Some Useful Reading
Sorry folks, but I’m completely exhausted and my brain is too liquefied to conjure up an article tonight, so I’m going to provide you with some excellent reading–provided courtesy of Captain Squid, PotPieGirl, and Squidoo itself.
One Squidoo Lens, One month, $1,000 - If you haven’t read this blog post yet, you must. It’s the king of incredible Squidoo accomplishments, and tells how $1,000 was earned in a single month from one lens. Seriously.
Here, PotPieGirl talks about her earnings from Squidoo from July ‘07 to June ‘08. Note that the earnings she talks about were JUST from Squidoo co-pay, so pretty much money from Adsense and maybe a couple Amazon affiliate sales. Now, what she earned with that might not seem like much to a lot of people, but to me an extra $500 a year would help a lot. Plus, I consider Squidoo royalties to be just a bonus–icing on the cake. The real meat is gained by placing your own targeted affiliate product links by joining FREE affiliate programs such as LinkShare and Pepperjam. Join these programs, find products related to the content of your lens, and put ‘em up!
And, if you haven’t read Squidoo’s own free eBooks yet, you really should. They give some excellent advice for both beginning and experienced Lensmasters alike. Check them out!
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!
