For those of you that haven’t seen much of fluffanutta’s work, he has several tools that are absolutely essential for managing lenses and getting the most out of squidoo.

I use all of these tools, and all are currently free to use.

• Firefox Add-on for Squidoo – This extension uses Greasemonkey to show some cool summaries, graphs, shortcuts and more on your dashboard, workshop, and individual lens stat pages. It consumes almost no system resources and saves me tons of time on a regular basis. If you haven’t updated your version of the addon recently, click over real quick and get the latest version, it’s fantastic!
• Squidoo Toolbar - Can you say one-click login into each of your accounts? This toolbar does this and more. Note: I’m currently working with fluffanutta to bring even more little tools and tricks to the toolbar so make sure and grab it so you are ready to roll when we release some of this stuff!
• SquidUtils – You can’t forget where it all begins. SquidUtils has everything from table makers, amazon links and stat tracking, ping services, and TONS of other good stuff. If you haven’t been by in a while, it’s definitely worth spending some time looking around there as there is a ton of new squidoo tools there.

I had the pleasure of helping to beta test the new toolbar over the last few weeks with Fluffanutta and I can say that it’s spectacular with stuff like the ability to switch between multiple accounts instantly, instant creation of any cobranded lens you want, and a ton more.

Yea, it’s free too.

Bonus: Send me your Review of the new Toolbar or post it in the comments and I’ll take the best ones and post them on Captain Squid for everyone to see (with attribution to your blog or lenses, of course).

The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008

Can Squidoo Make you $500 in one day? Yep. - This was a post to mark the first time that I ever earned $500 in one day with Squidoo. My Holiday season hasn’t been quite as juicy since then, but that was somewhat expected with the current content mix of my lens portfolio.

The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters – This tip is a bit more motivational and attitude related than any specific thing you can do as a process to succeed on Squidoo. However, you guys obviously liked it as this was the second most visited post of the year. I’ll have to write more posts like these in 2009.

One Lens, One Month, $1,000 – This is another earnings milestone post, marking the first time that I earned $1,000 from a single lens in one month. To date, I’ve had 2 different lenses earn that much in a month so it can in fact be done and is not an isolated incident.

Making Money with Pepperjam – This popular squidoo affiliate marketing post gives a step by step guide on creating a lens to promote a Pepperjam Network affiliate product. Don’t miss the second part of the series where we talk about adding products to a lens from a Pepperjam Advertiser.

Don’t Listen to Bunk SEO Advice – Perhaps one of my personal favorites, I rail against the dumb labor intensive SEO that doesn’t really produce good results and try to shine a little light on some of the facts around employing good SEO practices in order to get the most bang for your buck with your time. When you have a couple hundred lenses, time becomes quite valuable and wasting it on things that don’t work is simply silly.

The Captain’s Personal Favorite Squidoo Posts of 2008

Here are a few  Squidoo nuggets that I think flew under the radar but have some valuable information that is worth reading.

A Guide to Squidoo Income – A lengthy post detailing the nuances of Squidoo’s income sharing structure and when payment takes place for various types of earnings. I hear this question so often that I had to put something out there I could refer people to.

8 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Squidoo – Get these if you haven’t already. I still use every one on that list constantly. I may expand this to 10 plugins next year sometime but these 8 are enough to really reduce wasted time when you are building lenses.

Using Tags on Squidoo – This was a three part series I wrote in April and May. Since Squidoo changes so fast, a few small points may be out of date here and there but I’m still a firm believer in using this strategy to increase lens visibility. Start with an overview of link flow, then learn a little more about how Squidoo tag pages (used to) work and how they still do before finishing up with learning how to leverage the ‘Discovery’ or ‘Explore More’ box on lenses.

Those are the 10 best blog posts from Captain Squid this year according to you the reader and how I was feeling about my personal favorites this morning.

Anyone else have any favorites I missed?

If you were going through withdrawal, download the updated squidoo DE here. See the full Squid U forum thread for more details.

Essentially, you can create a firefox bookmark that allows you to type ‘tag search+tag+here‘ into your Firefox address bar and instantly pull up the related squidoo tag page for that search term.

This is a great way to avoid having ’stranded’ tag pages that your lens links to.

Thanks for the great tip Drew!

Feeds are limited to 5 results – The full tool offers 50+ results (basically unlimited)

2 of the 5 results are ‘Sponsored’ – 2 of the 5 results for the free trial contain my PID. This means that clicks on those links will result in commissions for me. Clicks on the other 3 links are commissions for you. Over time, this averages out to 40% of the results, which is still less than the 50% that Squidoo takes. The full version has Zero ‘Sponsored’ links.

That’s it! Besides that, the tool works exactly the same, and can still make you more money with your eBay modules than you are currently making.

Give the Free Ebay Affiliate Feed Generator a try and let me know what you think!

-Cap