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?

Massive SquidTop Revamp

I spent most of my afternoon today working with Captain Squid on SquidTop, which is a cool site where Squidoo lensmasters can make their own free blog about their lenses. Anyways, we completely revamped the site, and I must say it looks pretty awesome. It’s a really big improvement over what we had before I think.

Some stuff that SquidTop now has:

• A completely redesigned, more eye-appealing theme
• Site-wide search of blogs, posts, and comments
• An anti-spam captcha system using reCAPTCHA
• And more cool features on the way, including a friend system…

If you haven’t created a blog at SquidTop yet, you really should. Besides having a rather nice (and growing) community of Lensmasters, SquidTop is also very Google friendly. I blogged about a lens on SquidTop about a week ago and it’s already ranking high in Google, getting good traffic, and will probably very well start earning me some $ pretty soon! It does help a LOT to blog about your lenses, especially on a Google-loved site such as SquidTop.

Getting Around Squidoo Social Bookmarking Site Bans

While browsing the SquidU forums today, I came across a post about Propeller, which is a social bookmarking site created by AOL. Not too long ago, Propeller banned Squidoo for spam reasons, which was due to people promoting their lenses the wrong way and also for getting a flood of Squidoo submissions. A lot of people probably were being honest and professional about it, it’s just that with Squidoo having over 500,000 lenses made, even a fraction of those submitted to sites like Propeller would be overwhelming.

Anyways, The Captain had a brilliant idea. Why not join SquidTop, create your a blog (free) and write up a useful and informative post about your lens and then submit that to social bookmarking sites? That way, you’ll be able to get traffic to your lens and not have to worry about the “anti-Squidoo” people who have been burned by SquidSpammers downvoting or removing your submission. And, since SquidTop blogs are in subdomain format (ie, blog.squidtop.com), the same way Blogger blogs are instead of just the Squidoo.com/lens format, it will appear a bit less overwhelming because people won’t just see the same “squidoo.com” URL over and over.

The key, though, is to be conservative about your submissions–ie, don’t overwhelm the social bookmarking sites. Also, write decent descriptions, not just one-liners, and tag and categorize your submissions properly. I’m not sure if anything is hated more by social bookmarking site users than a submission that’s in the wrong category or is tagged wrong. If you take the extra few seconds to find a proper category, write up a quick (but decent) description, and tag well, your submissions to social bookmarking sites will be enjoyed by all and will stand through the ages like a beacon of hope for your Squidoo lenses.

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.

30 Ways to Increase Squidoo Traffic

Proper promotion is one of the keys to SquidSuccess, and here I’ve made up a list of ways to promote lenses that I have found particularly useful. Have any to add that I missed? Feel free to add them in a comment below.

1. Make something worth talking about and repeating.

2. Add unique, updated, and useful content to your lens.

3. Add new tags to your lens. You can have up to 40.

4. Submit your lens to one of the many lens groups, or create your own.

5. Join StumbleUpon and submit your lens.

6. Add your lens RSS feed to Zimbio and submit your lenses to appropriate Wikizines (Zimbio’s groups).

7. Submit your lenses to Lensroll (but only a couple a day please!)

8. Post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us–but don’t be spammy about it!

9. Comment on other people’s lenses with related, useful comments and links.

10. Comment on related blogs with a link to your related lens.

11. Start up your own blog, completely free, and promote your lenses there.

12. Build a few lenses on the same topic and cross-promote them.

13. Write good articles about your lens topic and submit them to places like ezinearticles, of course don’t forget to link to your lens.

14. Promote your lens on social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

15. Put links to one or two of your lenses in your signature at forums you hang out at.

16. Ask for feedback and help about your lens on SquidU.

17. Tell your friends about your lenses.

18. Include a link to one of your lenses in your email signature.

19. Build your lenses around specific keywords with low competition, by using tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool.

20. Start up a Monkeybrain and disagree with someone about something. Create a (fun) controversy.

21. Include interactive stuff in your lenses like polls, plexos, and guestbooks.

22. Focus on a few things about a topic in your lens; don’t try to include everything.

23. Ping your lens and notify the search engines and some directories of its creation or change.

24. Submit your lenses to Squidoo directories like Isle of Squid, Squoogle, Squidom, and LensMasterWorld.

25. Build linkbait lenses–lenses that people find useful and interesting and will likely link to, thus bringing you more traffic.

26. Improve your writing skills by taking a class at a local community college or something. It’s worth the investment.

27. Be original and creative about your lenses. Don’t copy other people’s work–they will hate you for it and so will the search engines.

28. Edit your lenses often and add more UUU (unique, updated, useful) content. Can’t emphasize this enough.

29. Fill a need. Find something people want badly and build the bridge that takes them to it.

30. Above all, don’t spam. It pays to take the time to create something of quality.