Archive for June, 2008
Superhero Lens Number 2 Done
It’s a race against the clock!
I just finished on my second lens for the Squidoo Superhero Project for Charity. As of this writing, I have 4 days, 13 hours, and 41 minutes left to create three more lenses for the Superhero Project. Think I can make it? I hope so!
My second lens for the project is about Dr. Ben Carson, who is a gifted neurosurgeon who has saved the lives of thousands of people, and become a great role model for millions (including me). In 1987 he performed a medical procedure to separate siamese twins who were joined at the back of the head–the first time such a procedure was successful. Really neat stuff. Since I’m a nursing student, his life story is especially fascinating to me.
That’s Superhero Lens #2 down now, and just three more to go.
Squidoo Enhanced Firefox Addon
The extremely talented Squidoo programming guru, thefluffanutta, has created an amazing tool for the Firefox web browser. Squidoo Enhanced improves the Squidoo usability experience by adding lots of cool new features to the Lens Workshop, dashboard, and other pages on Squidoo.
Some of the features include:
- Checks tags and color-codes them by number of lenses
- Counts tags, and links to traffic stats and the Wordtracker keyword tool
- Increases the height of text edit boxes
- Makes the workshop the full width of published lenses
- And more…click here for a full list
Squidoo Enhanced has been a big help in my Squidoo journey, and I would have had a much harder time without it. I know that my Squidoo traffic has increased significantly because of the suggestions this tool has made, and it’s saved me a lot of time and trouble.
Anyways, installing the addon is a breeze. All you have to do is:
- Download and install Mozilla Firefox Web Browser, if you don’t already have it
- Install the Greasemonkey Plugin for Firefox
- Restart Firefox
- Install the Squidoo Enhanced Script here
- Go to your Lensmaster Dashboard and enjoy!
Additionally, there is another SquidUtils addon script that cleans up the SquidU forum, removes some of the clutter, and adds some more goodies. You can find it here.
Kudos to thefluffanutta!
Who’s Your Superhero?
Last night I finished my first lens for the Superhero Project, which is a contest sponsored by Squidoo where all of the proceeds go to charity. Basically everyone makes five lenses in two weeks and then submits them to Squidoo, and HQ picks the best five and then awards $500 to charity for each winning lens. So $2,500 would go to charity because of this project.
I really admire Squidoo for making the option available to contribute to charity like this, and of course for the lensmasters who donate their time and work toward a good cause. Contests like the Superhero Project are not only loads of fun, they also make me feel good when I build lenses that will support people who need help.
Anyways, my first lens is Remember the Troops. It’s not entirely finished yet, so it looks a bit incomplete, but I’m still finding new stuff to add to it. There are only five days left in the Superhero Project Challenge, so I’m pretty late in getting started on this. I’m going to work hard though and see if I can get all five done by the deadline.
How about you? Are you participating in the Superhero Project too?
Weekend Woes
Wow, what a weekend. I was gone from Friday until yesterday, and I returned to a bunch of problems with SquidTop and some of my other sites. Since The Captain is off getting married somewhere, I’m left all alone for two whole weeks to manage SquidTop and the other projects we have going together.
I’ve been having to answer support requests and fix broken stuff almost nonstop since I got back, so it’s left me with little time for blogging, building lenses, and working on my millions of other projects. To top it all off, I had a migraine on Friday and another one yesterday, so that was very annoying and I was mentally incapacitated. This is strange, because I haven’t had a migraine for over a year now and getting two back-to-back was a little unnerving. Today I’m feeling much better, but I still feel a little nauseous and “hung-over”. I did a little looking on Squidoo and I couldn’t find that many really great lenses on migraines, so maybe that’ll be my next project when I get some time…
What someone really needs to make a lens about is how to stop time…or at least how to grow a couple extra appendages or something, so I could get more done. Wouldn’t that be nice? 
Edit:Tonight I noticed that my RSS feed wasn’t working right. It seems that Feedburner really screwed something up. I’m really sorry to anyone out there who was having problems with it, but everything’s fixed now.
Squidoo as an End in Itself
A lot of the people I talk to about Squidoo say they use it to promote their own websites. That’s absolutely fine, in fact it’s a very smart idea, because promoting one’s own websites with Squidoo can be very profitable. I use it to promote my own sites too–I’ll build a network of lenses and then link them all back to my sites. This has provided a great boost in traffic and revenue.
Lately I’ve been creating my own sites and “branching out” more, because I don’t like to keep all my eggs in one basket. Squidoo’s been a great stepping stone and “sandbox” for me, but I’m going to focus more on expanding outward. I’ll definitely spend most of my time building lots of new lenses and improving old ones, but it’s not going to be my sole focus I don’t think–like I said I like to spread stuff out.
But, what about just using Squidoo as an end in itself? Last month, the majority of my ~$300 in earnings was from Squidoo itself, so Squidoo can definitely be profitable alone. This month so far I’m at about at the level as all I earned last month, and nearly all of it was from Squidoo. It looks like I may very well earn double what I did last month. So, basically, Squidoo can be very profitable all by itself.
A lot of Lensmasters agree and do focus all of their time on lenses, and do rely on it as their only source of online income. But what if something happens that traffic to Squidoo lenses decreases? Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed that my lens traffic has been going up sharply–it’s doubled in under a month. Is there any chance that could go both ways? I know that a lot of factors could be involved. but I noticed that my lenses are ranking higher and bringing in more traffic.
How about the Great Google Squidoo Slap of 2007? Could something like that happen again? Possibly. Not likely, but it definitely could happen. If it did, though, it’d be a mess of trouble for a lot of people. At least when you spread yourself out over several websites, you can fall back on the others if one fails. Not that I’m trying to scare you–the chance of something bad happening to Squidoo is remote–I’m just the kind of person that likes to always be prepared.
What do you think? Do you rely on Squidoo 100% or do you have your stuff branched out?
