Blogging My Online Activities
A couple of posts ago I wrote about keeping track of my lens changes in a spreadsheet format; of course, that night I received a Squidoo Google alert that contained a post from Susan Villas Lewis about all of the changes she did for the day right on her Squidtop blog. While writing about the changes she has made to her lens she is also linking to the lens that she made the changes to, giving the lens another important backlink. I immediately thought that this was a great idea.
I seem to be losing hours on end lately just checking stats and finding cool things to implement on my blogs, Squidoo lenses and other websites; but I don’t seem to be taking any action on anything which then comes down to lost time in my opinion. When I’m ready to take action on these things I won’t be able to find them again, even though I’ve bookmarked the link. So, I’ve decided to use my Squidtop blog to keep track of what I did online for the day. I know, nothing exciting, but at least I’ll know where my time is going and I’ll be building some backlinks. When you work a day job that you are trying to get out of desperation is not a good thing and I think my lost time has been a result of working in desperation mode.
Do you keep an online log of your activities in order to stay on track? What do you do? If you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.
Tags: lens changes, Squidoo, Squidtop, Time Management
Link to Your Own Website
If you are selling on eBay there is a good chance that you are also selling on your own website. The majority of my online sales go through eBay right now, even though I’ve had a website up since I started selling online. I’m just starting to get to the finer details of SEO so my website is not found real easily through the SERPs. Chances are you may be in the same boat as well. Why not bypass eBay all together and link directly to the products on your own site through Squidoo.
I started doing this sometime last year with my UFO Extraterrestrials lens and it has worked well for me. Squidoo is the #1 referrer to The Software Castle right after Google. So, even though Google is not picking up my product pages in the dog eat dog world of online sales, it is picking up my Squidoo lenses. I also offer products from other sellers on lenses like this for a couple of reasons:
- I’m not the biggest guy on the block so I understand why customers may not want to purchase from me.
- I may not have the cheapest price on a game.
- If they are not going to purchase the game from me then I may as well earn a commission from the sale.
Do you currently link to the products on your own website? If not, why?
Tags: drive sales, product linking, Squidoo
Keeping track of Lens Changes
My lens, Nintendo DS Skins, has just taken off in the Google rankings and while I am extremely happy about this, I can’t put my finger on any actions that I took to help this happen. While I could just give it up to luck, I’m sure that this is not the case. I am a person that needs to know the reason why, so I’ve decided to do something about it.
In order to avoid confusion and questioning the next time something great like this occurs, I have decided to keep track of all the changes I’ve made to a lens and backlinks that I’ve created on a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is nothing complex, just a simple setup with the name of the lens at the top and the date it was created. The next row is my URL and a couple of rows down my 4 column titles of Date, Update to Lens, Backlink Title, and URL of where the link was placed. 
I know I can download and XML file of my lens after it’s updated, but that still won’t solve the problem of tracking my links, which are very important for SEO. This spreadsheet is very new and will evolve as time goes on; as this happens, I’ll keep you posted.
Do you keep track of changes and promotions for your lenses? Feel free to share your methods, if you don’t mind.
Tags: Lens Backlinks, Promotion, Squidoo
Social Networking and Squidoo
We all have different ways of promoting lenses and I just wanted to get an idea of what other people do. I have recently started actively participating in the Twitter Community and I set up feeds from my three blogs and Squidoo using the RSS Feed for Lensmasters built by fluffanutta at Squidutils.com.
During the last couple of days I have become extremely conscious about how many times I update a lens due to the feed automatically pulling every update. Today for example, I made a bunch of changes to my Brett Favre lens and then realized that I wanted to add another module. Instead of going back to do it today and tweeting again, I made a note to myself to take care of this tomorrow morning. Am I being to paranoid? I don’t know, but I want to make sure that I am not only using Twitter for promoting my lenses and blogs. I want to be a member of the community as well. I feel if I’m constantly feeding my lenses down the throats of everyone, members will stop following me. So, what you do do besides tweet about your lenses to promote them?
Two things that I do with every lens and blog that I build is submit them to the following websites: Site Neighbors and ClaimID. ClaimID allows me to group everything I write and build on the web all in one place and I can also bookmark links about myself there as well; I haven’t found much, so I don’t worry too much there. Both of these sites give me backlinks to my lens as well as another chance to be found in Google search. I have seen it where a Site Neighborhood for one of my lenses shows up before my lens at Google, most of the time I am listed at the top of the “hood” so a user lands on my page anyways.
So, what do you do in order to promote your lenses? Do you submit to every site you can think of? Do you have any other ideas you’d like to share?
Tags: backlinks, Social Networking, Squidoo
Linking to eBay Store Items
To people that have owned eBay stores, it is no secret that eBay is making it more difficult to promote your store on eBay. I’m not going to go into a ton of background because this blog is about Squidoo and not eBay.
If you use RSS feeds direct from eBay or even the eBay module available to you on Squidoo, you may have noticed something peculiar; eBay does not allow store items to be included in RSS feeds, even if you state “store inventory only” in your search. Take this search for example: “Driver Infant Packers Jersey“. 
When you search for this item you’ll see two items available for sale, now go to the RSS feed for this eBay search and you’ll notice that nothing is available.
This is extremely frustrating when building a niche lens; it’s so niche that eBay sellers do not list these in core listings very often. However, this could still be a good item to feature on your lens; if it’s hard to find find there’s a good chance that Google may pull up your lens in a search for this item. On my NFL Infant Jerseys lens I decided to experiment a little bit by hard linking to store items like this. It takes a couple of extra steps, but I think it is well worth it for a couple of reasons:
- This could be a hard to find item and offering it for sale on your lens could set you apart from the rest of the crowd.
- eBay store sellers work hard and eBay is making it more difficult for store sellers to have their items found. Hardlinking may not only get me a commissions, but it could lead to a sale for a fellow eBay store owner.
- Google spiders do not read RSS feeds or the items for sale in the Squidoo eBay module, they should read your hard linked items though. Of course, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.
- I am forced to check these links once in a while to see if they are still valid and add links to new store items as needed. Doing this will force me to edit the lens and re-publish which will help my lensrank and keep my content fresh for Google.
Like I said earlier, this takes a couple of extra steps, but it’s not difficult.
- Login to Squidoo and edit the lens you’d like to work on.
- Login to the eBay Partner Network, go to “Tools”, and then “Link Generator”.
- Search for the item you are looking for on eBay. Click on the item title and right next to the title you will see a 12 digit number. Copy this number.
- Go back to the eBay Partner Network, choose “link type” as “Item Number”. Use the program you are applying (mine are 99.9% eBay US). Choose your campaign name or ID and then “generate link”. Since Squidoo does not allow Javascript, you will need to copy the URL and create a Hyperlink for your item. I won’t go into detail on this here, but this Basic HTML for Squidoo lens explains this process quite well. Feel free to add a comment if you have a question.
- Save your module and publish; Whew you’re done !!!!!!!
Of course, this post is written under the assumption that you are a member of the eBay Partner Network. If you are not, you should be; what do you have to lose by trying to become a member?
