Gil announced that Squidoo has removed the no-follow links located in certain modules (About Me, My Lenses, Text with Big Picture).

MORE interesting,

RSS has had No-Follow ADDED to it. Before the changes there was absolutely no reason for RSS to have no-follow applied to RSS modules, as the entire module was rendered in a way that effectively makes it invisible to Search Engines anyway.

HOWEVER, now that no-follow has been added to the links in the RSS module does that mean that RSS feeds will become indexable soon?? If so, It would be the Ultimate Evergreen Module!

After a few tweaks and bumps, I’m proud to present the Blip.fm Squidoo module.

Bip.fm on Widgetsquid

Lens about Blip.fm Module with FAQ

Now, it’s easy to add live updates of your blip.fm stream to your lenses

Enjoy!

However, what really gets confusing is what happens when you start talking about the zazzle affiliate program.

Zazzle members can make money in two ways:

1) by adding designs to Zazzle and putting those designs on products and providing a markup (similar to how CafePress works). The amount you make depends on how much you mark up items.

2) by promoting any of the products on Zazzle and referring people that buy them, similar to a classic affiliate program.  Zazzle will pay 15% of the sale price to whoever refers the items.

There is a new module on Squidoo that lets you include Zazzle items on your lens. The module has two input options, one for the username and the other for keywords to search within that username’s gallery. I’ve found that including a username is almost mandatory to get any meaningful results to show up in the module. The benefits of promoting your own Zazzle items with this module is pretty obvious, but what about promoting other peoples art?

There is a significant thread over on Squid U (which recently got redesigned so you should check it out if you haven’t been by in a while) where I discuss whether Zazzle modules will generate commissions using the 15% payout affiliate program. 

Ideally, any item you put in a zazzle module would earn the 15% commission if it sells by someone clicking through. Squidoo and the lensmaster would then split this commission in the same way they split eBay, Amazon, and Cafepress commissions. 

In fact, this would provide a tremendous amount of value considering that actually using the Zazzle affiliate program to generate links to products is a gigantic pain in the butt in my opinion. (and I look at a lot of affiliate programs)

Unfortunately, Megan apparantly has stated that currently the functionality of the affiliate program is not a part of the Zazzle module. This is really quite dissapointing as I had very high hopes for using it in a ton of my lenses as another revenue stream. My artistic ability is probably a negative value so I can’t really create any Zazzle designs, but they would be a blast to promote.

Hopefully this will become a feature available in the near future, but until that time it is going to be tough to justify the use of the Zazzle module to non-zazzle lensmasters over the CafePress module. 

I do hope it gets resolved though, as I really enjoyed using the Zazzle site and I thought the designs overall were of a much higher quality than Cafepress.

A lot of Squidoo lensmasters seem to occaisionally forget the real depth that is in the module selection area of Squidoo.

Next time you are in the module picker, go to the tab labeled ‘Search (A-Z)’. Just type a space into the search bar and it search. You will get a look at every module that squidoo has to offer (you can sometimes even find ones that haven’t been ‘officially’ released yet ).

I realize that many of the modules seem narrow or not very valuable to you, but you can find some real gems if you look closely. In fact, a lot of the evergreen modules are buried deep in the module pot and not out for display on the front few tabs.

Go do some module mining and get impressed by the breadth of Squidoo all over again.

Bonus Points: What is an obscure / uncommon module that you use all the time (or at least more often than most)?

The Feed My Search module uses FeedMySearch.com to pull relevant news, blog posts, and search engine results into lenses. It works similar to the google blog search module which is also evergreen.

Uses -

I tried out the new module on some lenses I was making this weekend and had some mixed results. It seemed as if the module timed out about 40% of the time returning no results. However, when results were returned, I found the news and blog search results to be more relevant than the google Blog Search module.

Whenever squidoo gets new modules, I like to take them for a test drive to see how they perform. On several of the lenses I used the Feed My Search module on, they were indexed very quickly compared to other lenses I made this weekend (less than 24 hours for some). While the sample size was very small (I only made like 7 lenses this past weekend) I think that the initial results are promising.

I’m going to use Feed My Search going forward for the next few weeks and see how it does. If it seems to be performing well and has a minimum of timeouts, I may even go back and replace the hundreds of google Blog Search modules I have on my lenses. This is a big project though so I’m not going to undertake it lightly.

Have you seen any new modules lately? I try to keep an eye on the new module releases but I’ll be the first to say I miss them every once in a while. If you let me know about one I haven’t heard of I’ll credit you with the find and do a write-up / analysis of it.

New Week and New Modules, make some new lenses!

I’ve made rough drafts of a few new modules in the past week or so and met with some pretty good success. I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on how squidoo has the system set up. I’m not a superuser with APIs, but I’ve been able to put some things together that I think are pretty neat…

Now I’m stuck on what modules to make. Anyone have any ideas? Wasn’t there a ‘most requested modules’ list out there somewhere? anyone know that link to that lens?

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!

The Real Facts about Plexo Modules:

1. Votes are pooled across all versions of the plexo. If you grab a plexo module from one lens and drop it on another, votes on either lens will add to the vote count on every lens that plexo is on.
2. The Lens Owner earns Plexo Revenue. After checking and double checking the Amazon Associates IDs on the plexos, I’m almost positive that the owner of the lens that the plexo sits on generates the Amazon revenue.
3. Plexo Modules are Evergreen. Plexo Modules are indexable by the Search Engines.

Now, for a long time I thought that Plexos could be useful on Squidoo if you had a really viral list or something but for the average user they just didn’t have the user base to really do anything cool. In fact, I often see Plexo modules out there in Squid Land all by themselves looking lonely. Unless those lonely plexos are on a superstar lens getting thousands of hits a week (and some are) there simply are not enough visitors, much less other squidoo users who are going to come ‘grab’ your plexo. This method of ‘build a plexo and leave’ just doesn’t work that well. Sure, you get some benefit from it, but it’s not super duper cool.

However, unlike most of Squidoo that pulls data from other sources for the visitor to read, Plexos both pull (from Amazon, your list, YouTube, etc.) as well as push (votes, links to your lensmaster page) data around Squidoo.

I can think of a few ways that this can actually be super powerful and has been way under-utilized. I think I’ll save some of my thoughts for my next issue of the Captain Squid Newsletter

Plexos: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em ?

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…

It basically pulls a 5 item plexo list from Amazon with items that are ‘related’ to the item you give the module to start with.

Why this is awesome:

• More SE friendly instant generated content.
• Adds a great ‘exit path’ for visitors to your product themed lenses that may want to look at something else.
• They round off the end of a lens well.
• I think they are easier to edit than the classic Amazon Plexo module

Throw some up on your lenses and let me know how they do!

-The Captain