Captain Squid

As some of you know, I’ve basically disappeared off the face of the Squidoo-verse for the last 4 months or so.

I was working on one of my most aggressive entrepreneurial projects ever.

It totally crashed and burned over the last few weeks.

Failing is something I do on a regular basis with various things, but I’m not going to lie, this one stung a bit. Besides the lost money (significant) and time (also significant) pulling out of a project like that definitely knocks your confidence and pride back a few notches.

Another unfortunate consequence is that I’ve also been neglecting my Squidoo happenings and adventures, which I can never get the time back for.

I’ll probably keep licking my wounds for the next few days or so and then I’m going to return to the basics that started making me money online in the first place, building some lenses.

Hopefully there are a few of you still around that check in every once in a while that I can share the adventure with .

Failure sucks, but never failing once is way worse.

The only disaster in this situation would be me giving up trying. Which isn’t going to happen.

I know i seem to cover this idea ad nauseum but I wanted to emphasize (again) the importance of tagging your lenses properly.

Why do we tag lenses?

Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.

What is Indexing and why is it important?

When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses).  It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.

If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.

So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.

Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.

Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.

What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.

Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.

If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.

So,

DO

Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic

Use tags that are present on other lenses

TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*

DON’T

Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.

use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.

Questions?

Hey All, due to some unforseen real life craziness, I’ve been unable to be a good Captain and keep you all up to date on the latest ways to kick butt on Squidoo.

The most recent burst of craziness appears to be slowing down microscopically, so I anticipate being able to get back into the quest full swing this coming week.

Stay tuned for some juicy tips and updates, they are on the way!!

I’ve also been hanging out in the Chat Room a lot more lately so feel free to stop by there and Say hi to the crew if you are feeling lonely.

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Fun Squidoo Stats from October 2009

– 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

Our First Sale hit in the Squidoo Quest! It took a little less than 4 weeks for our first sale to come through Amazon, and only with 3 lenses published (have another venture that I’m trying to get off the ground, it’s been a time suck.).

Squidoo Lens Earnings Screenshot

Almost $4.00 from one sale certainly isn’t too shabby.

If we can keep up our $0.95 average pending lens earnings, we are probably about 1500 lenses away hehe. Don’t worry though, our goal is to get that overall number much higher through tons more sales and smart use of other affiliate programs.

Since I’m only counting earnings as they are PAID instead of registered on the Dashboard, the official earnings count will still read zero for another month or so but it’s definitely a solid start we can build on!

$2,000 / mo. here we come

I’ve received a great response so far on my little Squidoo Quest and am noticing some repeated questions on keyword/topic research so I feel that we should dedicate a few posts here to talking about it.

Here’s my general philosophy on researching new squidoo lens topics (or new niches in general)

1. Don’t focus on just ‘one’ keyword to the exclusion of all others - I find this takes a very narrow minded view towards what you want to accomplish and doesn’t really result in the outcomes people are looking for (namely, traffic, attention, conversions, etc)
2. You don’t need monster niches – There are plenty of people that search for specific models, styles, etc that there is no need to target a monster market unless you have a monster budget. For example, instead of going after everyone that wants to buy an appliance, focus on a specific brand of dishwasher.
3. Target Buyers – Unlike most of the people reading this, nearly everyone spends less time on the internet then you. They aren’t up on the latest SEO news or conversion metrics or any of that stuff. They want to find something they are looking for, get good information about it, and buy it. Writing your content to focus on these people will astronomically increase your conversions.
4. What is available? - Although Amazon has pretty much everything for a lot of verticals it is more ‘broad’ then ‘deep’ in some. I’ll often pick new topics based on what advertisers on some of the affiliate networks look interesting or cool instead of what some research tool tells me I should.