Looks pretty sweet.

Pirates love Points. Wonder who will be first to level 80…

– The top earner made more than $1300 for the month.
– Hundreds of people earned $100 or more.
– More than a thousand people earned more than $10.
– Lensmasters donated more than $5000 to the Squidoo Charity Fund.
– More than 90 people had 100 or more lenses all ranked in the top 100,000.
– 150+ people earned more than $10 each for charity.
– Dozens of lenses raised more than $100 for charity in just this one month alone.
– The top 5 earning charities supported by Squidoo in October were: Save the Children, CAER, ASPCA, Acumen Fund and Room to Read.
– A few of the most-sold eBay items on lenses in October included: halloween costumes, Christmas ornaments, crafting beads, zhu zhu pets, canon powershots, Coach shoes and bags, birthdaysupplies, Cuisinarts, Thanksgiving decorations, World of Warcraft Buring Crusade, Steampunk stuff, Wiis, pajamas, Nintendo DS games and skins, and even Kindles.

Original Post by Megan here

As I’m starting a new phase in my pirate life I’ve also decided to begin a new phase in my Squidoo life as well.

Now, in the past I’ve made several thousand dollars a month from Squidoo but with the demise of Ebay and various other affiliate programs that has fallen off somewhat.

However, I don’t believe for an instant that this means that you can’t make money (and have fun!) with Squidoo. So, I’ve decided to rededicate myself with a new Squidoo quest to prove that anyone can make a couple thousand bucks a month from Squidoo in a relatively short time.

We are going to see how long it takes to go from $0 to $2000 a month from Squidoo lenses.

Not using Squidoo to direct traffic to another site you have but instead using Squidoo lenses to make money directly.

It can be done, I’ve done it.

And we are going to do it again.

And I’m going to show you all how so you can do it too.

Tag pages are once again indexable by the major search engines. Fluffanutta has an exceptional review of the changes and why the newly indexable tag pages are good so I am not going to re-hash WHY this is good.

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a series of posts I’ve written in the past about how to take best advantage of tagging your lenses and how you can use it to focus and refocus attention, links, and traffic within your own little corner of the growing universe of Squidoo.

Techniques for Getting your Lens Indexed in the Search Engines -

• Why Links Matter for Indexing – A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level.
• Using Proper Tagging to Build Backlinks on Squidoo Lenses – How to conceptually view your lenses’ tags so they can be search friendly and build links at the same time.

Squidoo Tag Theory -

• Visualizing Link Flow on Lenses – Where do the links on lenses go to and where do they come from? This post was written when discovery boxes and Groups were still around. I think the fact that they aren’t around (really) anymore only increases the importance of the remaining factors..
• The Magic of Squidoo Tag Pages - If you read one post on this list this might be the one. It answers the question of why paying attention to your tags matters.
• Why the Discovery Box used to be cool – This is post is not really applicable any more with the current state of the Discovery Box, but I think the principles are worth noting in order to get a better overall view of all the different ways tags are used internally at Squidoo.
• How to dominate a Tag Page – A few examples of how having well crafted tags can help you to become the leader in any topical conversation on Squidoo.. and potentially across the web.

As a special follow up treat, if you can’t seem to watch the videos in your browser for whatever reason you can download a zip file of the CJ-Squidoo Training. (it’s about 35 MB so it takes a bit)

As a quick re-cap, here are all the lessons we’ve learned in the past few days:

An Introduction to Commission Junction

Applying for Programs on Commission Junction

Adding affiliate products to your Squidoo Lens

Using Commission Junction’s reporting tools for maximum benefit

Remember, this training is really only a blueprint illustrating one way you can use an affiliate program on Squidoo. Most of the concepts translate pretty easily across all the major networks as well, the reporting and application process is usually quite similar.

I hope you all enjoyed it and stay tuned for some more fun posts this week!

I’m a huge believer in analytics and collecting as much actionable data as possible from my web properties. CJ lets you do that in a way that is very powerful once you learn how to use it.

Commission Junction Reporting Tutorials:

Performance Reporting with Commission Junction

Transaction Reporting with Commission Junction

If you are catching this series for the first time, make sure and check out the earlier videos so you’ll have an idea what I’m talking about here :

Introduction to CJ and Squidoo

Applying for an Affiliate Program on Commission Junction

Adding Commission Junction Links to Squidoo Lenses

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up the series with a few special downloads for you guys so stay tuned!

The video covers how to insert products, descriptions, and images into your lenses in an SEO-friendly manner.

The video tutorial can be found here:

Adding Commission Junction Products to Squidoo lenses - CJ training Part 3

Also make sure and check out the first two posts in the series:

An Introduction to using CJ and Squidoo

Applying for Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction

you must be accepted as an affiliate by a company before you can begin earning money from them. The second installment walks you through applying for an affiliate program and provides some helpful tips for getting your application approved quickly.

Here’s the video:

How to Apply to Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction -CJ training part 2

And in case you are just joining us, the first post in the series can be found here:

Using CJ and Squidoo to make $1,000 a month

In a nutshell, they tell you how to build a kick butt affiliate lens using a third party affiliate program like Commission Junction. It’s close to 2 hours long all together and covers everything from how to apply to programs (and get into ones most people can’t) all the way to tracking sales down to the lens.

This is pretty much the blueprint I used to go from $10 or so a month on Squidoo to breaking $1,000 a month.

I Reached that level a while ago and have started using some other strategies since then in addition to these but I think you guys and gals will really find this series helpful.

Disclaimer: I recorded this video in 2008 so some of the screenshots are a bit outdated. The concepts are still perfectly valid though.

I’ll release the entire series over the next few days, here’s the first one, let me know what you guys think!

Commission Junction Training Video Overview -  Video 1

I think this is a massive improvement on the front page and it allows you to easily scan the first 5 lenses in each Squidoo category.

However, after showing it around a bit I heard a little criticism and I tend to agree with what I’ve heard. As you scroll down the new homepage, it’s very difficult to focus on any specific category.

There’s a lot of text that isn’t separated out in any appreciable way.

Here’s the two ways I think you can fix it.

1) add a tiny logo next to each category like a little skyscraper for business or a picture of a flower for Home and Gardening.

2) make the background of the title for each category a bit darker or find some other way to separate each category graphically.

Besides those minor gripes, I think it’s a great idea and I really hope that Squidoo continues to tweak and refine it over the next few months.

What do you guys think?