste these links into the network lenses as you populate them with content. You’ll also avoid making typos and mistakes while creating links on your lens.

Step 3: Picking up your CHD awareness content

I have created some pre-written content to go into one of the WRITE modules on your Squidoo lens. You can pick it up - click here

Ready-to-go CHD awareness building content - Pick it up here

Simply copy all the code in the form on that page, and paste it into the box on one of your TEXT-WRITE modules (more about this in the next section).

Step 4: Setting up your Squidoo lens

Now you are ready to begin building your lens.

Click on the BUILD A LENS button and fill up the boxes (you’ll already be familiar with this process if you studied the Squidoo basics as part of yesterday’s assignment)

You’ll want to keep the following modules in your lens:

- Introduction
- Text/Write
- RSS feeds
- Text/Write
- Guestbook
- Text links (non plexo)

Squidoo makes it easy to insert/add more modules, and you can re-arrange them simply by placing your mouse-cursor over the module, clicking and dragging it to where you want, and dropping it in place!

Step 5: Populating your lens with content

INTRODUCTION:

Write a brief introduction for each lens. It must include your primary keyword for that lens (formatted in BOLD) in the first paragraph.

It should also make a convincing appeal to invite visitors to go deeper and explore your lens. You must also insert a short invitation to readers to bookmark your lens, and rate it by clicking on the stars near the top of the page. Do this once again after your content too.

WRITE/TEXT:

In the first Write/Text module, copy and paste your article created in Step #1.

RSS FEEDS:

Here, you can automatically pull in ‘feeds’ from your blog, if you have one. It helps draw few visitors to your blog to read it.

WRITE/TEXT:

In the second Write/Text module, copy and paste the CHD awareness content (from Step #3 above)

GUESTBOOK:

Invite visitors to post their comments, and include a powerful benefit to them for doing so. These guest posts will keep your lens updated and fresh - automatically. You may also use the Guestbook module as an opportunity to invite visitors to join your mailing list.

TEXT LINKS (NON-PLEXO):

This is the critical component that ties all your Squidoo lenses together. Make sure you add only the Plain Text Link module and NOT the Plexo module.

By clicking on the Add More Links button, you can add new link boxes to the module. Create 5 or 6 of them. Then, from the text file you prepared earlier containing all the links to other lenses in your mini-network, copy and paste one snippet per box and click SAVE.

You will get a nicely formatted set of links, each one pointing to one of the other lenses in your mini-network. Both visitors and search engine spiders can follow these links to ‘find’ your other lenses on the topic.

That’s all for today. Next, you’ll begin building your other lenses.

The “CHD Social Media Challenge” is a project to spread Congenital Heart Defects awareness. There are 4 mini-tutorials and 1 firesale making up the ‘challenge’. You can join in and help too - click here to see how.