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!!!

Just click and drag the link up to your bookmark bar and the next time you need to submit a lens, just click it and presto bango it will copy your title, url, description etc. and pop it right in to the form.

I hope to roll out a similar bookmarklet for Squidpedia in the next week or so, so stay tuned!

pretty cool huh?

Where the Isle of Squid rankings are based on incoming and outgoing traffic numbers, the rankings on Squidpedia is based on how many points you earn for your listing. (more on earning points with SquidPedia)

Everyone that had already had a link submitted and approved at the Isle of Squid received a free listing right off the bat in SquidPedia. It’s the very least we could do for the lensmasters out there who have helped the Isle grow over the past few months.

Don’t worry, the Isle isn’t going away, it now just has a sister site in the form of SquidPedia.

There are still a few small kinks that may need working out, so if you find one, don’t panic and just send me a note through the contact form of the site or drop a comment here.

Special Bonus for Captain Squid readers :

For this week only if you write a blog post about SquidPedia, I’ll upgrade the listing of your choice with 3 points! Just drop me a line with the URL of your post so I can check it out and thank you.

Check out SquidPedia and let me know what you all think!

Squidoo Directories

Glen has done a low key release of his new Squidoo/Hubpages/Gather Directory aptly aimed Squoogle. If you haven’t, stop by and take a peek.

Isle of Squid announced the winners to the January Lens Submission Contest. Congrats Kat!

�Squidoo Blogosphere

Susanne at Squidoo Magic has a good educational post with screenshots walking you through setting up a table of contents on your squidoo lens. I try to avoid tables of contents and instead just create more lenses, but there are some situations where they are very useful. Nice work Susanne.

Magicality appears to be back blogging over at Squidoo Challenge. He’s got a new post up on promoting lenses with forums and on traffic from Yahoo. Good to see you back Magicality!

Pot Pie Girl is finishing up a spectacular series on SEO for Squidoo Lenses. Part 4 was just as good as the first three, check em out.

Do you write a blog or run a website about Squidoo and have a great post or announcement to share? Let me know! I’m always looking for more new Squidoo sites to see.

-The Captain

In Fact, I’m such a Nice Guy that I’m giving away some of this great stuff 100% Free.

For the Month of January, the top three lensmasters who have the most Squidoo lenses submitted to the Isle of Squid will win some pretty cool stuff. Full Details are on the front page of the Link Directory for Lenses.

If there are any questions about the promotion, drop me a line here and I’ll answer as quick as I can.

-The Captain

Combining multiple tools in one place is something the Captain is a big fan of, and I must admit, Fluff has done an admirable job doing just that.

Now, when you click ‘edit‘ on any one of your lenses from the ‘Advanced Lensmaster Dashboard‘ you are taken to a screen that has your lens framed in and a menu of great options on the left hand side:

Full Lens Info: This will return pre-formatted HTML code for your lens as well as BBC code for use in forum signatures. Your lens name, category, update time, URL, and description are all posted, allowing you to see how your lens is displayed at a glance.

Lens Maintenance: You can now edit, Publish, and view your lens from one place without losing the Squid Utils navigation.

Lens Statistics: Check up on your traffic, royalties, and other stats for each lens from here.

Lens Promotion: This is super useful, allowing you to do many things to promote your lens very quickly. This includes the Add This bookmarking tool, Lensroll.com submission, Isle of Squid Squidoo Link Directory Submission, as well as a Ping feature to notify all the major crawlers that you’ve got new content.

Search Engines: With a few quick clicks, you can double check to see that your lens is indexed in the major search engines. Extremely useful!

If you haven’t stopped by Squid Utils to check out the new management tools, you probably should. There is maximum piratey goodness for minimum price (currently free).

-The Captain

The Isle is a Squidoo-only link directory that is open to anyone that has a squidoo lens as well as any websites that are dedicated to squidoo.

All the lenses are hand-reviewed by myself and my team (currently Doug Eby, Gypsy Pirate, and select other squidooers that hang out in the squidoo chat room).

In order to accept your lens, we are using the following guidelines:

1. lens is published and searchable in Squidoo (no WIP or adult lenses)
2. The lens has an introduction picture.
3. The lens has NO default module titles (no ‘New Guestbook’ type� titles)

In order to kick things off, we are offering a few promotions for your lens to get ‘Featured’ Status on Isle of Squid, which means it will go into rotation to be shown on any page on the site.

1. Submit 10 lenses to the Isle to have one of your choice Featured. You may submit as many lenses as you like, and each 10 will allow you to feature an additional lens.
2. �Add 3 reviews to lenses listed on the Isle. These need to be real reviews of at least a couple of sentences. Cheesepuff reviews that have two or three words will not count. For every 3 reviews you submit, you can have an additional lens featured.

I’m only giving out 100 Featured Spots to start off and over 30 have been claimed in the first 24 hours! So hurry up and head over to the Isle and build another great backlink for your lens!

-The Captain