My Squid Life

I mentioned in my previous post that I signed up for Google Knol and Qassia. I focused just a little bit of time over the weekend working with Qassia in particular.  So far I really like it.

For anyone who hasn’t yet tried it, I will explain a bit.  You can submit your websites/lenses just as you would to any directory.  You then earn points, or in this case Qassia dollars, which serve to boost the visibility of your websites. You can earn Qassia dollars by writing “intel” (intelligence), referring others to the Qassia site, or screening the “intel” that others have posted.

When you write intel, you can also create a backlink to any website/page. That backlink then shows up anytime your intel is viewed.  It is a “do follow” link.

I’ve found it very easy to write for Qassia. The intel (or article) can be as short or as long as you wish and in my experience is easily composed right off the top of your head.  I was able to write 9 separate “intels” in about 4 hours total; and I’m not a fast writer. That’s 9 backlinks. There is no limit on the number of “intels” you can write or websites that you can promote.

The site should be coming out of Beta soon, and all of those intels should begin generating some cash in the form of AdSense revenue.  Yes, like Google Knol you get your Adsense revenue too but you also get the “do follow” links.   I’m betting it’s going to be worth a little time.

I’m delaying any new lens development for a few days. I’ve decided to do a bit more “promotion”.  I’m signed up with Google Knol and now need to take the leap and publish something. Of course that is assuming I can get my name verified.  You can do that via phone (which I can’t as our number is in my husband’s name) or by credit card (which I can’t because both of mine are technically “debit cards”).  I guess I will just try to publish without being verified.  It makes me feel very unofficial. Hope they come up with some better methods of doing this.

I also signed up at Qassia and at this point I’m just exploring but it appears you can submit your websites or lenses and create brief original content, known as “intel”.  Anyway, it should all spell backlinks and traffic eventually. If you’ve used it, I love to hear about your experiences, and if you haven’t maybe you should check it out as well!

Do you ever have days where you are just, well, invisible? Today, I had modest goals, to write two blogs and to do some social bookmarking things to promote some new lenses, and then move on to other parts of my life.

I wrote and published a blog here on SquidTop, mentioning my two newest lenses The Language of Squidoo, a very basic tutorial for the newest lensmasters, and Cell Phones with GPS about,… well, cell phones with GPS.  Four hours later I returned and that blog post is nowhere to be found. As if it had never been done.

I Tweeted a blog post from my other blog first thing this morning. I checked back in just now, no sign of it.

I checked several of my lenses on Squidaholic to see how I was doing on backlinks and it stunk.  I have all kinds of social networking links that I feel sure should be there but of course they aren’t.

Perhaps I woke up in another dimension, a parallel universe.  Yes, that’s it, I just need to wait until tomorrow when I wake up and find myself back in my typical reality. Why do my other blog when I feel sure it will dissolve anyway? 

Here’s hoping your day has been more productive than mine.

Squidoo is often about helping others; both in the form of charity and in the form of the Squidoo community supporting each other. I’ve participated somewhat in the forum over the past 9 months offering feedback, visiting lenses of others, voting for quality lenses when I run into Squidoo friends on social bookmarking sites, submitting the best to my own bookmarks on various sites, and so forth.

I’ve struggled however with doing more. Although I’ve done it a few times, it’s been difficult to blog about the lenses of others simply because they seldom fit with my blog topics or my niche. On a few occasions I have been able to feature a lens on one of my own but it still seems so limited. What I have discovered seems to work best for my lenses is to simply add a comment plexo that is related which allows other lensmasters to add links to their related lenses.  Over time hopefully, the topics will cover enough ground that the majority of lensmasters would find somewhere on my lenses where they could promote some of their own work.

For instance, I have a plexo on my Influence of Media on Children lens where other lensmasters can add links for lenses on the topic of better kid’s activities. My Fiero lens allows others to add lenses about their favorite car.  More recently I did a general lens on Western Movies where Im looking for lenses to add about specific western movies, actors, and so forth.  This also adds some fresh and useful content for my readers.

Although my topics aren’t always ones that coincide with those of fellow lensmasters, I hope to add more of these in the future so be sure to check in the forum where I will periodically post an invitation. If someone knows of a better way to communicate such things please let me know.

My brain is still in slow motion since my cold last week.  Rather than struggling to create new lenses I’ve settled for updating and improving some things.  I found a nice project that supports classroom interactions globally via the use of digital cameras and I added it to my Cameras for Kids lens. It gives people the opportunity to put their old digital cameras to work and teachers a chance to get their classrooms involved. I added a link to GramaBarb’s Recycle Your Digital Camera to a Child lens too.

I thought I had all the questions covered in my All About Cell Phone Batteries lens, but realized I hadn’t covered what to do if you have a battery leak, so I added a blurb about that.  Luckily most Li Ion batteries don’t have this issue but there are still other types of batteries out there.

I kind of like good old fashioned, hold in your hand photo albums. But as I glanced through my Photo Albums lens I realized there were none of the antique looking options on the page. Wow, had to fix that. I found some velvet, pedestal and wood style albums that I thought might add options with a whole different flavor.

My top performing lenses continue to be text messaging topics and I’ve got an entire list of additional how-to topics but rather than just tacking them on to my existing lenses I think I will need to buckle down here at the end of the week and create some independent pages for those.  Now, if I can just get my brain to cooperate.

I know that time is probably a huge problem for anyone involved in internet marketing. I am struggling to determine which activities and which specific sites are worthy of my attention so that I can focus on what is effective and cease some that are meaningless.  Analyzing traffic stats, looking at backlinks and such will help me with this but I’m wondering what other lens masters are finding. (Knowing that effectiveness can vary based on niche and a variety of other factors)

I assume those who are even newer to the process are more confused. These thoughts drove me to develop my Internet Marketing That Works survey hoping that some of the great and experienced marketers reading this could contribute to help others out.  Please stop by and take the time to contribute. 

This isn’t the ultimate survey but if discussion is good it may be useful.

I’ve been sick this week.  I want to blame my cat but I realize there isn’t much that a cat passes to us mere humans. One of them had a nasty upper respiratory infection and I ended up with a BAD COLD and slept away much of two days. Not sure how I picked it up.

I did manage to finish one lens last night between sneezing, coughing, and other annoyances. As a natural follow up to my Best Camcorders for Still Pictures lens which has done reasonably well gaining Google attention, I made a Best Cameras with Video lens.  People want to know, that’s all I can say.

Feel free to pay it a call, and don’t worry about all the sneezing and coughing thing; you know it can’t be transmitted online!

But, all of that isn’t related to what my exasperation is aboutrather it’s that I’ve decided to put an end to the shameless Guestbook spamming.  I’m going to strip the HTML from my Guestbooks on every lens over the next few days. Yep, no more free rides, no more irrelevant links dang it! I think in many cases it’s just that some people don’t think of it as bad.  But if I do this I have control, don’t have to spend time on it, and yet don’t have to be nasty and remove the comment or whatever.  So, again I ask, why didn’t I do this before?

I have mentioned before that my favorite lenses seem to be how-to or help oriented but I do have a significant number of lenses devoted to products. I don’t really like developing lenses that target one specific product because:

1. Most specific products have a very limited popular lifespan.

2.  I would rather offer shoppers a variety to find what they want versus expecting them to buy the item that I tell them to buy

3. As Rocking-the-Ice indicated, I don’t like to highlight a product I don’t own, and I’m not that big of a consumer!

What I have started doing is targeting very specific product categories to promote on such lenses which allows me to focus on a specific need but not a specific product. 

I think this is the future for any of my product related pages.

Focusing on month end stuff and some non-internet related responsibilities this week kept me away from creating any new lenses until today, Friday.  I was reviewing and visiting some lenses earlier in the week and came across WhippetTalk’s Cell Phones Drive Me Crazy lens.  I thought, cell phones are like so many things; so handy, so helpful, so misused.

Her lens captures some of the most common misuses; using text messaging and forgoing face to face communication, holding private conversations in public places, talking too loud, trying to drive while texting/talking, and so forth. 

Being a person who writes quite a bit about topics surrounding cellular devices , the issues I hear most often are related to how cell phones are abused from the other end; the spammers, the bullies, the predators, the stalkers, the debt collectors, and so forth.  Unfortunately, these problems with unwanted and even harassing calls and text messages will probably escalate before they disappear.  I decided to put together some of the best tips I could come up with for all those people struggling with this issue and my How To Stop Unwanted Calls and Text Messages  lens is the result. 

In the past week I learned about several new Mixx.com communities and just yesterday evening when I got back home I found out about the Rock the Squid forum. I’ve submitted by Cameras for Kids and Fiero lenses and visited several others that were posted.  For any Squidoo lensmasters who haven’t seen it, I suggest paying the site a visit and signing up immediately.