Welcome Back - Let's Get Busy!

Well it's been nearly a year (well 11 months) since I had to take what I envisaged as being a short break from this blog.   I've had a lot happening in my offline life as well as online and things have been falling through the cracks, my offline dramas still continue, but hopefully I can still manage to keep this blog updated again.

One thing that I've noticed on Squidoo is how important it is to keep a lens updated.   People have been saying this for absolutely ages, however it's only really been the last 12 months that I've noticed it really making a big difference to my lenses.   I'm not sure if it's a change in the algorithm or if it's because so many people are refreshing their content, either way I think it's a great idea to set up an updating system for your lenses.

You don't have to do a major update every single time, just a few little things count as an update like these -

• Check that you've filled in all 6 spaces in your related pages spaces.
• Update tags.
• Check for spelling mistakes.
• Credit images.
• Change a theme.
• Make sure you're using your sidebar widgets.
• Add a bookmark widget.
• Change your featured lenses to do-follow - I use this tool
• Check that your links all work especially sales links.
• Change modules/products/images around - think of it as a shop, shops change window displays and shop displays regularly.

I also make notes as to major changes that I can do at a later date and plan time to go back and do them.

Don't stress if you haven't updated your lenses in a while I have a number that were last updated in January 2011 and only one of these exceedingly 'old' lenses have gone into wip.   However I will be working a lot harder on updating every single one of my lenses after noticing some huge jumps in lenses I have been updating over the last couple of weeks.

I'm continuing to also use Wizzley, both to produce content in it's own right as well as to provide backlinks to my lenses.   Interlinking of your relevant work is always a great idea.   I'm finding Wizzley to be really good and thoroughly recommend it.

It's the sixth month already so you should be working on updating your Halloween and Christmas lenses as well as making any new ones that you want to add to your collection.

I will be endeavoring to update this blog once a week from now on to include tips (as usual) and I might also be adding some lenses of mine that I'm needing to do some serious work on so that you can see how I try to 'rescue' some of my lenses when they're not paying their own way.

Page Break Lenses

If you've got page break lenses then you'll be in the same boat as me right now and trying to think what to do with them.   When I first heard that they were going I tried to stick my head in the sand like an ostrich as the past few months seem to have been nothing but changing and updating things to keep up with different rules (I'm talking about all online sites now, not just Squidoo).

It is time to take action however and the first thing I did was reassess my page break lenses before doing anything, want to take the page break journey with me?   The first lens I'm going to update is my Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments lens which I hope doesn't suffer too much from this upheaval.

• First I went through and checked my traffic stats to see what keywords had brought traffic to my site.
• Second I went through and noted every sale made on the site.

Looking at my lenses a couple of things struck me and I did my keyword research again and discovered that Disney's Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments ranked higher than Disney Princess Ariel which was a change from when I first set the original lens up.   So a bright note with 'having' to do this work is that it's a great time to check keywords because they do change as a fellow Lensmaster explains well in her Keyword Freshness blog post.

I decided that without the page breaks this lens would be much too long so my first step was deciding on how I was going to break the lens up.   I did some keyword research and determined 10 different (extra) lenses that I could make from this main one and what I would call them all............now I don't know if there's enough products available for all ten so I focused on the five page break pages first and produced - Cinderella Christmas Ornaments.   I basically just cut and pasted what was on my second page of the original lens, adding a  heading to the introduction.   Next I decided it needed to be a little more interactive and so I added a couple of polls.

I still want people to click through the different Disney Princess Christmas ornaments so I added a featured lens module to link it back to the main lens.   I added a bookmark module, guestbook and a featured lens module on the bottom linking to my Christmas Ornament lensography.

I decided to utilize the sidebar widgets and included other Cinderella Christmas decor which included Cinderella Christmas stockings.   At the moment this is all duplicate content because I haven't deleted the page on my original lens, but luckily they've taken the filter down as I don't want to mess with the original until I've got all of the extra lenses done - I hope Google doesn't have a fit about it.

Now to the next lens which I'm basically going to approach like this one and this one is on Snow White.

Here is the completed Snow White Christmas Ornaments lens - again I simply cut and pasted from the page break lens and added a poll for interaction, side bar widgets, guestbook and bookmarking module.

This one was a little quicker to do so there is hope that I can complete this whole page break lens reorganization in one day!

I have now completed my Sleeping Beauty Christmas Ornaments lens and as with the other two it was basically cutting and pasting from my fourth lens break page and adding side bar widgets, poll, guestbook etc.   I'm starting to feel like this isn't so bad, although I haven't got to sorting out the main page yet so my feelings may yet change!

I've just completed this lens - Disney's Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments, the keywords for Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments were a lot better than Ariel Christmas Ornaments which was what my page break page had been titled.   I'm not sure if it's a case of the keywords have changed or because of the title character limit that the page break module had.

Again the majority of this lens is basically a cut and paste of the existing page so it was quite quick to pull together.

All of these lenses are obviously going to need some individual tweeking when it's all over, but luckily there's still plenty of time before Christmas.

This next lens has been called Beauty and the Beast Christmas Ornaments, again the page of the page break lens was entitled Belle Christmas Ornaments but whether that was all that could fit or whether the keywords have changed I'm not sure.

These are the five additional pages that were on the main Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments lens along with the main page so I'm going to start to work on the main page now and link them all together.

I'm going to leave the first few modules of the main lens alone and then after my collectible Cinderella and Snow White Christmas Ornament set I'm going to add a featured lens module to link to the individual Cinderella and Snow White lenses.

Next I added a poll under this and I've woven the other featured lenses in between amazon links for the remaining Disney Princesses.

One piece of advice - remember if your page break lens is an older one it will be grandfathered with the number of amazon modules allowed so do not delete any unless you're absolutely sure you've used enough.

I was missing Tiana so I moved some of the amazon spotlights from the Cinderella page up to add a couple of her Christmas ornaments.

I only had one Rapunzel ornament and when I checked Amazon I found a couple more so again I moved spotlights up from the other page breaks and changed them to Rapunzel ones.

Now I've checked the preview and it's time to delete all of the page break pages - a couple of deep breaths and here I go!

Well it worked!   This is the end result of my revised Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments and I got it all done before school finished.

In conclusion I don't think this one was so bad, but who knows about the others.   I hope that by following me along as I did this first page break restructure it will help you with yours.

Re-Assessing Yearly Targets

Today is my birthday and I don't know if it's a sign that I'm getting old, but I do seem to be getting very introspective on my birthdays which is why I thought it was a good time to review where I'm going with my online income this year and reassess what I need to do.

May is a great time to do this because we're not quite at the halfway mark yet and so we have lots of time to prepare for what is traditionally the most profitable quarter of the year - the final quarter.

As far as Squidoo goes I'm a little behind in some areas, my last pay was better than I expected although it is heading down which was to be expected as I've been changing over links.   This process of changing links over may just have got quicker thanks to a tip from susannaduffy on Squidu - I have been uploading pictures and adding my own links to amazon instead of using the spotlight module or the personal review as I believe it's correct name is now.   According to Susanna you can add your associate text link into the space where it asks for an ASIN - what a great tip and why didn't I know I could do that?!

Although my pay through Squidoo may be heading down my affiliate income is heading up at the same time with the result that I'm getting the same amount of online income as I have been.   I was expecting it to have increased more because my hubs were making great money before the panda update, luckily they seem to be recovering, but the google adsense income hasn't been what I predicted.

How are your targets looking?  

Now is the time to start planning, if you haven't already.   If you have planned then reassess how you're going and start some regular routines.

I am working harder on backlinks because the pages that were affected most by panda were ones that didn't have many (or any in some cases) backlinks.   I have been much better about setting up backlinks these days and interlinking my own work, but when I first started out I was shocking!

I am also going to use Susanna's tip to update more of my links - it will be alot quicker.

I'm updating and expanding niches which are successful and doing so in a more organized fashion.

I'm using my Outlook to set reminders to do certain things each day to add value to my online income (at the moment these are non-squidoo related).

What is the one thing you are going to do right now to either get back on track or to stay on track with your online earnings?

Using Calendar's For Squidoo

How organized is your Squidooing?   Do you have a calendar as well as a to do list on the go?   Now I have to be honest and say that while I think these techniques are awesome I have not used them over long periods of time - the techniques I'm talking about are blogging calendars and squidcasting calendars.

I came across the idea of a squidcasting calendar over a year ago when I saw this lens - Keeping Current With A Squidcast Calendar.   I immediately thought what a great idea and I started to send squidcasts more regularly. I actually get a good response to my squidcasts in general, but here are some tips I've found -

• Personally I only squidcast during the week - weekend squidcasts don't seem to get as much response (yours may however, this is just my personal experience).
• I do not send more than one squidcast a day as people get quite upset if they look in their Favorite's tab and all of the squidcasts are from one person - it does happen.
• I try and make my squidcasts sound interesting.   My squidcasts are also sent as tweets so a heading like Just Updated My Lens or New Lens isn't something I use.   Rather use something like did you know.......? or how are you going to celebrate........?   Think of a squidcast as a cross between a blog post and a tweet.
• I check my favorite's tag everyday, but I don't look at every squidcast I recieve - if it sounds boring I don't look at it unless it's someone who's writing I really enjoy or it's on a subject I love.   If the squidcast sounds interesting, however, then the chances are I'm going to love the lens it's promoting.

The other technique that is handy to use if you're blogging to promote Squidoo is a blogging calendar, now to be honest I have only heard this term this year - not sure how I missed it!   I have started to write a tentative blogging calendar for my blogs over the last few days and I think it should work really well.

When I was taking the A to Z Blogging Challenge I knew that I had to write on something beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet and I found it a lot easier to write a post with that in mind (and the fact that these were niche blogs so the subject matter was themed).   Quite often blogs don't get a new post as often as they should simply because the owner can't think what to write about..............at least that's the case with my blogs.   A blog calendar helps to keep things on track (in theory anyways).

I'm going to try and start using these techniques more regularly and I'd recommend you did as well because they really are an organized way to promote your Squidoo lenses.

Succeeding With Props

Large companies have long known the importance of 'props' to help their employees meet targets/company expectations and the biggest prop that seems to be used is Motivational Posters.   If you've worked in a bigger company then you're bound to have had posters on the wall encouraging you to reach for your goals.

My first awareness of motivational posters in the workplace came when I worked at what was at that stage a family business.   There were 3 employees at that time (the company did get bigger and the spin off company can be seen nationally) and the first motivational poster appeared complete with it's own catch-phrase.   The poster was one that said TEAM and I'm sure you all know what the acronym for that (and our work's new catch-phrase) is - Together Everyone Achieves More.

Years later and nearly every where I've worked has had some form of motivational poster up to 'encourage' us all to achieve.   Now if big multi-national companies, such as the bank I worked for a few years ago, are using posters to motivate employees then I'm sure they've seen research that backs the theory up.    Why do I mention this - you can use it to achieve success with Squidoo.

Let's face it when you're trying to get an income from home you can easily get side tracked, despondent and very de-motivated.   If you want to succeed then you need to stay on track.   Why not steal ideas from big corporations and apply them to your home.   Pop a motivational poster up near the computer with a power word that works for you whether it's Determination, Believe, Courage - you'll know which one will help you the most.

Now you may not need a motivational poster, it depends on what you're trying to achieve from Squidoo.   Years ago when I was first married I had a little picture of a house (just a generic house that was on a piece of junk mail) that I had cut out and stuck on the fridge.   My dream was to have my own house, I wanted to be reminded of that regularly so I popped it onto the fridge as it was one of the first places I looked when I got up.   When the opportunity came to job share a second job with my hubby (between our different working hours we could manage it, with our other commitments we couldn't have done it as individuals) I took it because I was still thinking of that house.    We saved the deposit by working 7 days and on days when I felt tired I would look at that picture and I knew that it was worth it.   Nine months later we're in our new home and it was worth it.

If your dream is to stay home so that you can be a stay at home parent then pop up a photo of your children. If you want to travel and your Squidoo earnings is needed to pay for airfares - go to the travel agent and get a picture of where you want to visit next and pop it up near the computer.

Incentives or props will help you to do the 'boring bits' of Squidooing so that you can earn money.

The most under-rated 'prop' is definitely a to do list.   On days when I have a to do list I always achieve a lot more than on days when I don't.   Writing down what you want to achieve the night before or first thing in the morning is a great idea (I find it helps me more if I write mine the night before, but whatever works best for you).   Then you need to stick to your list, now this is another place where I will (some days) get sidetracked so in order to stop that from happening write things like visiting a forum you like or checking emails, having a coffee etc on your list as rewards for completing certain items on your list.

What prop will you be using to help you succeed?

Interactive Lenses

As long time readers will know I don't believe that chasing lensrank is the way to go if you want to make more money on Squidoo because sales don't know your lensrank.   However, as I mentioned at the start of the year I want to earn $30,000 online this year and with the tier payments increasing I have looked at how I can increase the number of lenses in tier 1.

Last year I had 5 lenses in the top tier all year and for a couple of months it went up to 6 when a couple of my seasonal lenses rose to the occasion (at two different times).   This year I have attempted to do very quick updates to each lens in my top two tiers every week ...........I have done this well for the most part, but there was a break when I was away.   This has kept my tier 2 lenses safe and increasing, but my tier one lenses would increase for a day or two and then drop just outside(!)

There was one of my lenses that has flirted with tier one on occasion, but seemed to settle into tier two and I wanted to change that - updating wouldn't work so what would?   The lens in question is How To Earn Money On Squidoo - it's a help lens that doesn't make any sales so in order to make me money I really wanted to get it into the top tier and keep it there.   I finally seem to have cracked it and it has stayed in the top tier for a few weeks now and will hopefully hold steady.

I was never going to get thousands of visits a week on a lens that was solely for the Squidoo community so I had to make the visits count and to do that I decided to add some interactivity on the lens - it worked.

I've added 3 polls to the lens - polls are easy for people to click on and 3 polls for the length of the lens didn't seem obsessive.   People are taking these polls and I think that's what is responsible for the extra push needed to get it into tier one and keep it there.

Do you have something to encourage people to interact on your lenses?   Polls, quizzes, even guestbook modules are great ideas.   On my Julia Child's Cookbooks lens - I have used several guestbooks to encourage people to leave their own reviews on the page.   All three of these ideas are great ones to add to your lenses.

Take a look and see if you can add something to keep your reader on your page for a little longer.......you may find that your lensrank will improve as well :D

The other thing to think about is that the 'stickability' of a website (how long someone stays on your site) is said by many experts to increase your chances of making sales so even if your lensrank doesn't increase your sales might.   I have to say that my Julia Child's lens has made a lot of sales so that seems to back up what the 'experts' have stated.

The A - Z of Squidooing

The alphabet has been on my mind for the last couple of days, in fact it's been ever since I heard of an A-Z Blogging Challenge.   I've signed up two of my other blogs to it - Unique and Funky Gifts & All Eighties, All The Time.   It looks like  a lot of fun, but I couldn't think how I would keep this lens about Squidoo tips and still manage to write 26 blog posts - one for each letter of the alphabet.

I have, however, taken a break from updating lenses to produce Lou16's A-Z on Squidoo in an attempt to get my mind in shape!   On that note I thought I would devote this blog post to the A-Z of Squidooing (let's see if we can make it through the alphabet shall we?)

A is for Anecdote - adding your own anecdotes, experiences and stories to your lenses are a great way to make them stand out from the crowd.

B is for Blogging and Backlinks - we all know how important backlinks to our lenses are and one of the easiest ways to get a backlink is to blog about them and how did you like the combination of 2 bs for the price of one?

C is for Commitment - if you want to succeed at Squidoo you can't expect to become a millionaire overnight, you need to commit to creating at least 50 great lenses (in my opinion) and if you want to create an income you need to do the 'boring bits' too because as much fun as Squidooing is if you want an income you need to treat it as a job!

D is for Determination - sometimes you can follow all the advice and your lens still doesn't do well, what separates successful Squids from others often comes down to determination.   We've all had lenses that didn't do as we would have liked, but we've picked ourselves up and kept going.

E is for Excitement - Squidoo has lots of exciting moments to strive for whether it's receiving that first sale, getting a lens into the top tier, getting a lens into the top 100, receiving a purple star or getting a LOTD (I'm still waiting for this one myself).   The great thing about this excitement is that fellow lensmasters will also share it with you when you use up your bragging rights and there's not many online communities that do that :)

F is for Featured Lenses - this is one of my favorite modules and I think it's fantastic for interlinking your lenses or adding other peoples.   Could you imagine setting up a lensography without this module - it would take forever!

G is for Google - whether we love Google or hate Google the fact is that if we want to get a lot of traffic to our lens we need to get it ranked in Google and finding it on the front page is another chance to revisit the letter E again - Excitement!

H is for Hubpages - okay I know Squidoo is often seen as a competitor to hubpages, but a number of people actually participate on both sites and as much as I love Squidoo I do believe that you shouldn't keep all of your eggs in one basket.   Hubpages are a great alternative.

I is for Interlinking.   If you haven't read my Interlinking Your Lenses lens yet, then open it up in another tag and read it after you've finished this post.   I cannot stress how important interlinking is with helping your lenses to do better.

J is for Joker - no I'm not playing cards, I'm talking about having a laugh!   Some days (especially if you're busy updating lenses all day) Squidoo can become a bit of a chore and that's when you need to have a bit of a laugh to brighten up your day.   Squidoo is home to a lot of funny people - if you're a RocketMom then the Chatterbox group certainly knows how to lighten the mood, one of my favorite places to visit is a blog by a fellow lensmaster called Laugh Quotes - this is a great place to relieve any tension.

K is for - Keep Calm


Buy This Allposters.com

This poster just says it all.........let's face it in any avenue we venture up (including Squidoo) we can find ourselves struggling with a range of feelings that aren't very useful to us.

L is for Lensographies - these are fantastic for interlinking your lenses and I would be totally lost without my gazillions of lensographies.   If you don't have one yet then you need to read Why Should You Have A Lensography.   Now I have so many lensographies I need a lensography to keep them all in - don't believe me?   Then check this out Lensography of Lensographies, despite this there is another type of lensography that I came across recently......I don't even know if the lensmaster thinks of it as a lensography, but it's a great idea - Where in the World - this is actually a fun geography quiz, but if you look even more closely each quiz points you to a lens, it's a fantastic idea that's worth considering for your own lensographies.

M is for Making Money or just Money!   Sure Squidoo is fun, but the reason a lot of people are reading this blog is because they want to learn how to make money with it.   I believe that the best lens on making money on Squido is my one (but then I am biased) and I've recently updated it so here's the link again - How to Earn Money on Squidoo.

N is for Niche - as I've talked about again and again (or so it seems) the key to earning money on Squidoo is niches.

O is for Organization - not always my strong point, but the people who are successful are the ones who are organized and I've always found that if I have a to do list then I achieve so much more than if I don't.

P is for Professional - if you want to make Squidooing your income then you need to think of it as a career and don't let people dismiss you for anything less than a professional.   It's also important to present yourself in a good light online (just like you would if you worked in an office), so if someone asks for help in Squidu then help them politely - being treated nicely is something that gets remembered and I can still remember the people who helped me out in the beginning and I will often tweet their lenses or promote them when I can.

Q is for Quiz - the Squidoo Quiz lenses are a lot of fun, but if you want to make money out of them you'll need to add content as well - I used my Quiz lens as an opportunity to create backlinks to some of my hubs.

R is for Rinse and Repeat - basically once you've found a formula on Squidoo that works for you just keep doing it.

S is for Squidu - Squidoo's help desk and Squidoo's forum.   There is so much information there and so many lensmasters willing to help that it's well worth sifting through whether you want to add your 10 cents to the discussions is entirely up to you.

T is for Top 10s, if you are ever short of an idea for a lens try and think of a top 10 as they're always great ideas - top 10 coffee flavors, top 10 places to visit in your state, top 10 favorite movies the list just keeps growing.

U is for Unique - write unique content and use the word unique as well - in Kimberley's morning coffee (on Squidu) she mentioned a while ago that unique was a surprising keyword find, so there's another idea for a few lenses - unique wedding locations, unique holiday activities.............I hope you're taking notes :)

V is for Very Addictive, this is your warning (if it's not too late already) Squidoo can become extremely addictive and can end up ruling your life.

W is for Web Profile - don't just stick with Squidoo, find other forums to join or other sites and develop your own web profile - tweet, facebook, blog - whatever suits your personality, just create your web profile.....and then link it back to your lenses.

X is for the X Factor - some lenses just have this X factor and work, they're often lenses that you didn't expect to take off quite as well and whatever you do you can't replicate the results with similar lenses.   Don't stress, just enjoy the ride.

Y is for You - your lenses are all unique because they're written by you.   You are also the only one who can make Squidoo work for you which means that you're the one you need to pat on the back when you do a good job.

Z is for Zazzle - Zazzle is a great affiliate partner to use with Squidoo, just make sure that you use the text module to sell products on because Squidoo's Zazzle module doesn't pay you a referral.   Zazzle's referral rate is 15% which is not to be sneezed at.

Wow!   I can't believe I've managed to write and A - Z, I hope you've enjoyed it.

Plexos - More Easy Backlinks for Squidoo Lenses

The Link Lock by TekF
Large format poster

Now there's always a big discussion about the value of backlinks - do follow versus no follow etc. Now I seriously believe that organic backlinks from reputable sites on the same subject as your lens are the best ones to get, but they don't just appear. The right people have to 'find' your lens in order to link to it and how can they do this?
Obviously if you manage your on page optimization well and get ranked on the front page of google they will be able to find you easily - this is how I've managed to get a number of my organic backlinks, but what if you're not on the front page of google - is there any hope?

This is why I think there is a value in any backlink you can get so if there's a way of obtaining quick and easy backlinks then I say why not. We discussed Squidoo directories on a previous post as one way of getting backlinks, but plexos are good as well.

I used to love coming across plexos when looking at lenses and I would eagerly add my lens, but I used to think to myself how can I find which lenses have plexos that I can add to without just visiting them when someone posts a link on Squidu??   Well spammers always seem to find these plexo and I found out a black hat seo trick for us to use for good instead of spam!!

Now I'm going to assume that you're all writing in a niche now?   This means that you'll have a keyword  or keyphrase that you're targeting so here's what you do.

• Go to google
• Type in KEYWORD + site:squidoo.com + "0 points"
• Press enter and visit the lenses that show up

This gives you all of the lenses with a plexo that covers your keyword or keyphrase, now the only drawback is it doesn't distinguish between amazon plexos and link plexos, but it's surprisingly quick to scroll through these lenses.

It's a great idea to check out these lenses as well because they are your competition so see what you like about the lens, are they worth linking to or lensrolling with your lenses?   I'm very gradually going through my niches and adding links to plexos with keywords or phrases that I'm targeting.

Now you're probably thinking, but are they worth anything?   All I can say is I look upon backlinks as breadcrumbs that can lead people to your lens.   You don't know who is going to see your lens on a plexo, in a squidoo directory, from a tweet and think hey that's really good before favoriting it for their one million facebook friends!   We can't always predict where our traffic is going to come from, but with enough enticing breadcrumbs we can hope that it comes.

About 18 months ago one of my seasonal lenses started to get a lot of hits......but it was the wrong season!   It went from a handful of hits weekly to hundreds.   I looked at the stats and found that a single blog had linked to me highlighting one module of that lens - turns out that the heading on that lens was what they had typed into google and I actually ranked for that long tail keyword phrase without realizing it.   The person was obviously a successful blogger and liked my lens - she's linked to it twice since.   The reason for this story is that you never know who is going to find your lens and link to it - it could be through google, plexos, squidoo directories, xomba, best reviewer or just about anywhere.

Using Squidoo Directories for Backlinks

While organic backlinks are by far the best ones to get, don't dismiss the role that squidoo directories can play. There's always a lot of discussion online about the importance of backlinks. What's good and what's not and I am by no means an expert. I see a backlink as a recommendation, imagine you're sat at a table with a couple of your friends and there are also a couple of their friends present who you don't know as well. The topic turns to where you can buy the best Indian, out of all the recommendations you're going to allocate value to them. One of your friends has similar tastebuds to you so you take her recommendation more highly than the people who you don't know as well. Google also allocates it's own value to bakclinks, but unfortunately we don't know what Google bases it's values on.

The way I look at it, even if I didn't know the other people at the table very well if they ALL recommended the same place chances are I'm going to try it out - why wouldn't Google act the same way?

After using the interlinking lenses tricks that we've discussed previously, squidoo directories are probably one of the easiest ways to build backlinks. I've used various squidoo directories on and off and when I look at some of my older lenses I wonder why I wasn't more consistant with my practises!

This week I've been checking out the squidoo directoris to see what ones are still working. A couple of the directories aren't taking submissions at the moment, but all of the one's here are working fine as of posting -

Lensroll
Squidom
Isle of Squid
Squidup
Squidooenc.corank
Squidlog
Slinkset
Squidpoint
Squidirectory

My Experiment on Squidoo Directories

I have a lens that spent the 1st couple of weeks of this month in tier 1 before dropping into tier 2 (it has been a pretty consisten tier 2 lens for a while now). Most of it's traffic is referred with very little coming from Google. When I searched Google I found out why - it was at #53! I added the lens to 2 of the directories mentioned and the following day it was at #24. Two days after submission it's moved back into tier 1.....will the monthly average be enough? I added the lens to all bar 1 of these directories and it's now at #23 in google. It's also moved further into the top tier which I think is due to visits from members of the squidoo community that are involved in the squidoo directory and who have given the lens a thumbs up.

My conclusion - spend a few minutes adding your lenses to these squidoo directories. I'm waiting to see where this lens ranks for it's main keyword in a couple of weeks when the backlinks have had time to percolate and I'm expecting good things :)

So, do you use the squidoo directories?

Do You Ping?

I ping every time I update a lens (well only once a day not if I’ve updated it several times in a row!!). A ping is the way you let search engines know you’re there it’s the equivalent of leaving your business card in someone’s letterbox when you call and they’re not home.

Sending out pings does help you to get your lenses indexed by google, but what about other sites?

I use squidutils to ping my lenses, but if I’ve done a blog post I often used to ‘forget’ to ping it, the same with my hubs and articles that I’ve written. The solution is to use another ping tool and the one I generally use is pingomatic. I’m not sure if it’s the best, but it was one I was recommended and I’ve found it works well.

I have seen pingoat recommended on squidu, but I haven’t tried it. So don’t just ping your lenses, ping everything :)

My Favorite Lens for Fresh Squid

When I first came to Squidoo I knew nothing about HTML or SEO or anything like that .....and you could tell! The lens that I would constantly refer to was Basic HTML for Squidoo, it’s one that I am constantly recommending to people and to be honest I still refer to it to this day. Now I’m pretty handy with my HTML these days, but sometimes I just can’t think how to do something that I haven’t done in a while so I pop over to Glen’s lens and if this one doesn’t have the answer his advanced or color one will do.

What has been your favorite lens since you began your Squidoo journey?

Continuing the List of Things to Do on Your Lenses

If you’ve read yesterday’s posting you’ll know that we’re examining Bonnie’s to do list for lensmaking.....if you haven’t read yesterday’s posting then off you go and we’ll wait right here for you to finish :)

Bonnie’s List Again

• DO think outside the box
• DO go with your gut instinct
• DO your homework
• DO proof read
• DO keep sharing your work
• DO focus on a niche
• DO use the tools Squidoo offers

Do keep sharing your work – a lot of people ask where you share your work to and I’m reminded of a lensography I read and I can’t for the life of me think who it was about otherwise I would link to it, but the person used to put sticky notes with her url on them in restrooms when she was traveling!

I think the moral of this is you never know where your traffic might come from so keep posting your links everywhere you can think of. Send a lens to friends and family (if you think they’d be interested), submit it to social bookmarking sites, add it to forum signatures and don’t forget to interlink your lenses together.

Do focus on a niche – niche lenses are great, but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write on other things as well and it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t have more than one niche. I use the group function available to giants to keep all of my niche lenses together. I often find that I have overlapping niches which are great.

Focusing on a niche means that you can interlink your lenses, create a lensography on your niche to promote outside of squidoo and also you can have a blog which is a great way of sharing your lenses with the world. A niche blog is much more likely to get ranked than one which is generalized as Google doesn’t know how to categorize it.

Do use the tools Squidoo offers – there are so many tools such as the Discovery Modules, Sidebar Widgets etc but one of the best tools and one which I recommend using every day is Squidu. Checking in with squidu is invaluable because you never know when someone will mention something that they do and you think – oh I never knew that or wow that makes sense. I love hearing what veterans like Fluff and Jeffryv have to say about things because they’re not only helpful they’re very successful lensmasters.

There are often some interesting debates. Flowergardener recently started a debate which has really shown a number of issues being discussed and whatever your feelings it’s good to read feedback on both sides of the discussion.

A List of Things to Do When Making Squidoo Lenses

I’m a member of the Rocketmoms group on Squidoo and they have recently started their new session. One of the things that Bonnie (our illustrious leader) is doing during this session is to add tips each day to help us. The first tip was a list of things we should do when we build our lenses.

Bonnie’s List

• DO think outside the box
• DO go with your gut instinct
• DO your homework
• DO proof read
• DO keep sharing your work
• DO focus on a niche
• DO use the tools Squidoo offers

I thought this list was worth sharing because Bonnie has great insights into what makes a successful lens. I think we also need to add DO have fun because even though we’re trying to make money it is important to enjoy what we do.

Thinking outside of the box can help you to create some fantastic lenses. It’s all too easy to make your lenses using the same formula over and over again, this is one of the reasons that I don’t use the templates that giants are allowed to use, because I like my lenses to be different.

Thinking outside of the box is what led another lensmaster to discover that she could add a picture to the blackbox module and that led her to create this fantastic lens – Utilizing the Blackbox module.

Going with your gut instinct can be hard to do on Squidoo, I remember getting a Rocketmoms assignment that was right outside of my comfort zone and then as I was looking at a picture and an idea came to me, the lens was written so quickly after that and I was giggling to myself as I wrote it and having a fun time. I hit publish because in my gut I thought it was hilarious. Then I turned the computer off and went to bed, sleep was hard to come by as I started to doubt whether anyone would ‘get’ my humor. The next day my inbox was full from comments – other people did ‘get’ me.

It was also a lens that I felt I could send to my mum as I knew she’d get the funny side of it and from that lens I’ve given myself permission to add humor into my writing without worrying too much – I think this has really enriched some of my lenses.

Doing your homework is something that I don’t always do……I got in trouble at school for this too! It does help to do keyword research, but I don’t get quite as hung up on it on Squidoo as I do when I write elsewhere. Using the google keyword checker is a great idea to check if a lot of people are searching for something and what words they use. In some cases it’s good for spotting better alternatives to the word you usually use for example presents as opposed to gifts –using the keyword checker you can make sure that you use the ‘right’ one.

However if there is something that you’re interested in and it doesn’t get much search engine traffic does that mean you shouldn’t write about it? I don’t think so. If there’s not a lot of search traffic I would google it myself and see how much competition there is and the quality because if you’re interested in something then someone else probably is too.

I have several lenses that have low traffic, but convert to traffic because they are specific and do not have a lot of competition.

Do proof read is an absolute must and I think it’s a good idea to proof read again the next morning after publishing it. When you read your own words you know what you mean to say and so sometimes your brain ‘tricks’ you into reading what you thought you wrote as opposed to what you did.

By re-reading your lens fresh the next day you can often find some mistakes. What I often do if I come across them on someone’s lenses is shoot them an email alerting them to it. Yet another reason to enable your contact me button. I don’t know how others feel about this, but I’ve been lucky to have a couple of lensmasters alert me to mistakes via email and I appreciate it.

We’ll continue the list tomorrow.

Keeping Your Lenses Fresh

How often do you update your lenses? I don’t spend a lot of time updating mine unless there’s been some big change or I’ve ‘discovered’ something that I want to add to my lenses and then it takes me quite a while because of the amount I have.

I keep my lenses fresh by adding google blogs to some of them and I thought that this was a great idea for keeping them updated. Last week a fellow lensmaster (I believe it was Jeffry) posted in Squidu that he had done some research with some of his lenses and had found that Squidoo didn’t seem to recognize the blogs as updating the lenses as much as adding an ebay module would.

I don’t have a lot of ebay modules in my lenses, although I’ve been gradually adding more and I’ve made some nice commissions where I do have them. Should we be adding an ebay module to all of our lenses? It’s certainly an idea to think about.

Keeping to something relevant is the problem I will have with some of mine, but on another site I came across an interesting hub where the person added an ebay capsule as a bit of humor to the end with a comment similar to - and you can even buy a set of steak knives. Now he hasn’t sold any steak knives on this hub apparently, but if we employed a similar technique to our lenses it may help with our lensranking which could help our visibility and tier payments.

Please note I haven’t tried this (yet), but it’s definitely food for thought.

Social Bookmarking – Do You Do It?

Do you use social bookmarking? This is an area where I have seen mixed results – with some sites I find it works really well and with others the results haven’t been worth it. The key is to find which sites work best for you. Now I can be pretty slack which is probably why it took me so long before I started to make money! I know that certain sites are a great idea and work well for providing me with backlinks and/or traffic, but I don’t always put the work in by adding to them. Obviously if I want 4 figures this has got to change!

My favorite two are She Told Me and Xomba because they are the two that I have seen results with other several different niches…..they also earn me money themselves. There are lots of other sites that you can use as well and RickyRobi has written a lens to host all of the Squidoo Friendly Social Bookmarking Sites that she knows.

Which sites do you find the most effective?

When Should You Start A Seasonal Lens?

When do you start work on your Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day lenses etc? Some people have said that they start work a couple of months out others say 6 months. What about the day after an event or in the week after the event? After Valentine’s Day there was a forum post (at a place other than Squidoo!) that said the person was working on some Valentine’s Day ‘lenses’ while Valentine’s Day was fresh in her mind. She could see what had worked for her this year and what happened and she had seen what had happened in the real world. The idea sounded great to me – what do you think?

I have to say that being prepared early is definitely a great idea, last year was my best Christmas sales ever. I started my first Christmas lens at the end of Jun/beginning of July and the niche I developed started selling in September and continued into February. My lenses had had enough time to be seen as established and they were also interlinked well so that they feed each other. I was extremely happy.

Now that’s not to say last minute lenses can’t do well. During September one of my popular lenses started to get a lot of hits for people looking for Halloween lenses in this niche. I set up a lens in response thinking that I’d left it a little late……every day except one (and I think there may have been problems with reporting on that day) I made a sale throughout October and that lens continues to have made me the most money out of any of my other lenses.

I guess what this means is that there’s no clear ‘best time’ to write any lens. Personally the last few weeks I’ve been (in what time I’ve managed to find) alternating between Halloween, Christmas and evergreen lenses. What that means is that I’ve been juggling so many ideas I was shocked to discover it was April!!

Good luck with whatever kind of lenses you’re working on at the moment and remember if you have a lens that offers help with Squidoo or lens promotion then drop me a line and I may just feature you here.

Make Money While You Sleep!

You’ve seen the ads for $xx you can spend 10 minutes and make money while you sleep..... it’s the get rich quick schemes that people are constantly running. Squidoo, as most of you will know, is definitely not a get rich quick scheme HOWEVER once you’ve spent time and set your lens up properly then you may be surprised as to how much you can make when you take time off.

Updated content is great and with some lenses it is more important than with others, but if you’ve set your lens up well to start with then should things happen in ‘the real world’ as they have with me for the last few weeks then you can continue to earn money. Yet another reason to love Squidoo!

Payday has just happened again on Squidoo and I hope you’re happy with your payout. Mine is still in the 3 figures, but my goal for 2010 is to lift it into 4 figures a month....unfortunately my time has been caught up with other things causing my plan to turn into a train wreck! It is important to make a plan though, just don’t get hung up if you don’t manage everything on your plan – I look at mine as a map, if you take a wrong turn you just find a new route to get to your destination.

I’ve actually received $11 less than last month which was a surprise to me as I thought it was going to be much less than that as I was busy with other things and had ‘abandoned’ Squidoo a little during February. I always find paydays inspiring these days, but my first payday didn’t even make enough for my $1 threshold payment – it was 68c. It has taken a couple of years and over 100 lenses before I started to get some really good paydays – the key really is perseverance. Now I’m not saying you need to wait for as long as I did, because I really knew absolutely nothing when I started and I didn’t pay enough attention to what people were telling me to do. I wanted to do my own thing, which is fine, but if you want to make money you need to mix in a little of what others want as well as your own thing :)

Now my daughter’s off sick from school today so I’m going to go and give her a cuddle because, luckily, I know this great way of making money while I live my life my way :D

Break Up Your Text

Now when you’re looking at a lens you really don’t want to see a lot of text, even if you’re looking for information. Breaking text up is a key to making your lens look great, but still be full of information.

I admit that I’m still guilty of writing loooooonnnnnggg pieces of text that probably bore people to death, but I’m working on it.

One way to break things up is by using bullet points, these are really easy to add in to your lens and you can use them to illustrate all of your different points and then use the main keyword in each point as a heading to text modules underneath.
How do you add bullet points to your lens?

<ul><li>your first point</li>
<li>second point</li>
continue like that until
<li>final point</li></ul>

Another way to break up text is by adding pictures. Now if you’re writing a product review lens then you’ll obviously be using product photos and it can be good to show different views of the product as you work your way down the page.

If you’re writing more of an informational lens then you’ll probably have pictures showing how to do things or people you’re writing about.

Sometimes, however, it’s hard to think what pictures to add. I look at some people’s lenses and I think –‘Wow! I wish I knew where they got their images from..’ Well I’m about to tell you about a great resource here on Squidoo.

There is a lensmaster by the name of Steve or Tagsforkids who has produced a number of lens full of fun graphics which will help to break up your text for you.

These are some of his lenses –

Animated Squids
Squid Art
Squid Art Too
Squidville

Obviously there are other ways to break up text such as adding dividers between sections and putting boxes around different pieces of information.

A great way is to use modules such as the Blackbox or the sticky note.

How do you break up your text?

Organizing Large Lenses

Do you have a lens that has a lot of headings and you don’t want to split it into two and the table of contents is just sooooo long? Sometimes that are occasions when we need a large lens, but we know that the audience are probably only going to be interested in part of it. When this happens you need to utilize a horizontal table of contents and luckily for all of us Greekgeek has written all about how to do this on her lens How to Make a Fancy Table of Contents.

I found this particularly useful on one of my Christmas lenses – Official American Football Christmas Ornaments. Obviously you couldn’t call it that title and miss out any teams, but that lens was B I G ! I simply used Greekgeek’s lens and made my own table of contents so that people could go straight to their favorite team and it worked really well. If you have a look at the lens you’ll see that it really doesn’t take up much room, but if I’d have used either of the Squidoo options it would have taken up quite a bit of my space.

There are a lot of other great things that you can do with your table of contents, but the horizontal one is the one that I have mainly utilized – have you tried any of her other ‘tricks’?

Now if you have a lens on Squidoo tips or how to make money using Squidoo please feel free to email me with it and you never know I might feature it on this blog.

Hot Off the Presses!

Well okay it’s not that hot as I published these lenses before going to bed last night, but they are still full of great information! I mentioned that I was thinking of writing some lenses on how to make money a while ago. I’ve been rather full on with other things, but I finally got around to making three last night

The master lens is How to Earn Money on Squidoo and features a few other helpful lenses as well. This is the lens I’ll be updating regularly.

The other two lenses I wrote were on Monetizing the Introduction Module, which I’ve blogged about previously and Interlinking Lenses which is really important to build up your niches and get traffic going backwards and forwards.

I will be releasing other lenses in the future about topics which I feel need to be expanded and I’ll make sure to post them here so that you don’t miss out on anything.