Amazon Update & New Opportunities To Explore

First I have to give you an update - the 'sneeky' way of using out own Amazon associate code in the spotlight feature no longer works!   It appears that with the recent changes HQ have also managed to close that loophole so I'm sorry if anyone else wasted the hours I did in changing them over.

On a brighter note I have gone through nearly 100 of my 470+ lenses and updated the majority of the amazon modules to my own links using text modules and I'm pleased to say that it looks like I'll be getting an Amazon check each month from next month (I missed out on one this month by just over $2 - so close!).   It really is worth switching over to your own links once you start making regular sales through Squidoo and I should probably have done this a lot sooner.

Now in the past week I've heard about two new opportunities which I thought I would mention - one I have trialled the other I haven't yet!   They are called Wizzley and Loveblinks.

Let's talk about Wizzley first - now this is a very fledgling company started by some old timer Lensmasters (and I use that term in a good way - it means they know what they're doing!).   When I first looked there I was concerned by a clause in their TOC which they had copied (with permission) from another site - as soon as I queried it they looked into it and amended it.   I was impressed!

I was reading the forum before I published my first page and people were making suggestions and getting them acted upon very quickly.   Now is obviously the time to get in on this opportunity as the founders are just as hands on at communicating with us as they are at getting the site up and running to it's best potential.

This is my first page on Wizzley - How to Make Money on Zazzle - if you look at it you can see the layout looks fantastic.   It's like the birth child of Hubpages and Squidoo in that it has taken elements from both sites which are fantastic.   Wizzley doesn't pay you, all of your income comes from your own links - Google, Amazon, AllPosters and Zazzle.

You can set your pages to have the standard Google ads or a more discrete amount of Google ads or even switch them off all together.   There are modules for Amazon, Allposters and Zazzle where you input your own code.   I think this could be the birth of something really good.

I know this blog is all about Squidoo and I'm waffling on about another site, but there are two reasons for this - one is don't put all your eggs in one basket (always great advice as my grandmother passed this on to me!) and the other is backlinks.

After you've written five pages on Wizzley your links become dofollow so these should be good backlinks to get.

There is also the traffic factor - my first article got 80 visits in the first 24 hours which I thought was amazing......I wish all of my lenses got that!   If you can get people to your page and then clicking through to your lenses as well then you have double the chance to make a sale.

If you like the idea of Wizzley then I'm going to drop in my referral link for you here - Wizzley.com.

The next new opportunity is a site called LoveBlinks which has been set up by another lensmaster.   Now I joined this site yesterday, but I haven't had a chance to 'play around' with it yet and see how it goes.   It was basically set up as a way of getting backlinks to our lenses which sounds good doesn't it?

It's also an adsense sharing site which means another opportunity to add a further income stream which is always good.   If you want to check out more about it then here is the link - LoveBlinks which also contains my referral so that I can see if you've signed up and give you a little twitter love :D

As I've said I haven't had a chance to explore this site much yet, but I think the concept is a great idea and hopefully we'll all do well there.

Well this has been a long post today!   If you've already come across one or both of these sites before please share your experiences and any tips in the comments, thank you.