Captain Squid

• RT @squid_engineer: you can now label and link the photos in your text, polaroid, and other modules. Hooray for SEO and accessibility. -WOOT #

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Every week I’ll provide a brief update to my Squidoo Quest so we can track our progress together.

I’m in the process of creating some charts to summarize all of the statistics on an ongoing basis. Once this is live I’ll let everyone know so they can catch up on any weeks they missed.

Week 1:

Lenses created: 3

Lenses Receiving Search Traffic: 2

Total Traffic: 181

Squidoo Earnings : $0.00

Aff. Earnings : $0.00

Discussion:

My Laptop got destroyed halfway through last week, which definitely put a damper on new lens creation. However, this weekend I bought a new computer that will allow us to move forward! Significant search traffic is already going to the first two lenses I created, with approximately a 40% clickthrough from search traffic to Amazon or Affiliate links. As traffic increases over time, this should lead to some good sales. In the past it’s usually taken between 30 and 60 days for lenses I make to start seeing significant sales, so I’m not too worried about not having any sales from the squidoo lenses in the first week.

The response from the Squidoo community to the quest has been great so far and I have tons of topics to write about just from the comments I have received. Stay tuned to have more of your questions explained in depth!

The Captain was having some of his merry band over last night for some vittles and grog when some grog found it’s way onto the Captain’s laptop.

This leaves the Captain with one less laptop and one more paperweight than is desired.

Following some computer shopping this weekend, the quest should be back in full force again.

ARRR!

In my writings here on Captain Squid, you will often hear me mention the term ‘evergreen modules‘. I wanted to dedicate a post defining evergreen modules and what it means when I am talking about them so everyone is on the same page.

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?

Getting some great questions on lenses so far guys, keep it up! I’ll continue to answer them here as we move along.

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!

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.

okay, let’s follow up yesterdays admittedly ambitious post with a bit of clarification as to how I am going to go about getting to this goal of earning $2,000 a month from Squidoo lenses.

First, there are a few basic things to get out of the way:

Fully transparent – All of the lenses I make are going to be in the squidoo account here. Feel free to look at them, dissect them, use ideas from them, ask questions about them etc.

Fully accountable - As we progress, I’ll post regular income, traffic, and other updates to illustrate how far along we are. I will probably adapt the current ‘Earnings’ tab to reflect this new information since the current graph and info on there is a bit outdated and not applicable to my new focus.

Multiple Revenue sources – I am reserving the right to use other affiliate networks and programs in additions to the ones that Squidoo natively supports. However, any Amazon revenue will go through Squidoo’s modules (i.e. I won’t shortcut Squidoo’s share to get to the goal faster). I will make a point to try to pick affiliate programs that are easy to get into. If you are planning on following along, I would recommend signing up for Commission Junction and Pepperjam for starters. It’s free and both have a huge array of programs to choose from.

How to get the most out of following the Captain on this dangerous, monster-filled journey of the high Squidoo seas :

Subscribe to the RSS Feed - so you don’t miss any posts that can help you.

Ask Questions – If you don’t understand what I’m doing or why it’s working and you don’t say anything, I can’t help you. If you can’t find me in the chat room, just drop me a PM and i’ll get back to you. With any luck there may be any number of people hanging out in there willing to help out.

Participate – As time allows, I’m planning on holding several chat room webinars on different concepts, tricks, methods etc. These will be free, but I reserve the right to limit the number of attendees to keep things from getting out of control (100 people in a chat room makes any kind of discussion tough).

Actually do stuff – By far and away the people I’ve seen that are the most successful at anything in life, online or off, are those that are willing to actually put in some work. Build some lenses, then build some more. It’s the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. I can help a bit with best practices, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you.

Next: The Quest Begins

Sorry for the absence everyone, have been getting settled in Singapore and adjusted to life on Southeast Asia.

As I’m starting a new phase in my pirate life I’ve also decided to begin a new phase in my Squidoo life as well.

Now, in the past I’ve made several thousand dollars a month from Squidoo but with the demise of Ebay and various other affiliate programs that has fallen off somewhat.

However, I don’t believe for an instant that this means that you can’t make money (and have fun!) with Squidoo. So, I’ve decided to rededicate myself with a new Squidoo quest to prove that anyone can make a couple thousand bucks a month from Squidoo in a relatively short time.

We are going to see how long it takes to go from $0 to $2000 a month from Squidoo lenses.

Not using Squidoo to direct traffic to another site you have but instead using Squidoo lenses to make money directly.

It can be done, I’ve done it.

And we are going to do it again.

And I’m going to show you all how so you can do it too.

Hey All,

Been a naughty pirate with my Squidoo Posting the past month but have been busy moving my first mate and myself over to Asia to continue our pirating adventure.

Am Currently exploring Thailand (absolutely Amazing!) but should be back around trolling the waters of Squidoo by next week.

From what I can see it looks like we have a lot to catch up on and chat about.

Keepin it Piratey from Asia,

CS

mac33 has an excellent post on lensrank decay on one of his lenses and the impact of traffic on his lensrank.

It is an excellent example of how a few ticks of traffic to your lens don’t necessarily mean you will instantly climb to the top of the lensrank ladder. If your visitors arent engaging with your lens, your rank can quickly return on it’s previous path of decay.

This topic is worth further discussion and I’ll dig through some of my stats to see if I can provide some other examples that help make mac33’s point and expand it into some other potential factors of the lensrank algorithm.

Great Post mac!