I’m super excited to announce that I have taken a position with a company called the American Bureau of Shipping and I will be shipping out in the next 30 days or so for training in either Singapore or South Korea.

By the end of the summer I should know where the Captain and his Pirate Queen will be planted for the next phase of their life adventure.

As of right now it looks like I will either remain in Singapore or South Korea or go to China or Dubai.

I think the opportunity to do something like this is a once in a lifetime shot and when something like that comes along you either have to step up and walk the walk or just go back to whatever is comfortable.

However, all of you guys may see some continued lighter posting (trying to get a couple good posts in a week right now) while I try and sell my house, cars, and worldly possessions over the next 6 weeks or so while beginning training in Houston at the same time.

I DO have some cool new resources and toys planned for all you lensmasters out there who are looking to get a leg up. I don’t have a release date yet, but it is in the works and will be a giant pile of piratey awesomeness.

If you really need to get in touch with me, the Chat room or emailing me is probably your best bet.

Alternatively, comments are always welcomed and read!

I saw this while driving today and couldn’t help but start thinking about how destructive it can be to create a product that is often bought soley on price.

If you compete on price you better come ready to play, because the big boys will and it’s a lot easier for Wal-Mart to offer a lower price than you if that’s what it comes down to.

However, if you are offering value, service, expedience, or some other quality that your customer values more highly than price (and believe me, these qualities exist and are used effectively every day) then you can compete with anyone in the world, regardless of size.

Small words, big meaning. People get caught up a lot in ‘Squidoo is going to make me rich’ or ‘my blogs are going to make me rich’ or ‘my favorite GPT site / survey / ebook is going to make me rich’.

So far I’ve only found one thing that really set me firmly on the road to succeeding with anything in life.

Myself.

I think Squidoo is an equalizer and a differentiator at the same time. There are some lensmasters that build hundreds and hundreds of lenses with nothing but default settings and no unique content or insight of any kind and expect Squidoo to do all the work for them. There are others that spend all of their time on one or two lenses and expect to make wild fame, fortune, and riches off of 2 pieces of content that they constantly tweak.

Learn to build good lenses. This is done by building lenses. A lot of them. However, if you keep repeating the same thing over and over and over you aren’t learning anything. You have to try different techniques, topics, angles, etc. to find what works. I have probably 100+ lenses that get no traffic at all. none. zip. Were those lenses a waste of my time? Not at all. In fact, those are probably some of the most valuable lenses I have built because each one of them taught me something new. Without all those stubbed toes, I wouldn’t be getting ever closer to finding the right module combinations, topics, promotion methods, and little tricks and tweaks that work best for me.

Work. This is the difference between mindless repetition of anything you do and truly putting forth an effort worth talking about. Work is often associated with a negative connotation but that’s probably a result of people associating what they do every day when they go to ‘work’. Work is not a place, it is an action. A good action because it means you are putting forth effort. Effort + Knowledge = results. Every Time.

Scale. Perhaps another good name for this would be Focus. If you find something that works, figure out ways to duplicate that success. This can be the most challenging part of succeeding at anything (Squidoo or not) but I think it’s almost the most rewarding. You don’t achieve Scale when you can achieve excellence on demand. You achieve scale when you can help others achieve excellence on demand in ways that help everyone succeed.

Repeat. Once you conquer one mountain, it becomes a mole hill. One lens is a triumphant accomplishment when you have only one. Your first penny earned. Your first comment. Your first rating. Your first visit from google. Then it becomes the first 50 lenses, the first 100 visitors, the first $10 or $100 you make. It doesn’t ‘end’, it just changes.

I meet lensmasters all the time that say ‘i cant <insert thing here usually relating to traffic or ranking>’. I ask them how many lenses they have built and what is working on the others. Virtually every time, the answers are not very many and nothing is working because they are all the same. I’ll then tell them to go try and build a lens a day for a week, even give them ideas and module templates and affiliate program recommendations. Sometimes they do it and come back for more but usually i never hear from them again.

The ones that do return have usually learned something incredibly important. They’ve learned that challenging yourself to learn new things isn’t as bad as you remembered it in school and in fact it’s pretty rewarding.

I’ll admit it’s an imperfect world and it’s never the right time to start. But until you put your imperfect butt into imperfect gear and get the party rolling, it’s going to be hard to effect change for yourself or your cause.

oh, and I have a secret tip that if you just repeat it over and over and don’t even think about changing anything it will make you $47,000 a second. While I’m at it I’ve got some houses that you can buy for zero money down and never make a payment ever and you will be able to flip for millions in days. Check out my new site on all these great deals.

Here’s what I mean:

Pebbles - Earnings I would classif y as pebbles can be one of two things. They are usually moderate to large amounts that are earned infrequently (i.e. $15 at a time and some months you have 0-1 and some months you have 5) or smaller amounts that are reasonably reliable but not a sure thing (i.e. $5 commissions that you steadily have between 5-15 a month) . Over time, pebbles will grow into rocks or disappear completely. I don’t see ‘pebble’ type earnings turn into sand very often.

Sand - Small, consistent earnings that you can count on to some extent every month. I would classify Squidoo adsense earnings as ’sand’ to some extent since you have a rough idea of what you will make each month. The amount you make from any one source of sand will often have a cap (i.e. lens payout tiers, etc). Sand can form a very solid foundation, but like sand, you need a lot of grains or sources before it adds up to much.

Rocks – Rocks are awesome. Big fat commissions that come regularly every month like clockwork. Hard to achieve and they can unexpectedly switch to pebbles and become inconsistent. Rocks should always be something you are striving for with at least a few of your revenue sources. however, if you have nothing but rocks, losing one affiliate program or ranking can mean financial disaster for your earnings.

Each of the three different types can be useful for making some bucks online or off. using the best aspects of all three to counter some of the other weaknesses can be super powerful.

How’s your earnings profile? Lots of rocks, sand, or pebbles?

I received a mention in the Official Squidoo Blog about the new Hey! Monkeybrain! Squidoo Co-brand. Thanks for the HQ love gang!

The Captain announced the opening of the Captain’s Squidoo Training Center including the Commission Junction Training Videos. Also released was a Free eBay RSS feed generator, which I have received excellent feedback on. (Don’t worry, the original Free Lensbuilding 101 Training Videos are still there as well )

The Captain hit 300 lenses this month. Here’s the associated ridiculous dashboard screenshot.

March is looking like it will be a slightly slower month for me than my Blockbuster February Earnings.� That’s okay, as I’m still seeing positive trends in traffic. I didn’t have much in the way of� Valentine’s day marketing or lenses, which effectively cut my earnings to zero for a full week. Next year, I’ll be ready!

What’s your most Newsworthy Squidoo item from February?

Courtesy of WayBackMachine

If you click through, you can browse around the squidoo of early ‘06 a bit. Sometimes it’s good to look back on where things were in order to see how far you have come. More lenses have been built in the last 2 weeks than Squidoo had built in all of their first year. (granted, they were in Beta for pretty much all of it) . Looking back at the site, virtually all of the changes are for the better.

One constant about squidoo is change, which is a good thing. Do you have some lenses that just wallow on the bottom of your dashboard and don’t get any traffic? I know I have my fair share. As much as it pains you, crack those back open (even if it’s just one a day) and take a look. I bet you will be surprised at how much better you have gotten at making lenses since you made those old, dusty lenses. A few quick tweaks and you could easily be back on your way.

Another thing that changed? Looking at the Squidoo Top 100 lenses from Jan 2007, there were definitely some familiar names on the list. There were also a lot of people that kind of vanished into Squid History without a peep. The Lensmasters that are still here are doing pretty well for themselves and getting better every day..

Are you still going to be on Squidoo in Jan 2008? or will you be Squid History?