Archive for June, 2008
Wonderful Unexpected Squidoo Income
A few days ago I was contacted through Squidoo by someone who wanted me to write a paid review about his site and put it on my lens. Wonderful! I checked out the site, and it met my standards for quality (I don’t promote junk), so we talked back and forth a bit about it and negotiated a final price.
Today I wrote up the review (took about 10 minutes), slapped it on my lens, and now I’m $50 richer.
Isn’t Squidoo neat? This is why I’m a firm believer in quality. When you build quality lenses, filled with quality content, and backed by quality links, chances of things like this happening increase by 1000%.
How to Promote Your Lenses Without Being Labeled a Spammer
Proper promotion is the key to success in the marketing world. You can make the coolest, most awesome, wonderful website (or lens), but if nobody knows about it, it won’t get any visits. And therefore no sales and no money. I know firsthand all about this. I’ve made really cool sites in the past, before I knew a thing about promotion. I would just make them and wait for the people to start pouring in to visit and buy things. This might be possible with a brick-and-mortar business on Main Street, but on the Internet, you gotta promote your site aggressively to get traffic.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to promote your web creations. One way could get you good traffic and good feedback from visitors, another way could get you labeled as a spammer and a nuisance. I like getting comments on my Squidoo lenses, and it’s always fun to wake up in the morning with an email saying Squidoo: You have new comments! and seeing that someone left a quality comment that contributes to my lens and also links to one of their lenses on a similar topic for further reading.
I really don’t mind when people leave a link to their related lens if they leave a good comment and the lens they link to is relevant. However, I despise commenters who post a garbage comment on my coin collecting lens like:
“Hey! Nice lens! Now check out mine on wrinkle cream!”
Huh? Since when did coin collecting and wrinkle cream have anything in common? Plus, you didn’t even contribute anything to my lens. Why should I approve your comment? DELETE! In my book, people who do this are spammers, the same people who send me unwanted emails selling me pills–they contribute nothing. This is definitely the wrong way to promote lenses.
Squidoo lenses are really liked by the search engines, and that feeling of affection is increased by building backlinks to them by using social bookmarking sites and writing articles with links to them, for instance. Unfortunately, there are people who maliciously take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us who work hard.
Because of them, the same people who post useless comments on my lenses, sites like Propeller, which was once awesome for building backlinks to lenses, have now banned Squidoo lenses. There are other sites that have begun to shun Squidoo, and Squidoo’s reputation has been permanently damaged because of people who promote their lenses the wrong way.
If you’re going to comment on someone else’s lens and link to one of yours, make sure it’s a quality and relevant one. Really, it’s worth it in the long run to take 20 seconds to type out something useful and link to one of your lenses that’s similar in topic. The same applies to social bookmarking and other linkbuilding–don’t overwhelm the site with links to your lenses and be sure to write decent descriptions and tags.
The right way to promote your lenses, the way that will get your comments approved by people like me, and the way that will get you backlinks and search engine love is to contribute something of quality. Like it or not, quality and relevance is becoming king now, and those who practice it will triumph in the end.
Squidoo’s New Dashboard Features
Every time I log into Squidoo now I chuckle at whatever saying the new dashboard welcomes me with. I like the dashboard now, and I think it’s a huge improvement over the old one. Since I’m an über special Giant Squid, I get all sorts of fun things like lens labels for organizing my lenses based on category, type (charity or non-charity), or anything I want really, plus other neat stuff. And, I especially like the new features that were added just a few days ago, like lens stats and changing the color of WIP (Work in Progress) lenses to red.
However, there are some things I don’t care too much about. Like, for instance, the position of the new lens stats. I think it’d be much better if they were at the top of the page, so I don’t have to scroll forever to see them. For people with over 400 lenses, this can become quite a chore.
Another new “feature” I’d rather not have is the expanding of lens options (view, edit, delete, stats, etc.) when mousing over. It gets a little hard on the eyes when scrolling over a large list of lenses. Oh well, a lot of people like it and you can’t please everyone I guess. I’d still take the new dashboard over the old one anyday.
SquidTop: Squidoo Blogging Heaven
Squidoo by itself is an incredibly powerful tool. So is blogging. But when combined together, the results are mindblowing. Squidoo and blogging just seem to go hand-in-hand; it’s as if the two were meant to always be together.
Captain Squid realized this and so he and I put our heads together and created SquidTop, a place where Squidoo lensmasters can create their very own SquidBlog and promote their latest lenses, and talk with other lensmasters about Squidoo. And they can all do it completely free. It’s pretty much Squidoo blogging heaven.
Additionally, SquidTop has some pretty nice features, like Adsense revenue sharing, Twitter integration, and much more. New features are being added all the time, too! To top it all off (no pun intended), SquidTop is based on the Wordpress blogging platform, so if you’ve used Wordpress before you’ll feel right at home.
What the best part about SquidTop though is that it is absolutely adored by the search engines. Google comes back to visit dozens of times each day, and new blog posts are indexed within hours. That’s hours. Not days or weeks, but hours. This is some pretty powerful stuff!
Several people, myself included, have experimented with this and have noticed that when blogged about on SquidTop, lenses get indexed really quickly. So if you’ve got some lenses that you’re having a tough time getting indexed in the search engines, blogging about them on SquidTop will jumpstart the process. Or, if you just want to give some of your lenses a boost higher in search engine rankings, SquidTop will help with that.
If you haven’t started your own custom Squidoo blog yet, head on over to SquidTop, click the blue “Sign Up” button in the top right and start blogging away!
How I Found Squidoo
Squidoo has become a place where tons of people, myself included, have found success on the Internet. Before I found Squidoo, I was making literally pennies online. Back then I knew nothing about making money on the Internet, and would just slap together a site or something and put Google Adsense ads on it and just wait for the cash to start rolling in. Well, to tell the truth, that never happened. At the time I had almost no idea about promotion, getting traffic, or anything like that.
When I found Squidoo, however, this all changed. While browsing on the various forums I used to hang out all the time, I kept seeing references to something called “Squidoo.” I wanted to learn more about this “Squidoo” and sought out to find out all I could about it. I’m a person who likes to use IRC and chat, and so I searched for any Squidoo chat rooms.
I found Captain Squid’s Squidoo Chat, and from that moment on I began my journey to success with Squidoo. I swear, all of my success is attributed to this chat and Captain Squid’s blog. I have learned more in the past six months with these than I ever learned in the year or two I drifted along reading other blogs and forums. And the friendships I’ve made there have become literally priceless. I couldn’t have possibly reached where I am now without them.
Fast forward to today and here I am with 150 lenses, a Giant Squid, ten thousand times smarter, and actually making good progress with Squidoo. I went from making maybe a dollar or two a month, if I was even lucky, to over $300 a month. All in the small amount of time I’ve spent with Captain Squid and the gang, reading the SquidBlog, and by trying out new things on my own using the advice I’ve received. That has been a large part of my success–getting good advice and actually applying the advice I’ve received.
So, thanks to Captain Squid and the gang for providing information and advice that has been invaluable to my success. I couldn’t have made it without you.
