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Archive for the ‘Captain Squid’ Category

I know i seem to cover this idea ad nauseum but I wanted to emphasize (again) the importance of tagging your lenses properly.

Why do we tag lenses?

Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.

What is Indexing and why is it important?

When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses).  It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.

If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.

So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.

Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.

Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.

What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.

Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.

If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.

So,

DO

Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic

Use tags that are present on other lenses

TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*

DON’T

Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.

use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.

Questions?

Go to Source

The Amazon Fitness Lensbuilding Competition between Grayth (troy) and myself has begun as of Sunday and I’ve scored the first Sales with $1.24 currently pending on my dashboard from the 8 lenses I have entered in the competition.

For a blow by blow of traffic stats etc for the lenses in the competiton, official judge and arbiter Fluffanutta of SquidUtils fame has created an AWESOME comparison chart that compares traffic etc of all the competition lenses and updates daily.

As the month goes on, I’ll update earnings totals on Captain Squid. I’m also looking to update earnings on SquidUtils but fluffanutta and I haven’t figured out the best way to do it yet.

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• Reading: “36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To”( http://twitthis.com/xqhsls ) #

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In the spirit of the payday inspired post here’s a little teaser image of my earnings in my main squidoo account since inception:

Squidoo Account Earnings Growth

Now, every month payday invariably brings about discussion of Lensrank, that magical formula that helps determine how much your lens makes in a month.

Today, lets focus on one aspect of lensrank that is discussed some, but often not given the weight it deserves : clickouts.

I recently did an experiment and removed RSS feeds from about 40 of my lenses (Squidoo’s analytics do not as of the writing of this article track clickouts from RSS feeds in your stats) and replaced them with eBay modules (which do track clickouts).

the results were immediate and impressive. The clickouts that weren’t previously being captured are now being tracked properly.

And my lensrank SOARED on those lenses and has continued to stay very strong.

The moral of the story? Clickouts can make you more money, lots more.

So, make sure there’s stuff to click on on your lens.

Go to Source

This weekend I was hanging out in the Squidoo Chat room with Troy and we came up with a little competition that I think you guys (and gals) might enjoy following along with.

From Last friday (the 9th) till this coming Friday (the 16th) Troy and I will each build ten lenses.

The lenses will follow the following rules:

- Promote a product from Amazon related to the ‘fitness’ category.
- Use only Squidoo Modules and Squidoo’s Amazon Links

One month from Friday, May 16th, the group of lenses with the most Pending $$ on the Dashboard will be judged to be the winner.

The Variable that we are testing is that I will be focusing on lower cost items and hoping to make a large number of sales, while Troy will be focusing more on big ticket items in the hopes of landing a few monster commissions.

The Fluffanutta will be the impartial Judge in order to ensure fairness

I’ll post a few example lenses later so you guys can see what we are building. May the best Amazon Sales Lensbuilder win

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There are three different modules that I try and use in ALL of my local based lenses, and I’ve had great success with them.

1. Google Maps Module – No guarantee that it helps your google maps ranking in search results but I’ve seen promising things. Also, make sure and put the address of your location in the description area as well, so that it’s easily indexable.

2. ‘Contact Us’ – I have used Black Box modules for the ‘Contact Us’ area before but there are many that would work. Important things to include here : Phone, Hours of Operation, Fax, etc.

3. ‘Services Offered’ – I usually use a text module for this one. Make sure and include keyword rich descriptions of your services as you can easily score on long tail search terms for your location + service .

Want an Example? Here’s a lens I recently built for my lawyer in Las Cruces. It was indexed and receiving traffic within about 48 hours of publishing and has steadily been climbing the ranks for the last week or so.

Go to Source

One of the most under-rated uses for Squidoo that ironically has the most utility is using Squidoo to create lenses (webpages) targeted at specific local venues.

Are you trying to make a living with Squidoo? one of the most effective business models you can pursue is to go around town and build lenses for local businesses.

When done properly, you can have lenses about {Small Town Name} Pizza or Dentist or Tanning Salon shoot straight to the top of the results. That kind of targeting has very real, very HUGE value to small businesses and frankly, they are willing to pay for it once they see the results.

But before you can get there, you have to know how to build local lenses that are going to rank AND convert. And that’s what I’m here to help you do over the next week or so.

Next, Anatomy of a Local Lens

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While browsing around Squidoo and trying to catch up on some of what’s been going on I noticed the new project by HQ for SquidClubs. Initially I had a few ideas for what might make a cool SquidClub but didn’t push forward with the idea.

However, after encouragement from a few of my Squidoo buds I’ve decided to move forward and apply for what might possibly be the most awesome SquidGroup ever (If I get Picked )!!

Board Games.

Why it could be awesome -

People love board games.
There are a zillion of them.
They have rabid communities who love to talk about them.
I love board games. a lot.

I’m mentioning all of this because I wanted to get a straw poll from you guys and see if anyone was interested in building some board game lenses with me.

I’ve decided that regardless of whether I get accepted into SquidClubs this time around or not, I’m going to go ahead and move forward with creating one of the most comprehensive collections of board game information around, all in lens format.

A Lens cloud of board games, totally wicked.

It will be fun, interesting, and probably profitable as well.

If this sounds like something you’d like to join in on (I’ll probably be using a lot of board game lenses as examples in my upcoming posts after I finish off a series on local lenses I have planned for the next week or so) then please drop a line in the comments.

Who knows, your comment might be the one that makes a Board Game SquidClub a reality !

Got your own idea for a SquidClub? (apply Here)

-Cap

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As some of you know, I’ve basically disappeared off the face of the Squidoo-verse for the last 4 months or so.

I was working on one of my most aggressive entrepreneurial projects ever.

It totally crashed and burned over the last few weeks.

Failing is something I do on a regular basis with various things, but I’m not going to lie, this one stung a bit. Besides the lost money (significant) and time (also significant) pulling out of a project like that definitely knocks your confidence and pride back a few notches.

Another unfortunate consequence is that I’ve also been neglecting my Squidoo happenings and adventures, which I can never get the time back for.

I’ll probably keep licking my wounds for the next few days or so and then I’m going to return to the basics that started making me money online in the first place, building some lenses.

Hopefully there are a few of you still around that check in every once in a while that I can share the adventure with .

Failure sucks, but never failing once is way worse.

The only disaster in this situation would be me giving up trying. Which isn’t going to happen.

Go to Source

I know i seem to cover this idea ad nauseum but I wanted to emphasize (again) the importance of tagging your lenses properly.

Why do we tag lenses?

Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.

What is Indexing and why is it important?

When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses).  It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.

If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.

So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.

Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.

Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.

What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.

Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.

If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.

So,

DO

Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic

Use tags that are present on other lenses

TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*

DON’T

Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.

use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.

Questions?

Go to Source