I haven’t published that trick anywhere else, so it’s worth checking out. PotPieGirl runs a great marketing and SEO blog and talks a lot about actual implementation of theories you hear so much about.

Thanks for the chance to guest post PotPie Girl! If anyone else would like me to guest post, please feel free to contact me. It was a lot of fun and I’d definitely do guest posting again.

-The Captain

The Real Facts about Plexo Modules:

1. Votes are pooled across all versions of the plexo. If you grab a plexo module from one lens and drop it on another, votes on either lens will add to the vote count on every lens that plexo is on.
2. The Lens Owner earns Plexo Revenue. After checking and double checking the Amazon Associates IDs on the plexos, I’m almost positive that the owner of the lens that the plexo sits on generates the Amazon revenue.
3. Plexo Modules are Evergreen. Plexo Modules are indexable by the Search Engines.

Now, for a long time I thought that Plexos could be useful on Squidoo if you had a really viral list or something but for the average user they just didn’t have the user base to really do anything cool. In fact, I often see Plexo modules out there in Squid Land all by themselves looking lonely. Unless those lonely plexos are on a superstar lens getting thousands of hits a week (and some are) there simply are not enough visitors, much less other squidoo users who are going to come ‘grab’ your plexo. This method of ‘build a plexo and leave’ just doesn’t work that well. Sure, you get some benefit from it, but it’s not super duper cool.

However, unlike most of Squidoo that pulls data from other sources for the visitor to read, Plexos both pull (from Amazon, your list, YouTube, etc.) as well as push (votes, links to your lensmaster page) data around Squidoo.

I can think of a few ways that this can actually be super powerful and has been way under-utilized. I think I’ll save some of my thoughts for my next issue of the Captain Squid Newsletter

Plexos: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em ?

I’ve finally found a way to convert my training videos to a format that would upload on YouTube. If anyone is interested in seeing them again, or putting them on your lenses (hint, hint )� They can be found under Captain Squidoo.

The Next series of videos will be on using CJ to maximize your Squidoo Earnings. From the feedback I’ve gotten, this seems to be a subject area that many people wish to know more about.

The Newsletter Subscribers will get the first crack at the first video ‘Commission Junction Orientation’ , so make sure you’ve signed up. (psst.. the form is at the top of the left sidebar)

-The Captain

What is your goal when someone visits your lens? To learn something new? To buy a product or service? To get them to go visit your store?

How many of you build lenses specifically to send traffic to YouTube? Probably not many. However, many lenses do that unintentionally just because lensmasters don’t change the default setting.

The Squidoo YouTube module and the YouTube plexo allow you to choose two options: Thumbnail View (Small, static screenshots of the movie) or Full Size (full movies set into the page). The kicker is that if the visitor clicks on a thumbnail they are whisked off to YouTube and its many distractions instead of staying on your lens that was carefully designed to sell them something.

I call this ‘click leak’. Whenever visitors are leaving your lens through links that don’t benefit you or the visitor in any significant way, it’s important to look at ways to stop it. If someone visits your lens and can click on and watch a movie, they will often scroll around and click on other things and read more etc. while the movie is playing.

The Captain Says:

YouTube doesn’t need your traffic as much as you do. Put full length YouTube vids in your lens instead of thumbnails. This increases visitor retention and click out quality for your lenses.

-The Captain