My Squid Life

I was away for the past few days. Visiting in laws then off to my mother’s.  She has glaucoma and they’ve tried a variety of drops that haven’t helped reduce the pressure in her eyes. She’s also had to learn how to give herself monthly B12 shots. It’s required lots of my attention, but I guess next week we are going to go ahead with a laser procedure to take care of her eyes. 

In the meantime, I’ve spent any free time updating my lenses. I’ve managed to create a single new one on Pokagon State Park. It would have been a great place for a winter time lens, but I wasn’t sure I would make it that far north anytime in the next year, so I went ahead and did it now. It’s a great place for ice skating, cross country skiing, and toboggan rides. I found a YouTube video to take visitors on a virtual toboggan ride. (no, that’s not me screaming “Oh Sh!t”, it’s some unknown YouTube contributor)

I refuse to rant and rave. But does anyone else have similar frustrations?

1. I don’t know what the criteria is for getting paid for the Infolink ads on my Squidoo lenses but I’m pretty sure I’m not being paid for them at this point.

2. The Zazzle modules continue to leave my products missing in action. Is there a purpose to a Zazzle lens without products?

3. The FeedMySearch module still doesn’t function after several months. Do I really want to delete those on hundreds of lenses?

That’s it, life is otherwise lovely. I’ve developed one new lens, a basic personal review type of lens about rechargeable batteries.

Last week I was grumbling about Xomba becausing I couldn’t get things submitted in a quick and efficient way without errors. Well, their support hung in there with me and we figured out it was my browser.  I updated that and the problems were immediately resolved. It was never a problem on their end and things are running smoothly now.  I continue to submit my work there in an effort to increase traffic and earn a few more AdSense pennies. They offer only the “nofollow” backlink but it still seems to be worth the time.

I’m just starting on SheToldMe so I’ll wait to say anything about that until later. My browser problems don’t seem to be over, as with the change, I’m having NEW problems on other sites. Grrr, so I’m slowly working through those elsewhere.

I’ve was gone for a 3 day holiday and then had to spend a couple of days with my mom so I haven’t been too active for several days. I did manage to finish one more lens.  This one is on Indiana Dunes State Park, another in my local series.  We actually went to Chicago for the weekend and had a great time, but I don’t think I’ll be doing a lens about it. The Dunes were nearby and we spent a day there as well. Quite a change of pace from Chicago! The southern shores of Lake Michigan are the only beach in Indiana.  Because Lake Michigan is so large you can lay on the beach and imagine you are many miles away near the ocean. There are no swaying palms of course but I noticed they had some along the lake in Chicago, now that made me laugh.

When I think about my internet experience I have to laugh at how I once thought “success” would look as far as earning an income online. I thought I would promote one service and gradually make more and more sales to earn a decent income via commissions. Now I’m sure this happens for some people, but for me it’s been a hodge podge. No one part of my income is worthy of much more than a shrug but put together, it’s adding up.  I talked about this a few weeks ago but with the totals for August I’m seeing it even more clearly. With 7 separate payments ranging from only $23 to $480 per month I’ve finally started feeling like the time may come when I’ll feel like it’s all been worth it.

For now though, I’m continuing the drive to write more and promote more. Xomba was my focus the past two days. I’ll be honest, for now I’m giving it up. I’ve merely been submitting Xomblurbs which allow you to submit content that you have elsewhere online by posting a paragraph or two about it. It’s a “nofollow” link but it lets you broaden your audience, perhaps attract a little more traffic, and earn some more AdSense revenue.  All very nice, but I’m having tremendous problems with the “editor” on the site. Everything I submit shows up with word spacing issues. No matter what I do, I can’t get it to work correctly. Thus far, corrections have been trial and error and the time to make the submissions is outrageous. Hopefully, their support people will help me iron this out, if not, I’m moving on.