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Ebay - Squidoo Challenge Bonus Offer and Tips

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!

As many of you have probably heard, Squidoo is sponsoring a contest for eBay users masterminded by Giant Squid and Powerseller Katiyana. The Challenge? Build 10 lenses in 10 days from June 4 - June 17th about eBay. There are of course, lots of fabulous prizes and exposure up for grabs including an eBay Live spotlight by Seth Godin, Lens of the Day, and an iPod to the winner.

Are you not an eBay powerseller? Don’t be discouraged! If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on eBay you are eligible to attempt the Challenge. Not an eBay member yet? Sign Up, look around and start creating lenses based on your first eBay experiences!

This is a fantastic opportunity to show users how to build high quality lenses reasonably quickly. I’ve decided that I’m going to participate in the challenge as well. Not only am I going to make the 10 lenses, I’m going to break down each lens every day and talk about the little things I do to help lenses get more traffic and succeed.

Hopefully this way I can give you folks some good tips to use with other eBay lenses or with your own affiliate programs.

You aren’t going to want to miss a single one of these so make sure and subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail is available as well) here or by clicking the huge orange button at the top of the blog.

The Captain has decided that he is going to make a special offer to everyone that participates and completes the 10 day challenge.

Are you working on becoming a Giant Squid? Would you like to? Want some help getting there?

1. Follow along in the ten day challenge by building your own lenses each day.
2. Leave a comment here to say you are following along (and on each post each day with a link to your new lens if you wish).
3. I will personally mentor each lensmaster who completes the 10 day challenge for the next ten days, helping them to build 10 more ultra high quality lenses (that can make piles of $$ as well!).

Prediction

I bet there are less than 10 people that will take me up on this offer and be able to complete the initial 10 ebay lenses. However, for those that make it and what to learn exactly what it is I do, I’ll show you some extra sneaky tricks I’ve used to go from $300 a month from Squidoo to $2,000 a month since January :).

Oh yea, and each person that makes it through building all 20 lenses over the next 20 days, I will write a personal letter of recommendation on your behalf to HQ to get you Giant Squid status.

Who’s in?

Squidoo Tweets, Feeds, and other animal activities

I don’t know if squidoo has reached some kind of ‘next level’ or what, but there seems to be an explosion of new Squidoo blogs, people using twitter, and now friendfeed feeds of lensmasters.

Now, this captain sails a fast ship but things are obviously moving at breakneck speed.

Hold on to the ride and we’ll see what works :).

Squidoo Lensrank Algorigthm Updates Again

As tends to happen every 3 months or so, it appears that Squidoo HQ has again updated the special sauce that keeps Squidoo interesting, Lensrank.

The last lensrank ranking change brought us a much heavier weight placed on traffic and less placed on having a single star rating. This shifted focus towards bringing traffic to your Squidoo lens, and it worked.

Traffic to Squidoo has increased at a healthy clip the last few months, and the top 10,000 spots in LensRank have become a pretty competitive place to be, and HQ has rewarded lensmasters that have gotten there.

It appears that the rules have changed again. After moving to some new servers, there have been some bugs to work out of the system and HQ has been working very hard to do that. After yesterday’s LensRank update, there also appeared to be another fundamental shift in the way LensRank is calculated. Some people had lenses rise up the rankings, some had lenses fall, and for some I’ve talked to, they haven’t noticed much affect.

Note: The next little bit is purely my own speculation. HQ hasn’t confirmed any of this, neither has anyone else in the Squidoo community. This is solely conclusions (probably incorrect) that were drawn from looking at trends and patterns I saw emerge from my 300+ lenses. So take it for what you will.

From what I can tell, there are at least 20 different factors that can affect Lensrank in some way, so reverse-engineering the algorithm is not something that I have the time or inclination to do.

What I’ve seen

There appears to have been an overall heavier weighting on some factors relating to ‘lens quality’ such as:

• Age of lens
• # of modules
• # of ratings
• # angel blessings

I think that Traffic has remained heavily weighted, but the ‘threshold’ for it may have risen. An example would be that instead of more than X visitors having a solid boost on your LensRank Y visitors was needed. I saw the rankings of a lot of lenses with 0-20 visits a week get jumbled all over the charts, but the ones with 50 visits or more a week stayed pretty strong.

Source of traffic may also play a role, but I haven’t dug deep enough to find that one out yet…

Dashboard commissions don’t seem to matter a whole lot either way..

In short, building quality lenses with content that people want to read will make you money. I know, shocking, right?

Maybe I should change my name to Captain Obvious…