First question I want to tackle relates to how long it takes me to build lenses.

From Lewis:

Hey Joe!

Maybe you could also post about how long the lenses take you – I know you make lenses very quickly!

That would also show people just how much is going into the challenge.

Nice idea btw. Good luck with it!

Lewis

And a follow up from David:

good lens! I agree with Lewis I would be interested to see how long it took you to put it together.
thanks

The answer? Including keyword research, each lens probably took me about an hour with actual lens creation time in the workshop at about half of that.

I use a few different principles that allow me to build lenses this quickly:

Practice : I’ve built a lot of lenses in the last few years. Hundreds and hundreds. I know where all the modules are and what they do. Knowing what tools you have and how they work can help you organize your thoughts as you build your lens. Knowing you will need 3 video modules ahead of time and adding them all at once instead of one by one as you go will save you lots and lots of time.

Module Formulas and Templates : (more on this in a later post) Usually I’ll build lenses in groups. The first one or two I’ll play around with modules for a while then once I see which combination is working best, I’ll set up a lens template. The first two lenses I built about dehydrators have similar modules in them but not identical. As I go on building out the niche, I’ll start a template with probably 5-7 modules in it. That will allow me to get my creation time down under half an hour a lens, easy.

Evergreen Modules : I’m a huge fan of Evergreen modules (I’ve talked about them before and will devote some more time to them soon) . They make lens building go super fast and help accomplish a lot of basic content/seo principles that I want to achieve.

Focus : I try to make lenses about fairly specific topics so they are focused and respond to what the searcher/visitor is looking for in a very precise way. If a lens starts to lose focus on me it will often spiral out of control and result in something of a mess that doesn’t get any attention from anyone.

Tools: I use a few basic and free tools to help me do some things faster. I’ll post about these later as well.

Gotta run for now, lenses to build and work to do!

A stepping stone? Yes, definitely. Who doesn’t love a few extra bucks coming in every month? In fact, it’s possible to make several hundred bucks a month this way.

Why is it not worth worrying about using lensrank to earn money? Because the amount you will earn tops out pretty quickly. Getting a lens in the top 10,000 or 15,000 lenses is HARD.

The top payout tiers are competitive. In fact, I would venture to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something where people spend so much time trying to make an extra two dollars.

There are a lot of people out there that try to ‘game’ lensrank with rating swaps or traffic swaps or exchanges or multiple accounts or whatever. I’m not really surprised that people try to game or optimize their rankings. What just shocks me is the amount of time people are willing to put into it.

Think about it. It’s easy for a small item sale from amazon or eBay to add up to more than an entire month’s of effort on gaming lensrank ($2).

Conversely, if you are really worried about lensrank or people trying to ‘game’ it. I wouldn’t be.

Be grateful that they are wasting their time doing incredibly unproductive things.

If you run across one, report them. No need to crow it to the rooftops or go on witch hunts across the interwebs trying to find pepole who are gaming a ranking mechanism on a medium size website…

Instead of responding to them or worrying about them, go build your next lens that’s going to make some real money.

Unfortunately the niche got a little carried away with me and here I am… 36 hours and 7 lenses later.

Yep, 7.

Here’s How:

I noticed that Star Wars Legos are big on eBay… really big. It seems like darn near every auction has a ton of bids on it.  ‘ Sweet!’ I thought to myself, let me narrow this down and I’ll just do a lens on selling the little lego figures that were custom made for Star Wars. Oops.

It turns out that each movie has a HUGE list of custom made Lego Characters. So, I had to make a lens highlighting all the custom characters for each movie (6 lenses) as well as an over-arching lens about all the custom lego figures ever made for Star Wars.

How did I tie the 6 lenses on each individual movie into each other as well as a lens that acts as an ‘umbrella’ or guide to the topic?

1) Use the ‘Featured Lens’ Module to highlight ALL the lenses in the series on the lens. Find it by doing a search for ‘Featured’ in the Module Directory.  As each Featured Lens Module can only hold 5 lenses, I broke it up into Lego characters from Star Wars Episode 1-3 and Episode 4-6.

2) Plexify! - Create one link list plexo (voting list) on the main lens and then simply copy/publish it to all the other lenses in the series. It shows up on the bottom of a lens giving visitors some great suggestion of where they can look next for more information.

With 5 days to go, we now have 9 lenses done for the challenge!

Bonus Ideas: After the contest is over I’ll probably go back and link all of the sets listed in each ebay module to search pages for that set on eBay using my eBay Affiliate ID (Since Squidoo doesn’t provide this functionality).

Make sure and stop by the Challenge Lens and check out that plexo for  some of your favorites and vote for them.

How is your guys and gals Challenge building going?

The first lens by the good ole Captain for the Ebay – Squidoo 10 Day Challenge is live and ready for action.

The first topic I chose to cover was eBay shipping and postage scales.  I chose it for several reasons:

1. I know the topic – I’ve got an eBay feedback rating in the 300 range and so I’ve shipped my fair share of items. Getting a shipping scale helped so much I can’t even begin to describe it. Therefore, it was an easy write.
2. It’s got a built in audience – People in the competition are ebay sellers. By providing valuable information to them it creates a win win for everyone.

Key design points:

1. Use keyword rich and descriptive module titles – no default module titles…ever. NO, not even the guestbook. And taking the time to fill out the subtitles can really help.
2. Relevant Products – Instead of a long list of products, use multiple product modules with only a few listings in each that are more targeted.
3. Images in text areas – on the text/write modules I used images I uploaded myself, NOT through the upload utility. this allows me to add in relevant ALT text in the HTML which helps with indexing and ranking.
4. Multiple Interactive Modules – The Guestbook and Poll get users used to clicking on your lens and makes them less afraid to check out a listing.
5. Thoughtful tagging - every tag used is used on at least 10 other lenses giving me maximum discovery tool exposure.

Please feel free to check out the eBay shipping tips lens and let me know what you think or ask any questions.

I’ve made rough drafts of a few new modules in the past week or so and met with some pretty good success. I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on how squidoo has the system set up. I’m not a superuser with APIs, but I’ve been able to put some things together that I think are pretty neat…

Now I’m stuck on what modules to make. Anyone have any ideas? Wasn’t there a ‘most requested modules’ list out there somewhere? anyone know that link to that lens?

Gil’s Example:

Fluffanutta’s example after applying some of his CSS Tricks:

How it Works

The module automatically creates links to all of your modules with Titles. If your module doesn’t have a title, it doesn’t show up on the list, that simple.

Lot’s of exciting stuff going on at Squidoo this week and it’s only Tuesday!

The Real Facts about Plexo Modules:

1. Votes are pooled across all versions of the plexo. If you grab a plexo module from one lens and drop it on another, votes on either lens will add to the vote count on every lens that plexo is on.
2. The Lens Owner earns Plexo Revenue. After checking and double checking the Amazon Associates IDs on the plexos, I’m almost positive that the owner of the lens that the plexo sits on generates the Amazon revenue.
3. Plexo Modules are Evergreen. Plexo Modules are indexable by the Search Engines.

Now, for a long time I thought that Plexos could be useful on Squidoo if you had a really viral list or something but for the average user they just didn’t have the user base to really do anything cool. In fact, I often see Plexo modules out there in Squid Land all by themselves looking lonely. Unless those lonely plexos are on a superstar lens getting thousands of hits a week (and some are) there simply are not enough visitors, much less other squidoo users who are going to come ‘grab’ your plexo. This method of ‘build a plexo and leave’ just doesn’t work that well. Sure, you get some benefit from it, but it’s not super duper cool.

However, unlike most of Squidoo that pulls data from other sources for the visitor to read, Plexos both pull (from Amazon, your list, YouTube, etc.) as well as push (votes, links to your lensmaster page) data around Squidoo.

I can think of a few ways that this can actually be super powerful and has been way under-utilized. I think I’ll save some of my thoughts for my next issue of the Captain Squid Newsletter

Plexos: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em ?

It basically pulls a 5 item plexo list from Amazon with items that are ‘related’ to the item you give the module to start with.

Why this is awesome:

• More SE friendly instant generated content.
• Adds a great ‘exit path’ for visitors to your product themed lenses that may want to look at something else.
• They round off the end of a lens well.
• I think they are easier to edit than the classic Amazon Plexo module

Throw some up on your lenses and let me know how they do!

-The Captain

What is your goal when someone visits your lens? To learn something new? To buy a product or service? To get them to go visit your store?

How many of you build lenses specifically to send traffic to YouTube? Probably not many. However, many lenses do that unintentionally just because lensmasters don’t change the default setting.

The Squidoo YouTube module and the YouTube plexo allow you to choose two options: Thumbnail View (Small, static screenshots of the movie) or Full Size (full movies set into the page). The kicker is that if the visitor clicks on a thumbnail they are whisked off to YouTube and its many distractions instead of staying on your lens that was carefully designed to sell them something.

I call this ‘click leak’. Whenever visitors are leaving your lens through links that don’t benefit you or the visitor in any significant way, it’s important to look at ways to stop it. If someone visits your lens and can click on and watch a movie, they will often scroll around and click on other things and read more etc. while the movie is playing.

The Captain Says:

YouTube doesn’t need your traffic as much as you do. Put full length YouTube vids in your lens instead of thumbnails. This increases visitor retention and click out quality for your lenses.

-The Captain

Here’s a rundown of the most common:

eBay search :� NOT evergreen – The eBay Module loads after the lens loads, so google only sees javascript, which it can’t interpret.

Amazon search: Evergreen� – the Amazon module picks load with the lens, which means google sees these changing over time.

RSS Feeds - Not Evergreen – Again, this uses Java and loads after the lens so no google love.

Google Blog Search - Evergreen – Loads with the lens, just like the Amazon Module.

Youtube - Evergreen (I think) -� The comments for the video load instantly, which is what google can see.

What does this mean?

Every lens you make should have either a Google Blog Search, Amazon module with search enabled, or a youtube video with search enabled in order to give you that ‘evergreen’ look that google loves so much.

What other modules do you swabbies want the Captain to check for evergreen content?

-The Captain