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, [...]
I think the most important part of any endeavor is always learning from your mistakes.
I’ve got hundreds of lenses (Hundreds!) that are total failures.
Except for what I’ve learned from them.
You can learn a little by finding good information from smart people in the forums or on blogs etc.
But you can learn so much more by [...]
I’ve heard several questions the past week about ‘when’ or ‘how’ to add external links (links to other sites) to lenses.
I try to follow a few basic rules of thumb that work quite well for me.
1) add ‘rel=nofollow’ to affiliate links – Especially if they link to some crazy domain or something. Besides, you aren’t [...]
I’ve been toying with some different ideas on how to have multiple lensmasters ‘author’ a single lens and yet not have to set up a new Squidoo account specifically for the new lens. An example would be a lens with group Q&A sections or expert interviews that constantly change or have new content added regularly.
Here’s [...]
The URL of your lens is your identifier, how people and search engines alike know where your lens is located. On a scale of 10, the importance of your lens URL is probably in the 3-6 range.
Use one to three words separated by a hyphen. (hyphens are easier to remember and faster to type than [...]
There’s a lot of talk going on today about adding ‘tip jars’ to lenses. The mechanics behind it are basically adding a link to your paypal account asking for donations.
From a technical standpoint, adding some kind of personal donation or ‘tip jar’ to your lenses is definitely possible. However, from a ‘money making’ view, they [...]
Since our little piratey band has grown so much since January (like 800% !) I thought that it was appropriate to take a post and recap what you folks thought were the best posts of the past year as well as some of my personal favorites.
The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008
Can [...]
Glen’s Blog over at Lensroll has a great new post on what some of the top lensmasters do before publishing a lens, including yours truly.
It’s definitely worth a read. I thought it was interesting that there was a definite split between some who viewed the question as mechanical, i.e. what steps do you take in [...]
I know some lensmasters like to break out their lenses into different accounts depending on the content of the lens. For example, I know of several that have dedicated accounts for their music related lenses.
I’ve stayed away from this for the most part, mainly because it’s something of a hassle to remember which lenses are [...]
Oftentimes as you browse the web looking for tips or tricks to improve your websites, lenses, blogs, and other digital online ’stuff’ you run into perhaps two of the most cliche sayings on the internet in the web development space: ‘content is king’ and you need to have ‘unique content’.
Since neither of these phrases really [...]
