Looks pretty sweet.

Pirates love Points. Wonder who will be first to level 80…

Gil announced that Squidoo has removed the no-follow links located in certain modules (About Me, My Lenses, Text with Big Picture).

MORE interesting,

RSS has had No-Follow ADDED to it. Before the changes there was absolutely no reason for RSS to have no-follow applied to RSS modules, as the entire module was rendered in a way that effectively makes it invisible to Search Engines anyway.

HOWEVER, now that no-follow has been added to the links in the RSS module does that mean that RSS feeds will become indexable soon?? If so, It would be the Ultimate Evergreen Module!

However, after encouragement from a few of my Squidoo buds I’ve decided to move forward and apply for what might possibly be the most awesome SquidGroup ever (If I get Picked )!!

Board Games.

Why it could be awesome -

People love board games.
There are a zillion of them.
They have rabid communities who love to talk about them.
I love board games. a lot.

I’m mentioning all of this because I wanted to get a straw poll from you guys and see if anyone was interested in building some board game lenses with me.

I’ve decided that regardless of whether I get accepted into SquidClubs this time around or not, I’m going to go ahead and move forward with creating one of the most comprehensive collections of board game information around, all in lens format.

A Lens cloud of board games, totally wicked.

It will be fun, interesting, and probably profitable as well.

If this sounds like something you’d like to join in on (I’ll probably be using a lot of board game lenses as examples in my upcoming posts after I finish off a series on local lenses I have planned for the next week or so) then please drop a line in the comments.

Who knows, your comment might be the one that makes a Board Game SquidClub a reality !

Got your own idea for a SquidClub? (apply Here)

-Cap

– The top earner made more than $1300 for the month.
– Hundreds of people earned $100 or more.
– More than a thousand people earned more than $10.
– Lensmasters donated more than $5000 to the Squidoo Charity Fund.
– More than 90 people had 100 or more lenses all ranked in the top 100,000.
– 150+ people earned more than $10 each for charity.
– Dozens of lenses raised more than $100 for charity in just this one month alone.
– The top 5 earning charities supported by Squidoo in October were: Save the Children, CAER, ASPCA, Acumen Fund and Room to Read.
– A few of the most-sold eBay items on lenses in October included: halloween costumes, Christmas ornaments, crafting beads, zhu zhu pets, canon powershots, Coach shoes and bags, birthdaysupplies, Cuisinarts, Thanksgiving decorations, World of Warcraft Buring Crusade, Steampunk stuff, Wiis, pajamas, Nintendo DS games and skins, and even Kindles.

Original Post by Megan here

Image by Marrion Derret

The first lens or two (depending on when you are reading this) of our journey towards $2,000 a month is published and live. As per the rules, they can be found on the ‘Captain Squid‘ account that is freshly started and has no previous ties or history.

Check them out, ask questions about lens structure, composition, tagging, whatever. I’ll follow up with answers.

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 has caused some big time ripples as it is the latest in a string of moves by eBay that increasingly makes their affiliate program more and more hostile towards its own affiliates.

Along this line, HQ announced their new eBay policy today for lensmasters.

In a nutshell, no more adding your personal ebay links to squidoo lenses.

What does this mean for your options? I see a few:

Use Squidoo’s ebay modules – Easy, fast, and they have proven to convert over time. However, Squidoo keeps half the income (which is pretty fair imho).

Stop using eBay – Over the past few months I’ve begun transferring a lot of my sites and content away from using eBay as a prime revenue generation source. For such a large company, their policies have been remarkably inconsistent and prone to change.  When compared with the other affiliate behemoth, Amazon, I’m constantly surprised at how well Amazon executes its program and eBay flubs theirs. If the products you are reviewing or reccomending on your lens can’t be found on Amazon, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the other networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, Linkshare, and the like. Often you can find great programs that promote very cool specialty items and give you a better commission on top!

All in all, look at this change as an opportunity to diversify your income streams, not as a death knell on your online efforts.

What thoughts do you folks have?

Some Fun Facts about my time on Squidoo:

I began using Squidoo right around when there was 100,000 lenses.. Now I think there’s close to a million.

I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 lenses. While I’ve slown down my output a bit since moving to Singapore (so much to do and so little time!) I’m hoping to maintain my rate of better than a lens a day for the foreseeable future. It’s too profitable and fun not too!

I’ve had multiple lenses earn over $1,000 in a single month.

I’ve had a nice handful of lenses earn over $100 in a single month.

I’ve got hundreds of lenses that have only ever earned pennies. (and that’s okay! Success with no failure is pretty boring..)

I was an original Giant Squid and Giant Squid 100 member.

I started Squidtop – a Blog network for lensmasters that is building up a nice community. I’ve got plans to make this even more awesome in the near future, if you want to help, let me know!

The Isle of Squid lens directory has grown to include thousands of hand reviewed lenses representing some of the best that Squidoo has to offer. This is another project that I’m hoping to expand in coming months and if you want to help, let me know!

I’ve met some amazing people from not only across the US but across the entire world. Some of you folks are truly amazing!

Posted 1,000+ times in Squid U…

and so much more I can’t think of right now…

Here’s to another 2 years and beyond of Making Money and Having Fun!!!

I Sure hope this one was less controversial than the last one. The last time they changed the layout, a lot of lensmasters got really fired up about it… for about a week.

Change is good. It helps you keep perspective on things.

What i’m most excited about is finding out what the OTHER new feature HQ refers to in that post is… could be something very cool!

For those of you that haven’t seen much of fluffanutta’s work, he has several tools that are absolutely essential for managing lenses and getting the most out of squidoo.

I use all of these tools, and all are currently free to use.

• Firefox Add-on for Squidoo – This extension uses Greasemonkey to show some cool summaries, graphs, shortcuts and more on your dashboard, workshop, and individual lens stat pages. It consumes almost no system resources and saves me tons of time on a regular basis. If you haven’t updated your version of the addon recently, click over real quick and get the latest version, it’s fantastic!
• Squidoo Toolbar - Can you say one-click login into each of your accounts? This toolbar does this and more. Note: I’m currently working with fluffanutta to bring even more little tools and tricks to the toolbar so make sure and grab it so you are ready to roll when we release some of this stuff!
• SquidUtils – You can’t forget where it all begins. SquidUtils has everything from table makers, amazon links and stat tracking, ping services, and TONS of other good stuff. If you haven’t been by in a while, it’s definitely worth spending some time looking around there as there is a ton of new squidoo tools there.