Image by Marrion Derret

The first lens or two (depending on when you are reading this) of our journey towards $2,000 a month is published and live. As per the rules, they can be found on the ‘Captain Squid‘ account that is freshly started and has no previous ties or history.

Check them out, ask questions about lens structure, composition, tagging, whatever. I’ll follow up with answers.

First, there are a few basic things to get out of the way:

Fully transparent - All of the lenses I make are going to be in the squidoo account here. Feel free to look at them, dissect them, use ideas from them, ask questions about them etc.

Fully accountable - As we progress, I’ll post regular income, traffic, and other updates to illustrate how far along we are. I will probably adapt the current ‘Earnings’ tab to reflect this new information since the current graph and info on there is a bit outdated and not applicable to my new focus.

Multiple Revenue sources - I am reserving the right to use other affiliate networks and programs in additions to the ones that Squidoo natively supports. However, any Amazon revenue will go through Squidoo’s modules (i.e. I won’t shortcut Squidoo’s share to get to the goal faster). I will make a point to try to pick affiliate programs that are easy to get into. If you are planning on following along, I would recommend signing up for Commission Junction and Pepperjam for starters. It’s free and both have a huge array of programs to choose from.

How to get the most out of following the Captain on this dangerous, monster-filled journey of the high Squidoo seas :

Subscribe to the RSS Feed - so you don’t miss any posts that can help you.

Ask Questions - If you don’t understand what I’m doing or why it’s working and you don’t say anything, I can’t help you. If you can’t find me in the chat room, just drop me a PM and i’ll get back to you. With any luck there may be any number of people hanging out in there willing to help out.

Participate - As time allows, I’m planning on holding several chat room webinars on different concepts, tricks, methods etc. These will be free, but I reserve the right to limit the number of attendees to keep things from getting out of control (100 people in a chat room makes any kind of discussion tough).

Actually do stuff - By far and away the people I’ve seen that are the most successful at anything in life, online or off, are those that are willing to actually put in some work. Build some lenses, then build some more. It’s the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. I can help a bit with best practices, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you.

Next: The Quest Begins

As I’m starting a new phase in my pirate life I’ve also decided to begin a new phase in my Squidoo life as well.

Now, in the past I’ve made several thousand dollars a month from Squidoo but with the demise of Ebay and various other affiliate programs that has fallen off somewhat.

However, I don’t believe for an instant that this means that you can’t make money (and have fun!) with Squidoo. So, I’ve decided to rededicate myself with a new Squidoo quest to prove that anyone can make a couple thousand bucks a month from Squidoo in a relatively short time.

We are going to see how long it takes to go from $0 to $2000 a month from Squidoo lenses.

Not using Squidoo to direct traffic to another site you have but instead using Squidoo lenses to make money directly.

It can be done, I’ve done it.

And we are going to do it again.

And I’m going to show you all how so you can do it too.

Been a naughty pirate with my Squidoo Posting the past month but have been busy moving my first mate and myself over to Asia to continue our pirating adventure.

Am Currently exploring Thailand (absolutely Amazing!) but should be back around trolling the waters of Squidoo by next week.

From what I can see it looks like we have a lot to catch up on and chat about.

Keepin it Piratey from Asia,

CS

It is an excellent example of how a few ticks of traffic to your lens don’t necessarily mean you will instantly climb to the top of the lensrank ladder. If your visitors arent engaging with your lens, your rank can quickly return on it’s previous path of decay.

This topic is worth further discussion and I’ll dig through some of my stats to see if I can provide some other examples that help make mac33’s point and expand it into some other potential factors of the lensrank algorithm.

Great Post mac!

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tag pages are once again indexable by the major search engines. Fluffanutta has an exceptional review of the changes and why the newly indexable tag pages are good so I am not going to re-hash WHY this is good.

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a series of posts I’ve written in the past about how to take best advantage of tagging your lenses and how you can use it to focus and refocus attention, links, and traffic within your own little corner of the growing universe of Squidoo.

Techniques for Getting your Lens Indexed in the Search Engines -

• Why Links Matter for Indexing - A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level.
• Using Proper Tagging to Build Backlinks on Squidoo Lenses - How to conceptually view your lenses’ tags so they can be search friendly and build links at the same time.

Squidoo Tag Theory -

• Visualizing Link Flow on Lenses - Where do the links on lenses go to and where do they come from? This post was written when discovery boxes and Groups were still around. I think the fact that they aren’t around (really) anymore only increases the importance of the remaining factors..
• The Magic of Squidoo Tag Pages - If you read one post on this list this might be the one. It answers the question of why paying attention to your tags matters.
• Why the Discovery Box used to be cool - This is post is not really applicable any more with the current state of the Discovery Box, but I think the principles are worth noting in order to get a better overall view of all the different ways tags are used internally at Squidoo.
• How to dominate a Tag Page - A few examples of how having well crafted tags can help you to become the leader in any topical conversation on Squidoo.. and potentially across the web.

This has caused some big time ripples as it is the latest in a string of moves by eBay that increasingly makes their affiliate program more and more hostile towards its own affiliates.

Along this line, HQ announced their new eBay policy today for lensmasters.

In a nutshell, no more adding your personal ebay links to squidoo lenses.

What does this mean for your options? I see a few:

Use Squidoo’s ebay modules - Easy, fast, and they have proven to convert over time. However, Squidoo keeps half the income (which is pretty fair imho).

Stop using eBay - Over the past few months I’ve begun transferring a lot of my sites and content away from using eBay as a prime revenue generation source. For such a large company, their policies have been remarkably inconsistent and prone to change.  When compared with the other affiliate behemoth, Amazon, I’m constantly surprised at how well Amazon executes its program and eBay flubs theirs. If the products you are reviewing or reccomending on your lens can’t be found on Amazon, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the other networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, Linkshare, and the like. Often you can find great programs that promote very cool specialty items and give you a better commission on top!

All in all, look at this change as an opportunity to diversify your income streams, not as a death knell on your online efforts.

What thoughts do you folks have?

I’ve got hundreds of lenses (Hundreds!) that are total failures.

Except for what I’ve learned from them.

You can learn a little by finding good information from smart people in the forums or on blogs etc.

But you can learn so much more by doing.

Instead of reacting, or stopping before you start, go Do.

If you need help with the ‘Do’ then this is the place to be. I’ll do my best to help show some things that can make ‘doing’ easier, faster, or more efficient.

But if you don’t start out by doing SOMETHING, there’s not a lot of advice I have to give.

Some Fun Facts about my time on Squidoo:

I began using Squidoo right around when there was 100,000 lenses.. Now I think there’s close to a million.

I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 lenses. While I’ve slown down my output a bit since moving to Singapore (so much to do and so little time!) I’m hoping to maintain my rate of better than a lens a day for the foreseeable future. It’s too profitable and fun not too!

I’ve had multiple lenses earn over $1,000 in a single month.

I’ve had a nice handful of lenses earn over $100 in a single month.

I’ve got hundreds of lenses that have only ever earned pennies. (and that’s okay! Success with no failure is pretty boring..)

I was an original Giant Squid and Giant Squid 100 member.

I started Squidtop - a Blog network for lensmasters that is building up a nice community. I’ve got plans to make this even more awesome in the near future, if you want to help, let me know!

The Isle of Squid lens directory has grown to include thousands of hand reviewed lenses representing some of the best that Squidoo has to offer. This is another project that I’m hoping to expand in coming months and if you want to help, let me know!

I’ve met some amazing people from not only across the US but across the entire world. Some of you folks are truly amazing!

Posted 1,000+ times in Squid U…

and so much more I can’t think of right now…

Here’s to another 2 years and beyond of Making Money and Having Fun!!!