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

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.

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).

If you can’t figure out why you can’t get any search traffic from google on your lens go to the SquidUtils lens Search (powered by Google) and put in the keyword you are trying to rank for. The search only searches lenses (or groups) on squidoo instead of the entire web.

If you aren’t #1 or #2 on squidoo for a keyword how likely do you think you are to be chosen by google to represent that keyword from squidoo to all the other sites on the web?

all hope is not lost and you can certainly climb the ranks within squidoo quite quickly with some good content and attention. Just keep in mind that if you are getting ready to build a lens about ‘The Secret’ … don’t. It’s been done, I promise.

Get a new spin on things, there’s huge amounts of traffic out there to snag, I promise.

Gil’s Example:

Fluffanutta’s example after applying some of his CSS Tricks:

How it Works

The module automatically creates links to all of your modules with Titles. If your module doesn’t have a title, it doesn’t show up on the list, that simple.

Lot’s of exciting stuff going on at Squidoo this week and it’s only Tuesday!

That being said, here’s how I would fix the dashboard:

• Once you hit a certain number of lenses (50,100?) the dashboard would automatically change to a new format. HQ could afford to make the new dash more feature intensive because many fewer people would be using it, allowing the Squid Servers to keep up.
• This Dash would allow me to one-click publish my lenses. ( a pipe dream but it had to be said).
• Ability to edit keywords, title tags and republish without leaving the Dashboard.
• Sort by primary tag. Why? Lots of reasons.� Read The Importance of the Primary Tag by Fluffanutta for an overview.
• One Screen lens creation. I absolutely hate having to load 4 screens to create a lens. After doing it over 300 times I pretty much have those little sayings memorized. Creating lenses from the dashboard functionality would add extra bonus points.
• Ability to define groups and folders for lenses. Easily view groups and folders of lenses. The Dashboard Extender by Magicality currently does this, but the load times are so horrific for a large group of lenses that it’s not worth turning on.
• Advanced sorting and search functionality. I want to be able to view all of my lenses that have less than X visitors and fall between X,XXX and XX,XXX Lensrank. This is huge for maintaining a large group of lenses and difficult to do currently.
• Access to the Lens RSS feed as a link from the Dashboard. Why don’t we already have this?
• Lens specific earnings reports by day. I want to see which lenses made sales yesterday and through which affiliates.
• Aggregated click through reporting. How many clicks did I send to ebay and amazon yesterday? What lenses did they come from?
• Ability to create Module Templates. I almost always select ‘I want to do my own thing’ and then load in the exact same modules, especially when I’m doing a group of similar lenses. The ability to roll my own pre-set module groupings would be amazing.
• Back up all lenses as a ZIP file.
• Have a ‘Saved Plexo’ list. Goes back to creating similar lenses. Keeping another window open for the sole purpose of grabbing the same plexo over and over is easy to fix.
• Easier Co-Brand creation. Instead of going to each co-brand home page to create a lens, how about a drop down on the dashboard (or new one-page lens making screen) that lets you select your co-brand?

Perhaps I’m not using squidoo as intended, but I am more concerned about overall performance and performance of clusters/themes of lenses than I am with the performance of any one lens. Before I go and build 20 lenses to flesh out an idea, I like to have enough data to tell if that idea is going to make money and scales well. Up to now, doing that is kind of painful just for the number of screens I have to load and the amount of manual calculation I have to do.

What would you add? what’s on your Squidoo Dashboard Wishlist?

BDKZ has started a blog devoted to Hey! Monkeybrain called Cowabunga!. I think it’s a great and original concept that allows blogging about hot issues (Like Pirates Vs. Ninjas) while incorporating Squidoo at the same time. Very fun and very cool. Great job BDKZ ! (Psst… Ive got a few debates going on Chickens and Eggs, Star Trek and Star Wars, and Paper or Plastic )

Duel Modules now� load when a page loads making them Evergreen! More evergreen modules is good for search engines and by extension, good for lensmasters!

Fluffanutta has released the latest version of his Advanced Squidoo Dashboard Utility on SquidUtils.com . It allows some cool new organization methods such as sorting by lens category and lens type, which are both really really useful.

Meanwhile Back at SquidU:

There’s the beginnings of a good thread on Directories and Blog Submission sites for Squidoo Lenses. Look for some of these to get added to the Squidoo Training Center this week.

Sneaky Observation of the week:

There’s only 153 Squid Lit lenses… have you read a book or 20 lately?

Squidoo HQ announced the release of their next front door : Hey MonkeyBrain. This is a debate themed site where the magic build lenses are designed around two sides to an argument. I thought something like this might have been in the works, but the actual product turned out awesome! Mashable and Digg agree.

Sell My Lens is gaining some steam. Fluffanutta sold a set of lenses for over $100 this week. Pot Pie Girl’s post on her Squidoo Lensmaking for clients reminded me – If you have a service like that, feel free to post it as a classified ad on Sell My Lens!

New site on my radar -

Hurox (pronounced ‘who rocks’) – Could be very similar to Squidoo, entirely built on Ajax and VERY fast. Still in early Beta.

Promotion idea -

Dosh Dosh wrote an article last month with 40 of the highest quality social networking sites. As usual, it’s great link bait so I’m biting.

That’s all for this week – More Piratey Squidoo News next week…

The Co-Brands are nice, but what if you could go the extra mile and use some custom text sizes, colors, lines and more? Yesterday, Fluffanutta (web, twit, FB) released� lens on CSS Tricks for Squidoo. Focusing on ways to easily create columns and float different elements around your modules, it’s definitely a must read for those of you using affiliate programs or linking pictures in modules.

Fluffanuttta’s sweet new lens should not be confused with Glen’s monstrous Advanced HTML tricks for Squidoo. While Glen’s is great for anything and everything to do with text formatting, Fluffanutta’s is great for learning how to move blocks of pictures and text around in your text/write modules.

Fluffanutta’s Lens receives a hearty Arrrrr from Captain Squid and is now enshrined in the Captain’s Picks.

If you have a lens that you would like to have the Captain review for a chance to make Captain’s Picks, leave the URL in the comments. Be warned though, if your lens isn’t up to snuff, I might make ye walk the plank…

Fluffanutta has written an exceptional article on Primary Tagging as a forum post. I’m going to repost it here after offering a few of my thoughts on Primary Tagging.

1) If your lens is about polka dotted teddy bears, I would just use ‘Teddy Bears’ as my Primary Tag. (as an example)

2) Primary Tags are going to be a careful balance between choosing a tag that has more than one or two lenses under it, but not choosing some of the most general tags on Squidoo (i.e. Marketing and Music should not be your primary tags)

3) Primary tagging has an effect on search results withing squidoo as well as on ‘tags’ pages. You can look at tags pages by either clicking on the ‘More Lenses About Primary Tag‘ link on the lens or by going to the Tag Cloud.

�Fluffanutta’s Initial Post: (Reminder: Check the Forum Post, the Follow-up Tips have been excellent also)

The Primary Tag is the first tag you get to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and very under utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points to note:

- In some lens formats (e.g. Ever.com and SquidWho) the primary tag appears at the very top of the page, next to “Explore more:”.

- Most lenses (maxxed) have a box in the side bar titles “Explore more…”, containing links to the Category and Primary Tag of the lens, plus all the groups it belongs too.

- Another feature of the sidebar (which is not always present) is the tag list, which is usually headed by the Primary Tag (on un-maxxed lenses), and then the first 5 regular tags (in alphabetical order). The remaining tags are hidden, and search engines may ignore these ones.

- Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens.

In addition, I am working on a new project that will make these Primary Tags even more important! So, you need to make sure that your these tags are as optimal as possible.

Here are some tips:

1. Your Primary Tag wants to be the most important key phrase that you can think of. For example, if your lens is about a person or a product, stick to just their name.

2. Keep your tag to just 2 or 3 words, where possible. One word is not always specific enough (unless the subject is a strong brand like Pepsi), and more than 3 words can sometimes be too specific. Of course, it does depend on your subject matter.

3. Don’t simply repeat your Lens title again (even though this is the default when building a lens). Your title should include as many keywords as you can sensibly fit (no keyword stuffing!), while your Primary Tag is about your key phrase.

4. Format your Primary Tag nicely – keep it Capitalised, spelt correctly (!) and don’t include any special characters or quotes (“). Use spaces between words, not dashes or underscores.

5. Make sure you repeat your Primary Tag as a regular tag too. The tags appear as the Meta Keywords at the top of the page, and you don’t want your key phrase to be missing from it.

6. Pick a Primary Tag which is popular, i.e. people will be likely to be searching for it and other lenses are might also have the same Primary Tag.

Here are some examples: Doctor Who :: Discworld :: Digital Camera Accessories :: Smart Phones

Bad examples: The Whole Lens Title Again :: Kee Frase Spelt Wong :: lowercasewithnospaces :: “Phrase in Quotes”

I hope that people remember these tips – I need to go and change a lot of my own Primary Tags having just looked at a few of them. And remember – I’m developing a project that’ll bring these tags in to their own…