Squidoo Talk

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?

Google is Weird

Sometimes I just can’t understand Google. We’re kind of in a love/hate relationship. Sometimes it loves me and brings piles of traffic to my lenses, sometimes it hates me and drops my lenses completely and they are nowhere to be found.

For instance, one lens of mine was getting between 150 to 200 visitors a DAY, and was ranking on the first page for Google search results. Then suddenly it died completely for about a week. I couldn’t find it anywhere no matter how hard I tried. So, to put it mildly, I panicked just a little bit because this was one of my top performing lenses.

And suddenly, just as it died, the lens was reborn again and began receiving regular traffic again. Weird. Other lenses have gone through the same phenomenon, though on a much smaller scale because they don’t get as much traffic overall, but most of them have gone through this phase.

After doing some research, I discovered that what Google does is it places a newly-discovered site (lens) high up in the search results for a “test run”, just to see how well the site performs, how much it’s visited, etc. If the site does well, it gets rewarded by Google with a good ranking, but if not, then it basically gets shoved back to the end of the line. In my case, the lens was fairly popular and was doing well, so it got its ranking restored.

Google seems to like it when lenses get lots of backlinks, too, and I think that the “Google New Lens Effect” is lessened when new, relevant backlinks are frequently added to lenses. You can never have enough relevant backlinks to your lenses as far as Google is concerned. Google is also good friends with Father Time, and when lenses get older Google tends to treat them better. I’ve had lenses that were long dead and forgotten for a few months, but suddenly were resurrected and started getting great traffic from Google.

Time and backlinks are the salvation for new lenses I guess. Google, I love/hate you.

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.