Posts Tagged ‘Squidoo’
Give a Fellow Lensmaster a Little Boost
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but cash earned from a sale on Squidoo seems to give a lens a little boost in lensrank for about a week. Squidoo isn’t just about making money, but it’s also about community and helping others. So, if you’d like to help a fellow lensmaster out next time you’re going to make a purchase at Amazon
- Find a lensmaster that you like and hopefully they have a lens supporting a charity you like.
- Click through one of their Amazon or other Squidoo module links. It doesn’t matter if they have featured the item you are looking for, just click through one of the links.
- Find what you are looking for and complete your purchase.
- The earnings will show up on the lensmasters dashboard within a couple of days from shipment and they will experience a boost in lensrank for a short period of time and a little extra cash when Squidoo pays out.
That’s all you have to do, it’s simple, easy to do and a way to give back to your favorite lensmaster, charity and the whole community.
| 3.2 |
Tags: helping others, lensrank, Squidoo
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.
| 3.2 |
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?
| 2.5 |
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.
| 2.5 |
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?
| 2.5 |
Tags: backlinks, Social Networking, Squidoo
