More Giant Sized Squidoo tips from Kiwisoutback, including tips for monetizing your lenses.  (continued from yesterday)
5. When starting a new lens, how much research do you do? Do you follow any type of plan? Or do you just wing it?
Kiwisoutback:  When I start a new lens, I always look to see what the competition is on Google, not just on Squidoo. Doing a little keyword research can save you a lot of time and may just make you reconsider your lens topic, or get more specific. Researching on search engines will tell you whether you need to dig a little deeper into your topic, or if it’s fine just the way it is.
6. What is your best advice for SEO?
Kiwisoutback:  Links! If you have no links inward to your lens, your lens may never be found. Think of every possible place you can add a relevant link and try it out. If you have seveal online profiles, try adding the lens to that. Submit your lenses to various social networking sites (the more the better!) if you can. If you have a blog, create a post about the lens, or ask someone you know to blog about the lens. It’s also important not to overdo it with the lens title.
7. What is your best tip for monetizing a lens?
Kiwisoutback:  Try to use less banners and more actual products on lenses. Banners don’t tend to a huge moneymaker.
Before creating a lens, you may want to think about a specific product and build the lens around that and how you can fit it in. Adding a random product to a tutorial style lens usually doesn’t yield good results. Really get inside the reader’s head and think of what their wants and needs might be. The more affiliate modules that you include on your lens, the better your chances of selling an item will be. If you’re not comfortable selling products on a strictly informational lens, instead write a new lens based around products and include your personal recommendations.
And here’s the story behind one of Kiwisoutback’s favorites:  ”How to Plan a Road Trip“.
My girlfriend and I had always wanted to travel the country and see what this great nation has to offer. You can only read about road trips in books, see photographs, or hear stories so many times before you get an unstoppable itch to travel. Planes weren’t an option. We both really wanted to see up close and personal the famous sites like the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coast, and ciites like New Orleans.
 
We didn’t have 3-4 weeks of vacation time available, but we decided to go for it anyway. Being from New England, we had the perfect starting point for the trip: one of the corners of the country, so we don’t have to crisscross back and forth. One by one we decided which sites we wanted to see the most and made the most direct routes from destination to destination. We squished in as many places as possible in 3 1/2 weeks, the most amount of time we could take.
It seems like it lasted just a few hours, but this incredible trip included a trip to Arches National Park, The Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the entire coast of Southern California , and the long days across the middle of the country. We had a blast and we wouldn’t change it for the world.
My girlfriend and I were married in 2005, and decided what better way to honeymoon that to go on another road trip? We didn’t get to see everything we wanted to see since we had only 3 1/2 weeks (you really can’t see everything in this amount of time!). This time, we decided to double it and take 6 weeks! We travelled to some of the same places, but some new ones as well, like Washington State, Key West, the Outer Banks, Yellowstone, and the Redwoods of Northern California. It was the trip of a lifetime, and we discovered a definite new passion: road trips! We were never as relaxed as we were during this vacation. Some people get stressed out with all of the driving, packing and unpacking, but once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s nothing. In fact, we loved it!
This trip provided me with some great tips while on the road that I knew would be valuable for other people planning their own road trips. In fact, the trips have evolved into an entire series of road trip lenses. As long as we’re travelling, we’ll keep making these lenses.
Are you a Giant with a few tips to share?  Want to be featured here?  Contact me at Robin(at)Squidoo.com.