I’m a firm believer in making your Squidoo lens pretty. You want people to land on it and feel like they’re in the right spot for professional information. Think about if you were handed a plain old flyer someone printed out with nothing more than text on it versus a nice colorful brochure with text wrapped around relevant images.

Which would you consider the authority on the subject matter?

The same goes for all of your web 2.0 pages - Squidoo, Google Knol, Hub Pages. You need formatting and images that make it pop.

Let me show you a comparison right now. Which one would you rather visit and buy from:

This lens: http://www.squidoo.com/glasschristmasornament

or

This one: http://www.squidoo.com/toptoddlertoys

The images alone make a world of difference in the experience your visitor has on your lens (or Knol or Hub).

But there’s also some cool formatting you can do, too! You can bold and italicize words. I bold links and italicize to make words pop. This is done with simple HTML code like this: [b] and [i] (replace the brackets [] with arrows <>).

Here’s how to put a color box around a text module and enlarge your text (again, replace brackets [] with arrows <>):

[b][p style="border: 3px solid #069; padding: 14px; text-align: center"][a href='http://www.plrminimart.com/blog' target='_blank'][b style='color: blue; font-size: x-large; font-weight: bold']PLR articles[/b][/a][/p][/b]

Using that code, you can change the color, the font-size, and the border color. I’ve hyperlinked my text, too! Here’s the result you’ll get:

To simply change some text to a different color (and bold it), use this code - again, change brackets [] to arrows <>:

[b style="color: green; font-weight: bold;"]green with envy[/b]

This would make green with envy turn to a bold green color!

To wrap text around an image that you host on your server and hyperlink the image, Which is what I love to do, use this code (arrows, not brackets):

[a href="http://www.URLYouWanttoLinkto.com"][img src="http://www.ImageURL.JPG" alt="relevant keyword" align="right" hspace="5" /][/a]

Now you can change the right to left or center and the spacing makes sure the text isn’t sitting right on the border of the image. It’s nice to have a bit of space separating the image and the text.

Where to get images?

IStockPhoto is my top choice. I buy $60 here and there and use them up as I go, keeping the images for later use. They’re $1 per small image, and small is kind of large for the ‘net.

Also, remember to break up your text modules with some Amazon or polls or something else of your choosing.

Hope this helps!
Tiff

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