Your Squidoo Profile

Setting Your Squidoo Profile

The main thing to consider when signing up at Squidoo is the username you choose. It cannot be changed.

Username: Points to Consider

* If you are using a username somewhere else (e.g. an ebay ID) and one of your aims is to promote your ebay store, then you might want to use the same username at Squidoo. A form of name branding. That is if the username is available.

* The username you choose cannot have spaces. It can be upper/lower case and can have hyphens (-) and can be alphanumeric.

First Squidy Steps

Ok. You have just signed up. Now what? Should you roam around reading? Should you write your first article (aka lens)? Should you hang out at the forum? So many avenues and each might take you away for a long time. If you are like me - partly torn in all directions and wondering what is the most sensible thing to do then the following is one possible route. It's only a suggestion (though I admit I have ventured down all those aforementioned avenues and just managed to pull myself back before I got totally sucked in!) but at this point, I think a sensible one.

Spruce up your Details: My Dashboard

You are already signed in, so let's just go to My Dashboard (top right)

My Profile ^[tab] is where you will be able to edit all kinds of goodies related to your Squidoo account.

It is divided into a number of sub-sections so I will go through them in order.

Personal Info

You can change anything here except for your username. The (real) name you signed up with will already be there. Now you can add to Default bio (Tip: can enter HTML code here) and upload a Default Photo (presumably of yourself).

More About Me

This section is great. It gives you the opportunity to add lots and lots of links to your other sites/shops. Such a cool feature. I love it!

And after you have written a few "lenses", you can also choose to put up to 5 as Featured Lenses.

And if you have other Favorite lenses (be they your own or other's - ok I am guessing here as I have yet to write anything at this point), you can also enter them in this section and choose if you would publicly like to share them or not.

Account Settings

This section allows you to modify your email address, your password, and whether you want to "Allow contact" or not. I will come back to this section when I find out more details and if there are more details that need explanation.

Payment Settings

This is an important section if you want to earn money and be paid! :)

Here you can set your PayPal email address. If this is the same as your registered email address with Squidoo, you don't need to do anything here if you don't want to.

Global Payment Settings

Here you can specify who is to receive your Squidoo earnings - you only, charity (ies) only, or both. If both, you can specify percentage that should go to each (where 100% is the total of your Squidoo earnings). And what is also very cool is that you can donate to a group of (unspecified) charities - the "Squidoo Charity Fund" (picked by Squidoo team) or you can select one or more charities you would like to contribute to.

You can also specify the cash payout threshold - how much your Squidoo account has before Squidoo sends a payment to you. Anything from $1 to $1 million dollars! (Here I believe they are all talking in US Dollars).

Global Ad Settings

This can only be turned on or off. This has to do with Infolinks appearing on (all) your lenses. Click through on their hyperlink "in text ads" to read more information given by Squidoo.

Without being too technical, if you have the "I want in text ads" on, then sometimes, some words or phrases on your articles will be automatically hyperlinked. And that link will lead to some advertiser's site. Part of Infolink.

Social Application Settings

Here you can authorize Squidoo to "use your Twitter account". This would give Squidoo to "access and update your data on Twitter".

How it works: after you have written/edited a lens, you normally get a popup that ask if you want to Tweet this. If yes, then it will take you to log into your specified Twitter account and it will already have entered some text and link (back to your lens) for you - which you can modify if you wish.

Cheerio! Now I am off to psych myself up to write my first Squidoo lens!