Some Fun Facts about my time on Squidoo:

I began using Squidoo right around when there was 100,000 lenses.. Now I think there’s close to a million.

I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 lenses. While I’ve slown down my output a bit since moving to Singapore (so much to do and so little time!) I’m hoping to maintain my rate of better than a lens a day for the foreseeable future. It’s too profitable and fun not too!

I’ve had multiple lenses earn over $1,000 in a single month.

I’ve had a nice handful of lenses earn over $100 in a single month.

I’ve got hundreds of lenses that have only ever earned pennies. (and that’s okay! Success with no failure is pretty boring..)

I was an original Giant Squid and Giant Squid 100 member.

I started Squidtop – a Blog network for lensmasters that is building up a nice community. I’ve got plans to make this even more awesome in the near future, if you want to help, let me know!

The Isle of Squid lens directory has grown to include thousands of hand reviewed lenses representing some of the best that Squidoo has to offer. This is another project that I’m hoping to expand in coming months and if you want to help, let me know!

I’ve met some amazing people from not only across the US but across the entire world. Some of you folks are truly amazing!

Posted 1,000+ times in Squid U…

and so much more I can’t think of right now…

Here’s to another 2 years and beyond of Making Money and Having Fun!!!

The front page of the site is a list of the most recent posts about squidoo that is updated in real time. However, your blog isn’t automatically added, it takes about 4 seconds to do and I highly recommend that you submit your blog to squidoosphere if you blog about squidoo. I can finally take off my google alert in my RSS reader for ’squidoo’ and just subscribe to the feed instead!

I currently have an RSS feed of all the Squidtop blogs on my to-do list but until then you should definitely go submit your blog to Squidoosphere if you blog about Squidoo.

The entire interface was upgraded on the backend to use the wordpress 2.x style engine over the previous 1.x engine.

The front end has changed drastically with some major overhauls and feature updates that should make users really happy.

You can now ‘Squidtop Surf‘ and be taken to a random Squidtop blog straight from the homepage.

A larger selection of themes are available for users and you can use more customization than with the previous design to really make your blog your own.

Several of the plugins that allow Squidtop to be super useful for getting Squidoo News and posts found by people and search engines alike were re-written to run a bit faster and cleaner.

A new anti-spam suite was also installed that should help the permanent wave of spam that flows everywhere.

If you haven’t checked Squidtop out yet or if you’ve been thinking about starting a blog but were looking for a dead simple way to do it, check it out.

What other improvements do you think Squidtop could make?

Zach from SquidUber has been an awesome person to work with as well. If you haven’t checked out his squidoo blog then you are missing out on some pretty good stuff.

Pretty cool how if you give people a platform to talk about things they love, it’s easy to find others who want to play .

Thank you all and have an excellent weekend.

-The Captain

For those of you who are curious, Squidtop is a place for Squidoo Lensmasters to Blog about their lenses (or whatever else they want!) without fear of being banned for having ‘too many links to one site’ as Wordpress and Blogger are wont to do.

The community is growing quite nicely and we’ll pass the 200 blog mark this week! The posts are indexed quite quickly by google and are another great way for you to promote your lenses and yourself.

If you haven’t already, make sure and stop by and read some of the great blogs over there. You can get lost for hours at a time! I know I do…

P.S. Thanks so much to all you lensmasters that help us keep Squidtop free of spam and a fun place for everyone to go! Your participation is greatly appreciated and amazingly awesome as usual.

Overall income saw a bit of a drop this month, but not the end of the world by any means as I had a few new affiliate programs start to pan out after going through a bit of a dry spell for finding new ideas. I actually have a new project that I hatched yesterday that I might share with you folks once it pans out.. we’ll see.

May 2008 Earnings: $1,575.64

In April I was trying out some things with PPC and other marketing methods. While the volume was a little higher, the return I was getting on the PPC wasn’t worth the added risk in my opinion. I may give PPC another shot when the mood strikes me in the future, but not right now.

Earnings did increase by about 10% over March Squidoo earnings.

In other news, one of the Lensmasters that Haunts our Chat Room, Zach, has started a new blog about squidoo – Squidüber. He’s off to a pretty good start, you should drop by and see what he’s talking about or snag his RSS feed. Zach is the co-creator of SquidTop with me and is good for bouncing new Squidoo ideas back and forth. Good luck on the new blog Zack!

I’m Proud to introduce SquidTop!

What is SquidTop?

Squidtop is a site that allows you to create your own blog to talk about your squidoo lenses, accomplishments, progress, or any other topic you desire. What’s unique about it is a custom interface that allows you to update your blog with short little posts like twitter/pownce updates like so:

There is also a fully featured back-end built on wordpress, allowing you to create in depth posts about whatever you would like!

Other Cool Features

Twitter Integration – Simply add your Twitter RSS feed to the ‘Options’ page in your admin area to display a list of your recent twitter posts.

Adsense Revenue Sharing - I designed a custom adsense revenue integration into the site. Your blogs receive 80% of the impressions while Squidtop receives the other 20% to cover hosting, maintentance, etc. To activate it, go to your options page and insert your google publisher ID and your ad_slot number so google can track it. That’s it! you’re all set up.

Recent News - The front page of Squidtop shows the most recent posts made on the site by any blogger. This means that when you post updates, you are visible front and center for all the Squidtop vistors to see!

How to Sign up for Squidtop

Just head over to www.Squidtop.com and click on the big blue sign-up button. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes before you can have your very own blog to talk about your lenses on!

What are you waiting for? Give it a try!

Let me know what you folks think and if there are any obvious improvements that you would like to see in the site.