The new Lens Auction area is super easy to navigate, has an RSS feed for lenses currently for sale, and the listing process has been streamlined so it only takes a minute or so to list your lens for sale.

I’ve also removed all fees associated with buying or selling lenses. There are no final value fees or listing fees. There are a few options to ‘upgrade’ your listing if you wish but right now there aren’t a ton of lenses listed so you can get a lot of visibility just by creating a standard listing.

Both Auction style formats and fixed priced listings are available as well as free image uploading for uploading screenshots or whatever you would like.

Check it out and let me know what you guys think.

As a little bonus to try it out, I’ve got a stack of squidoo stickers here that I’m looking for a use for. The first 10 lensmasters to list a lens for sale at Sell My Lens this week and email me their address will have a free sticker waiting in their mailbox one day soon...

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!

If you check out mine, you’ll notice that you can add some websites about you on the left (including up to 3 of your personal sites), your favorited  lenses are shown that you have marked as ’shared’, your fans, and your lens list in alphabetical order. The lens list can also be sorted by lensrank, which is a nice touch.

The lensmaster profiles on Squidoo also display the ‘Real’ name for you that you have on your account. Hrmm… not sure how a few people are going to feel about that, especially the more private types. Although you can easily go into your profile information and change your name.

I’m almost positive your tax info is stored separately so you wouldn’t have to worry about getting a 1099 for Maniac McGee at the end of the year or anything.

One interesting feature is the ‘Featured Lens’ area below the lensmaster bio. It works like a Featured Lens module and allows you to feature any of your lenses you would like (or anyone elses). The idea being that if the lens is at the top with a thumbnail then it is more likely to be clicked on.

I think this is pretty cool, but I have plenty of my lenses listed on my lensmaster page already. Combined with the fact that I am woefully behind on starring and giving angel love to well deserved lenses, I’ve decided to do something creative with my Squidoo Lensmaster Profile page.

What I’m Going to Do with My Profile

The Five Featured lens spots on my profile page are currently for rent as part of a lens review by yours truly. For $25 bucks a month right now (going up when there is a waitlist, of course ) You can have your lens featured front and center on my profile page.

There are a few caveats to this deal:

I reserve the right to say no and give you your money back if the lens rubs me the wrong way. I don’t forsee this happening often but it’s got to be said.

If you like, I will also write a review of the lens on Captain Squid. I think this is a great way to see how different lenses are put together. In these reviews, I’ll provide thoughtful, constructive criticism with ideas for monetization and promotion. If for some reason you don’t want me to write your lens up, you have to tell me.(duh)

I’ve got some other little caveats, rules, and such over at ‘Your Lens Here‘. Check it out.

But for Today (or just while) Only:

If you leave a comment with 2 sentences or so about why your lens should be seen by 10,000 people a month or so (The link to my lensmaster profile ‘gets around’ as we say…) then I’ll throw it in the running for being a free featured lens for this next week (Aug 20 – 27 ).

3 lenses of my choosing will be chosen each week for as long as I want to run this little game. ( or as long as there are spaces available) No, you can’t whine if you don’t get picked one week, polish it up and re-submit it or submit something else.

On Tuesday I’ll post a reminder for the week and on Wednesday I’ll announce the winners and give a short review/critique of each.

Each lens is only going to be able to win once.

The one thing I’ll ask is that if you do win you wouldn’t mind letting me know what kind of traffic you get for the time your lens is up ( a little ‘testamonial’ if you will). Doesn’t have to be glowing, just has to be the truth.

Okay, I’m tired of writing rules, if I missed something, ask me in the comments. Otherwise, throw your lens in the ring for a little free promotion!

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.

For those of you who are curious, Squidtop is a place for Squidoo Lensmasters to Blog about their lenses (or whatever else they want!) without fear of being banned for having ‘too many links to one site’ as Wordpress and Blogger are wont to do.

The community is growing quite nicely and we’ll pass the 200 blog mark this week! The posts are indexed quite quickly by google and are another great way for you to promote your lenses and yourself.

If you haven’t already, make sure and stop by and read some of the great blogs over there. You can get lost for hours at a time! I know I do…

P.S. Thanks so much to all you lensmasters that help us keep Squidtop free of spam and a fun place for everyone to go! Your participation is greatly appreciated and amazingly awesome as usual.

I think I found a great site today for you guys : Youpet.com

I heard about it from a neighbor, went over and checked it out and it looks like a great place for all you pet lovers (and link lovers ) to spread the word about your pet lenses.

It looks like it’s got a pretty good pile of features with blogs, pictures, a rating system (treats) and other cool stuff.

Unfortunately, I haven’t made a lens about my dog yet (it’s on the list!) so I haven’t had a chance to fully get into it yet.

Those of you that have, check Youpet.com out and let me know what you think!

1. You can now communicate directly to your visitors with little thoughts and tidbits. This is awesome.
2. You can announce new events or updates across the squidoo universe (well, YOUR squidoo universe)

This is good. Really good.

But how do you promote your squidcasts to others ? Each Lens’ RSS Feed will show the casts you send out for that lens.

This effectively means that you can get the RSS aggregators (Zimbio, Technorati, etc.) to treat your lens as a blog.

Wait a minute.. submitting ALL of my lenses to these sites AND writing casts for each lens? That will take forever and probably piss off all your fans with all those casts.

Wouldn’t it be nice to submit ALL of your squidcasts as ONE RSS feed? Yes, it would.

But wait, there isn’t a way to promote that RSS feed because it doesn’t exist…

That’s what the Captain’s for!

I have written a yahoo Pipe that allows you to create a feed for ALL your squidcasts. When you submit this feed to blog sites, your feed is updated every time you write ANY squidcast.

How to use it:

Go visit the Pipe here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/captainsquid/fan_feed

Enter your lensmaster name. Your SquidCast Feed will be automatically generated.

right-click on the ‘more options’ link and click ‘copy link location’.

Now paste your new uberfeed into whatever RSS submittor you want! Need some Ideas? Check out my posts on Free RSS Submission Sites and Using Zimbio to automatically promote your site.

Ta Da!

If you are looking for some more sneaky tricks, make sure and sign up for the newsletter. The first copy goes out this weekend!

-The Captain

JoePopular is another take on the Social Networking craze, but it is a simple yet functional set up.� You place your most relevant sites (or lenses) in several categories right on your profile page.� So when people visit they see right away what your best links are.

You earn JoeDollars from referring people and your JoeDollars can be used to advertise your profile page.� A very interesting concept that has great potential.

Sign up and check it out…..

Doug’s JoePopular Page�

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