Looks pretty sweet.

Pirates love Points. Wonder who will be first to level 80…

Gil announced that Squidoo has removed the no-follow links located in certain modules (About Me, My Lenses, Text with Big Picture).

MORE interesting,

RSS has had No-Follow ADDED to it. Before the changes there was absolutely no reason for RSS to have no-follow applied to RSS modules, as the entire module was rendered in a way that effectively makes it invisible to Search Engines anyway.

HOWEVER, now that no-follow has been added to the links in the RSS module does that mean that RSS feeds will become indexable soon?? If so, It would be the Ultimate Evergreen Module!

Either way,  the contest has given me some great new ideas for templates etc for future lensbuilding, as most of the contest lenses from me were built in a single afternoon using a relatively simple template.

Multiply by a few hundred and we’ll be in business .

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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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.

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

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.

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

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