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.

After a few tweaks and bumps, I’m proud to present the Blip.fm Squidoo module.

Bip.fm on Widgetsquid

Lens about Blip.fm Module with FAQ

Now, it’s easy to add live updates of your blip.fm stream to your lenses

Enjoy!

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!

What’s a bankrupt inbox?

Well, since I am now 12 hours off from most of the continental US there is virtually no chance for me to catch up on emails as speedily as I used to. Waking up every morning with over 100 unread messages has gotten just too overwhelming. My current Gmail inbox is sitting at 1722 unread messages.

How am I going to do it?

I’m going to take every message outside of the 100 most recent and just archive them. If i haven’t gotten to them by now, I probably wont.

Next, I’ll go through the 100 remaining emails and either respond, delete, archive, or take some other kind of action. No skipping around.

After that, whenever an email comes in that doesn’t require immediate action, it doesn’t need to hit my inbox. I’ll continue to refine my filters etc.

The most dangerous part of trying to keep growing in ventures online? Getting bogged down and flooded.

Low Signal to Noise means Low ROI…

Anyone have any insight to add or guides they know of about declaring bankruptcy on your inbox?

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

The easiest way I can figure to build a lens like this with multiple lens authors and only a single lensmaster logging into the account is by using plexos.

Each other creates a plexo with the information they are responsible for on an existing lens or on a new ‘throwaway’ type lens.

From there the lensmaster that actually owns the account for the group lens can add each plexo to the lens.

By doing this, the ‘author’ of each individual plexo has control over their content and can change it whenever they need to but only one person has access to the Squidoo account.

Thoughts? This is a bit of a work in progress but I like the possibilities…

I had the pleasure of helping to beta test the new toolbar over the last few weeks with Fluffanutta and I can say that it’s spectacular with stuff like the ability to switch between multiple accounts instantly, instant creation of any cobranded lens you want, and a ton more.

Yea, it’s free too.

Bonus: Send me your Review of the new Toolbar or post it in the comments and I’ll take the best ones and post them on Captain Squid for everyone to see (with attribution to your blog or lenses, of course).

The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008

Can Squidoo Make you $500 in one day? Yep. - This was a post to mark the first time that I ever earned $500 in one day with Squidoo. My Holiday season hasn’t been quite as juicy since then, but that was somewhat expected with the current content mix of my lens portfolio.

The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters – This tip is a bit more motivational and attitude related than any specific thing you can do as a process to succeed on Squidoo. However, you guys obviously liked it as this was the second most visited post of the year. I’ll have to write more posts like these in 2009.

One Lens, One Month, $1,000 – This is another earnings milestone post, marking the first time that I earned $1,000 from a single lens in one month. To date, I’ve had 2 different lenses earn that much in a month so it can in fact be done and is not an isolated incident.

Making Money with Pepperjam – This popular squidoo affiliate marketing post gives a step by step guide on creating a lens to promote a Pepperjam Network affiliate product. Don’t miss the second part of the series where we talk about adding products to a lens from a Pepperjam Advertiser.

Don’t Listen to Bunk SEO Advice – Perhaps one of my personal favorites, I rail against the dumb labor intensive SEO that doesn’t really produce good results and try to shine a little light on some of the facts around employing good SEO practices in order to get the most bang for your buck with your time. When you have a couple hundred lenses, time becomes quite valuable and wasting it on things that don’t work is simply silly.

The Captain’s Personal Favorite Squidoo Posts of 2008

Here are a few  Squidoo nuggets that I think flew under the radar but have some valuable information that is worth reading.

A Guide to Squidoo Income – A lengthy post detailing the nuances of Squidoo’s income sharing structure and when payment takes place for various types of earnings. I hear this question so often that I had to put something out there I could refer people to.

8 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Squidoo – Get these if you haven’t already. I still use every one on that list constantly. I may expand this to 10 plugins next year sometime but these 8 are enough to really reduce wasted time when you are building lenses.

Using Tags on Squidoo – This was a three part series I wrote in April and May. Since Squidoo changes so fast, a few small points may be out of date here and there but I’m still a firm believer in using this strategy to increase lens visibility. Start with an overview of link flow, then learn a little more about how Squidoo tag pages (used to) work and how they still do before finishing up with learning how to leverage the ‘Discovery’ or ‘Explore More’ box on lenses.

Those are the 10 best blog posts from Captain Squid this year according to you the reader and how I was feeling about my personal favorites this morning.

Anyone else have any favorites I missed?

Squidoo Lens Editing

Greasemonkey – This lets you add little mini scripts to your browser (don’t worry you have to push one button and that’s it). In a less frightening description, it makes web pages look and work cooler. As a corollary, you must download The Fluffanutta’s script that soups up your Squidoo Dashboard and Workshop. (It only works for FF right now, IE support is supposedly on the way..)

Scribefire - I’ve written about Scribefire before and what I said then still holds true. I use it all the time when flipping between tabs in FireFox and I want to keep data or content in one place.

Squidoo Plugin – The official plugin released by HQ. It allows you to add your current page as a link on any one of your lenses, placing it in either a link list or a link plexo. This is incredibly useful if you remember you have it available..

SEO / Analysis -

SEO For FireFox – Awesome plugin by Aaron Wall at SEO Book. Shows backlinks and other relevent data on top of your search results as well as lets you easily see which links are no-followed on the page.

SEO RankChecker - Part two of SEO Book’s must have plugins is the SEO Rank Checker. Use it to monitor your search engine rankings for specific terms on all three search engines by domain and by keyword. Awesome Tool.

Compete.com Toolbar (aff.)- Shows you estimated people counts and site rankings for whatever site you are on, also adds more cool information to your search results. This is a good one to check out if sites you are looking to submit links or content too actually get any traffic.

Bookmarking / Networking -

StumbleUpon Toolbar – I use this a lot for doing market research with StumbleUpon as well as for reviewing and tagging sites (and lenses). Don’t go ‘thumbing’ all of your lenses at once, but when used judiciously it can pack a punch. Oh yea, and it’s a great fix for when you are feeling burnt out.

I usually have another toolbar of whatever social bookmarking site I’m hot on at the moment, but the only one I’ve consistently used over the last year is StumbleUpon.

I would also advise getting a Google/Yahoo/MSN toolbar just for easy searching and bookmark management as well.

This isn’t a comprehensive count of all the plugins I use, but these are the ones I use most often. Try a few of them out and see if they improve your performance or researching for Squidoo.

Got a plugin I’ve clearly missed? Let me know!

So, with no further blathering, here is The Captain’s Dos and Don’ts with Squidoo SEO.

DO

• Write in clear, concise paragraphs that are easy to read and make sense. Use keywords in your content text.
• Use less than 3 keywords in your URL
• Build multiple lenses around a general theme and link them together with a directory lens.
• Think very carefully about tagging your lens.
• If you have text content in a module, use the subtitle with relevant words in it.
• Know your audience. Who is your lens written to appeal to? Where do they hang out? Find them.
• No-follow your affiliate links.

Don’t…

• RSS modules on Squidoo are rendered with JavaScript. Google does not see any links from an RSS feed in any of your lenses. Don’t believe me? Google one of your lenses and click the ‘cached’ link on the result. Instead, use the google blog search module or one of the other evergreen modules that Does have its contents indexed by G.
• Leaving drive-by links on lenses and blogs just makes you look spammy. Stop it.
• Do your followers on Twitter want to know more about your lens? Match your promotion to your audience, Twitter is full of ‘Digerati’ and is very tech oriented. You may have a bunch of followers that are rabid fans of German Polka Music and in that case you should share your German Polka Lenses with them. Don’t Share every lens you have on Twitter.
• stop looking for places to promote your lens where people will actually care.
• go bombard 25 social networks with the link to your lens. Try one you think is most appropriate first and see how that goes.
• Write huge introduction modules with a short novel and a bunch of pictures. 3-5 sentences in the intro, tops.
• throw a lens up in 20 minutes, come back in 3 months, and state unequivocally that Squidoo sucks and no money can be made using it and there is no value in Squidoo. You look silly.
• copy/paste your article or blog post straight into a lens. Most likely it will just be ignored or the search engines will rank the squidoo lens and demote your blog. Spend some time changing it around.
• think there’s only one definition of success on squidoo.
• links passed from nearly all directories and articles really don’t carry that much weight. Directories and Article (Bum) Marketing require a tremendous amount of energy for  the ROI. Find a better way.

I could go on but I’ve got to go now. I’ll try to expand on this list later.