From Last friday (the 9th) till this coming Friday (the 16th) Troy and I will each build ten lenses.

The lenses will follow the following rules:

- Promote a product from Amazon related to the ‘fitness’ category.
- Use only Squidoo Modules and Squidoo’s Amazon Links

One month from Friday, May 16th, the group of lenses with the most Pending $$ on the Dashboard will be judged to be the winner.

The Variable that we are testing is that I will be focusing on lower cost items and hoping to make a large number of sales, while Troy will be focusing more on big ticket items in the hopes of landing a few monster commissions.

The Fluffanutta will be the impartial Judge in order to ensure fairness

I’ll post a few example lenses later so you guys can see what we are building. May the best Amazon Sales Lensbuilder win

1. Google Maps Module – No guarantee that it helps your google maps ranking in search results but I’ve seen promising things. Also, make sure and put the address of your location in the description area as well, so that it’s easily indexable.

2. ‘Contact Us’ – I have used Black Box modules for the ‘Contact Us’ area before but there are many that would work. Important things to include here : Phone, Hours of Operation, Fax, etc.

3. ‘Services Offered’ – I usually use a text module for this one. Make sure and include keyword rich descriptions of your services as you can easily score on long tail search terms for your location + service .

Want an Example? Here’s a lens I recently built for my lawyer in Las Cruces. It was indexed and receiving traffic within about 48 hours of publishing and has steadily been climbing the ranks for the last week or so.

Evergreen Module – A squidoo module that can be updated either automatically or by interaction on a lens without entering the workshop. In addition, an evergreen module is indexable by bots/crawlers/spiders even if they can’t read javascript.

What does this mean?

If a squidoo module can provide ‘fresh’ updated contact on your lens that you don’t have to physically add yourself and the search engines can see those changes, I call it evergreen.

Examples -

• Google Blog Search
• RSS mashup
• Amazon Plexo (even if nothing can be added, Yes, changing the order of products counts!)
• Featured Lens module (set to ‘random’ with more than 5 lenses)
• Yelp
• Hometown Stats
• Twitter Search

Any Questions?

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!

Tag pages are once again indexable by the major search engines. Fluffanutta has an exceptional review of the changes and why the newly indexable tag pages are good so I am not going to re-hash WHY this is good.

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a series of posts I’ve written in the past about how to take best advantage of tagging your lenses and how you can use it to focus and refocus attention, links, and traffic within your own little corner of the growing universe of Squidoo.

Techniques for Getting your Lens Indexed in the Search Engines -

• Why Links Matter for Indexing – A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level.
• Using Proper Tagging to Build Backlinks on Squidoo Lenses – How to conceptually view your lenses’ tags so they can be search friendly and build links at the same time.

Squidoo Tag Theory -

• Visualizing Link Flow on Lenses – Where do the links on lenses go to and where do they come from? This post was written when discovery boxes and Groups were still around. I think the fact that they aren’t around (really) anymore only increases the importance of the remaining factors..
• The Magic of Squidoo Tag Pages - If you read one post on this list this might be the one. It answers the question of why paying attention to your tags matters.
• Why the Discovery Box used to be cool – This is post is not really applicable any more with the current state of the Discovery Box, but I think the principles are worth noting in order to get a better overall view of all the different ways tags are used internally at Squidoo.
• How to dominate a Tag Page – A few examples of how having well crafted tags can help you to become the leader in any topical conversation on Squidoo.. and potentially across the web.

This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.

As a special follow up treat, if you can’t seem to watch the videos in your browser for whatever reason you can download a zip file of the CJ-Squidoo Training. (it’s about 35 MB so it takes a bit)

As a quick re-cap, here are all the lessons we’ve learned in the past few days:

An Introduction to Commission Junction

Applying for Programs on Commission Junction

Adding affiliate products to your Squidoo Lens

Using Commission Junction’s reporting tools for maximum benefit

Remember, this training is really only a blueprint illustrating one way you can use an affiliate program on Squidoo. Most of the concepts translate pretty easily across all the major networks as well, the reporting and application process is usually quite similar.

I hope you all enjoyed it and stay tuned for some more fun posts this week!

I’m a huge believer in analytics and collecting as much actionable data as possible from my web properties. CJ lets you do that in a way that is very powerful once you learn how to use it.

Commission Junction Reporting Tutorials:

Performance Reporting with Commission Junction

Transaction Reporting with Commission Junction

If you are catching this series for the first time, make sure and check out the earlier videos so you’ll have an idea what I’m talking about here :

Introduction to CJ and Squidoo

Applying for an Affiliate Program on Commission Junction

Adding Commission Junction Links to Squidoo Lenses

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up the series with a few special downloads for you guys so stay tuned!

The video covers how to insert products, descriptions, and images into your lenses in an SEO-friendly manner.

The video tutorial can be found here:

Adding Commission Junction Products to Squidoo lenses - CJ training Part 3

Also make sure and check out the first two posts in the series:

An Introduction to using CJ and Squidoo

Applying for Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction

In a nutshell, they tell you how to build a kick butt affiliate lens using a third party affiliate program like Commission Junction. It’s close to 2 hours long all together and covers everything from how to apply to programs (and get into ones most people can’t) all the way to tracking sales down to the lens.

This is pretty much the blueprint I used to go from $10 or so a month on Squidoo to breaking $1,000 a month.

I Reached that level a while ago and have started using some other strategies since then in addition to these but I think you guys and gals will really find this series helpful.

Disclaimer: I recorded this video in 2008 so some of the screenshots are a bit outdated. The concepts are still perfectly valid though.

I’ll release the entire series over the next few days, here’s the first one, let me know what you guys think!

Commission Junction Training Video Overview -  Video 1