My Squid Life

Ok, after being a little lazy last week, I’m getting back on the writing horse this week. I had been shooting for getting to  50 hubs and 300 lenses this year.  It’s still achievable, but I’m a little behind.

When I started off three years ago on the internet as an affiliate marketer, I had absolutely no preparation for the task. I was following some advice provided by the program I had signed up with, and, unfortunately it wasn’t necessarily good advice. Like many, I had to learn and experience for myself. I got an email from someone who signed up to that program under me, she wanted some help. I responded to that of course, but it also put in my mind, the idea for a hub on the topic. This article on Important Internet Marketing Lessons is purely for beginners, people who haven’t even read up on the topic yet. It’s no cookbook, but it’s three general concepts that weren’t clear to me immediately.

Yesterday, although I had picked up the reigns again, I took the day “off” to travel to the southern part of the state to a park for some exploring. The weather had changed from 90+ degrees and humid, to a very nice 76 degrees and it was a perfect day to put together material for another one of my hiking related lenses. This one is a virtual tour of Spring Mill state park.

I have continued to add my bookmarks to RedGage over the past week. Thus far I have amassed a whopping $.19.  I’ve had “friends” who’ve won bonuses and so forth so I’m not exactly a leading earner right now! Anyway, I’m enjoying it thus far. Much of what I’ve added have been pictures and Qassia articles because uploading my hubpages and even many of my lenses has been thwarted by technical issues.  Luckily however, those seem to have resolved either yesterday or this morning. Now it’s time for me to get down to business there as well.

I think I mentioned before that I’m involved in some things in the real world this month, and not doing much lens building, or other writing for that matter. Actually, I think this is the first week in a couple of years that I’ve yet to write anything at all except my blogs.  I decided to spend my “spare” time to recharge versus writing. Kind of nice actually!

My affiliate sales have shown a jump this month which should more than make up for a mediocre month on Squidoo.

For those of you who aren’t on Tagfoot, I will mention an AdSense tip that we were given there. I can’t testify as to how effective it is, but we were advised that increasing font size on our AdSense ads increases clicks. If you go to your AdSense account (My Account tab) and scroll down to Ad Display Preference you can change it to “large”.  I’ve done this and I can say my AdSense for the past 4 days is twice what it had been, but again it’s only been 4 days and even if that’s significant, I have no idea if the larger font is the cause. But there you have it.

I know many Squidoo members in the past several weeks have received e-mails from a site called RedGage. I know there’s been discussion in the forum about this spam. Indeed, I agree it’s spam. On the other hand, I checked it out and am currently using it to decide for myself what I think. So far, so good.  They have a nice tutorial to guide you, and they’ve promptly responded to requests for help. The community seems good so far, and much of the writing I’ve seen is actually very good. They pay you for page views. To me there’s little to lose.  I simply bookmark/upload my existing blogs, articles, lenses, hubs, etc. and try to earn a few extra cents on the work I’ve already done.  I don’t have to run around the web looking for other interesting content, they only want me to submit my own. I’m fairly accustomed to getting legit. business offers along with all of the spam in my inbox so I guess I’m less alarmed by their overly enthusiastic marketing method. (I’ve given them my direct feedback about the spam)  Anyway, that’s my input as to what I’ve found so far.

I really, really like the new templates at Squidoo. It’s nice to get a cleaner look. It’s nice to have a bit of control over how the template looks. But then the big banner shows up at the top of the page this morning. It may be a good idea to have it, but I certainly don’t like the looks of it. It pushes our content down again; more of it’s “below the fold” and I simply don’t like things flashing at me.  Oh, well.

I have other projects taking up my time this month, but I did manage to squeeze out a quick lens yesterday on Graham Cracker Crusts.  If you have a pie recipe that works well with a graham cracker crust, please be sure to add your link to my plexo.

I posted a link to an article I found yesterday, in the SquidU forum just as an FYI. I don’t think anyone else finds it as interesting as I did, but…it’s generally about the FTC monitoring blogs. Their intent is to find violations of conflict of interest rules. The first part discusses paid reviews and the need for bloggers to assure that visitors understand they have a relationship with the manufacturer or retailer. More interesting however, is that it also talks about this applying to affiliate marketing even, potentially, to those who simply write a personal blurb and post an Amazon link to the product. I’m not saying it’s earth shaking news, but avoiding a potential charge by the FTC would seem to be something worthy of attention. Here’s the article for what it’s worth.

Like anyone who intends to ever experience success on the internet, I’m dedicated to learning. I enrolled in the Summer School that’s currently being offered to Squidoo Giant Squids. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to graduate, but at a minimum I’ll audit the class!  I did manage to finish the first assignment which involves use of the new caption module. It’s just another great way to get involvement from visitors. If you have the time you can visit my Language Development Activities lens to see how it works.  Of course, if you have some captions to offer up that would be fabulous too, it can be a lot of fun.

The only other lens building I’ve done in recent days, was one on Shades State Park here in Indiana. It’s another in my series on hiking available in my local area. I’m pretty fit for my age and I think I owe it to the fact that I’ve continued to enjoy being active over more sedentary pursuits like watching television. I saw a RocketMoms lens recently by SandySpider about How to Have Fun Getting Fit and she mentions how important it is to have fun while exercising. The Wii is of course a great example, but things like hiking, biking, tennis, and so forth work for me too.  I think the important point is to do something you enjoy, otherwise you won’t do it.

Over the past month I was fairly focused on new lens development. My most recent lens was about green cell phones; the environmentally friendly kind. It highlights the few models which are constructed of biodegradable or recycled content as well as some of the ones which can be powered by alternative energy sources.  My traffic has bumped up on a couple of lenses but overall it’s been pretty stagnate.  I think it’s time to shift gears a bit.

I need to do a little more promotion, something to boost traffic. I’ve been good about keeping up with my tech blog but article writing, forum participation, and so forth have been minimal for weeks. I started out this morning by adding a related page on Hubpages but got distracted when I saw the new themes on Squidoo. Of course, when I first saw them they were a mess this morning. It was a almost impossible to ignore how jumbled my pages looked and not feel totally overwhelmed. OMG, I now had 203 lenses to go through and fix?  Well, luckily support had it under control and straightened things out with no intervention needed on my part.  The only problem I see now, is that my text no longer wraps around some of my images as I had it, and on lenses where I had the images staggered they are all now aligned on the left.  Not sure what I’m going to be able to do with that. I’m not an HTML expert.  It’s not a huge problem but it’s less visually appealing I think. The new themes on the other hand look pretty nice, it’s good to finally have a little control over the appearance of the lens.

On a few occasions I’ve been contacted by webmasters who want to pay for a text link on one or two of my lenses. I missed out on a couple of opportunities previously because I was away on vacation or didn’t like the site they wanted to advertise. Recently however I had another request that was much more acceptable and pertinent to my lenses. I finally forced myself to sit down and work out a strategy for pricing such things.  I based the fee on the amount of traffic the lens gets per month. I’m curious if other lensmasters have tapped into this additional income and if they feel it’s worth posting a do follow link on their lens for a bit of extra revenue each month?

I’ve continued lens development in recent days as well. I took a few days off to enjoy some outdoor time; it’s how I maintain my sanity. Then, when I got home I put together some quick lenses on Clifty Falls and Prophetstown parks as well as the Cardinal Greenway rail trail. They are fairly nearby and were easy ones to do.  I’m still floundering with the photo gallery on these. I resize my images to be the same but apparently the photos need to be either all in landscape mode or all in portrait mode, or they cause the lens to jump around.  I’ll need to go back and do a bit more tweaking.

I’ve also done a lens on pictures of thunderstorms; they can be violent and frightening at times, but very soothing strangely enough when they aren’t too extreme.  My last lens of the week was about cell phones for recording video. They aren’t the ultimate filming tool but sometimes the key is to have a camcorder on hand when you need it; not just when you’ve planned for it.

I got my first purple star last week!  Pretty exciting for me, it was for my Monon Trail lens. It was a fun one to do and something I enjoy.  It had gotten some positive feedback and high ratings from it’s first 19 visitors prior to this. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, only three of my subsequent visitors rated my lens and some of them must not have felt so positive about it and it’s average rating dropped.  Oh, well.

I’ve reogranized one of my lensographies as some of my lens creations have fallen into some categories. I’ve been naturally leaning toward some nostaligia types of topics, dealing with the elderly, and outdoor activities more in my non-niche time. Thus my new Just for Fun Lenses lensography was revised.

I also added a new lens yesterday on another park for some good hiking, this one is on Clifty Falls.

It might just be me, but I often find myself rushing at the end of the month to get lenses published.  I don’t like it when I publish a lens in the first half of the month and perhaps it goes over well and lands in the the top tier and stays there, but I don’t get the benefit of that on the following paycheck.  So, I’m always rushing to get them published by the last day of the month so that if they spring up, I will perhaps see the benefit on the next paycheck.

Anyway, in the last seven days, aside from publishing a number of articles and a hub, I also created a couple of basic lenses.  Today I finished up one that CherylK had requested about digital camera features. There are an endless number of functions and features but I chose some of the more common ones to highlight. Hopefully it will answer some questions that newbies might have. If you visit, feel free to suggest other features to discuss.

My other new lenses are focused on products. One is for those wanting a white cell phone, another for those hoping for a yellow cell phone, and the final one provides a type of buying guide for wall mounted cordless phones.

Evergreen content is great. You write it and there it is; it doesn’t necessarily have to be updated. I have some lenses that are like that of course.  Recipes, personal stories, nostalgia, sightseeing/location oriented types of things. But then of course I also have shopping lenses. I know that these don’t work for everyone, but for me they’re critical to my revenue. Their main drawback is that in many instances, I have to update them. Not every month or anything, but periodically. Even the info oriented lenses need occasional updates as technologies change, new products come along to solve old problems, etc.

I’ve talked (complained) about this before. I think I’ve finally decided I need to formally schedule time to do this. Before next week I want to get it on my calendar.  I had considered just choosing one day each week to do nothing but updates but I’ve not had the discipline to stick to it.  Thus, I’m in the process of choosing those lenses that require periodic updates and putting them on my calendar at least twice a year for refreshing the content or products. This way, I won’t be stuck with spending an entire day updating, when there are other things I’m inspired to do.

This morning I did some minor updates on my foreign film reviews lens. I’m also going to write some related content to post elsewhere to give it another backlink. Similarly, I did an update on my lens about choosing a medical alert system and posted an article on Qassia.  I’ll be hitting Hubpages and maybe making my maiden attempt on Bukisa tomorrow.  Need to get those backlinks and spread myself around.

I’ve been keeping 20 to 22 of my lenses in the top tier this month. This is good news because it’s close to my pre-Christmas shopping season performance.  The bad news is that I don’t think it’s consistenly the same lenses so I doubt I’ll get top tier payment for all of them.  I’m not good about tracking my statistics so I can’t be sure.  I think it’s a rebellion on my part. After spending years of tracking all kinds of indicators, statistics, and such I just refuse to do it right now. Not smart, but it’s working for me at the moment, psychologically speaking. Of course, the other bad news is that I probably have 60 more lenses than I did at Christmas time and still only the same number in the top tier.

Lensrank isn’t the most critical aspect of my revenue but it certainly doesn’t hurt!

Anyway, the past several days have been busy for me out in the real world but I have squeezed in a few new lenses. I did one that I had been putting off for a while about broccoli recipes.  I love broccoli, but mostly I eat it plain with just a bit of garlic and butter. I have a number of favorite recipes but they belong to someone else, so I linked to a few and then dredged up a couple that were more or less my own to use.

Another in my “wall art” series of lenses was completed.  This one was on pictures of the sun. Then this morning I finished one about the Monon Trail . It’s the primary bike trail in Indianapolis, where I lived for many years.  I included quite a few pictures that I took one afternoon while riding and tried to provide a decent description of the various things to see and do along the length of the trail.