Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Ok, folks after working my piratey butt off for the past few days I was able to finish updating my RSS feed generators for eBay. Here’s a few things I learned the hard way.
1. eBay’s reporting is still slow.
2. when eBay (or my generator or whatever) asks for your ‘Campaign ID’ , that is the 10-digit number of the campaign, not the name of the campaign that you gave it.
3. Currently, you HAVE to add some kind of tracking or the RSS feed won’t work. That’s not my doing, that’s straight from eBay.
4. The minimum payout for the eBay program is only $5, which is probably a smart move by eBay since it will probably draw a lot of smaller sellers to them.
5. EPN payouts to paypal do not have any fees associated with them.
I’m still working on some new tricks and such, but let me know how the new feed generator is working for you!
Since this is the last Squidoo News edition of the month, I thought I’d wrap up some of the exciting new additions to the world of Squidoo in February. As the end of the month draws near, make sure you spruce up your lenses one last time for that April payout!
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?
I’ve been trying to pound out some lenses today and have been struggling (as usual) with the unwieldy size of my dashboard. Having 300 lenses listed in one place is great for my ego, but not for getting anything productive done. Opening multiple accounts doesn’t really solve much but forcing me to remember more logins and passwords (as if I don’t have enough of those already!).
That being said, here’s how I would fix the dashboard:
- Once you hit a certain number of lenses (50,100?) the dashboard would automatically change to a new format. HQ could afford to make the new dash more feature intensive because many fewer people would be using it, allowing the Squid Servers to keep up.
- This Dash would allow me to one-click publish my lenses. ( a pipe dream but it had to be said).
- Ability to edit keywords, title tags and republish without leaving the Dashboard.
- Sort by primary tag. Why? Lots of reasons.� Read The Importance of the Primary Tag by Fluffanutta for an overview.
- One Screen lens creation. I absolutely hate having to load 4 screens to create a lens. After doing it over 300 times I pretty much have those little sayings memorized. Creating lenses from the dashboard functionality would add extra bonus points.
- Ability to define groups and folders for lenses. Easily view groups and folders of lenses. The Dashboard Extender by Magicality currently does this, but the load times are so horrific for a large group of lenses that it’s not worth turning on.
- Advanced sorting and search functionality. I want to be able to view all of my lenses that have less than X visitors and fall between X,XXX and XX,XXX Lensrank. This is huge for maintaining a large group of lenses and difficult to do currently.
- Access to the Lens RSS feed as a link from the Dashboard. Why don’t we already have this?
- Lens specific earnings reports by day. I want to see which lenses made sales yesterday and through which affiliates.
- Aggregated click through reporting. How many clicks did I send to ebay and amazon yesterday? What lenses did they come from?
- Ability to create Module Templates. I almost always select ‘I want to do my own thing’ and then load in the exact same modules, especially when I’m doing a group of similar lenses. The ability to roll my own pre-set module groupings would be amazing.
- Back up all lenses as a ZIP file.
- Have a ‘Saved Plexo’ list. Goes back to creating similar lenses. Keeping another window open for the sole purpose of grabbing the same plexo over and over is easy to fix.
- Easier Co-Brand creation. Instead of going to each co-brand home page to create a lens, how about a drop down on the dashboard (or new one-page lens making screen) that lets you select your co-brand?
Perhaps I’m not using squidoo as intended, but I am more concerned about overall performance and performance of clusters/themes of lenses than I am with the performance of any one lens. Before I go and build 20 lenses to flesh out an idea, I like to have enough data to tell if that idea is going to make money and scales well. Up to now, doing that is kind of painful just for the number of screens I have to load and the amount of manual calculation I have to do.
What would you add? what’s on your Squidoo Dashboard Wishlist?
