My Squid Life

Uh oh. I missed my goal of hitting 100 lenses by the end of the month. My EXCUSE is that I had a number of other off line things which interrupted unexpectedly.  None of it was bad, just unexpected. A friend showing up in town, my sister visiting unexpectedly, a last minute decision to go door to door in getting voters registered for the November elections, my 19 year old neice deciding she needed help with some things, etc.

I published two lenses this week.  The first was Parents of Famous People. Although parenting can certainly play a strong role related to some of the great achievements and excruciating mistakes that some famous and “infamous” people experience, I feel we are pretty complex and there are many other factors that determine our success or failure. In some instances, a person faces terrible circumstances and manages to achieve greatness while another seems to have a relatively “normal” childhood and fails miserably. This lens is not a serious look at the issues surrounding parenting! It’s just for the curious.  I would love to add more famous or infamous people and would appreciate any suggestions you have.

My  final lens is about the small town where I live. Although it’s complete as far as content and published, I’m not ready to “promote” it however, as I still have a few pictures I want to add.

My “results” have been mixed this month. I’m still only averaging 2,700 to 3,000 visits per week total and without having average stats available I would guess I only averaged 10 lenses in the top tier.  On the other hand I’ve had more affiliate sales to help offset this.

Here’s hoping the remainder of my week is quiet (predictable) and productive.

As long as it’s moving forward it’s good. Never mind the speed!

I finished off two more lenses. This first was a “how to” for the DYI types who, for kicks, like to do their own labor.  The result was my Installing a Satellite Dish lens. Hey, it may not be your type of task but you have to sympathize with the sense of accomplishment.

The other was a long delayed tribute to three furry quadrupeds that make my life better. (and my computer monitor fuzzier) My Abandoned Kittens lens tells a bit about their story and provides information about stopping the onslaught of stray and feral cats.

I’m now at 95 lenses.  I see 100 on the horizon.

I took a couple of days off to enjoy the fall weather last week and am now seriously behind. My goal to hit at least a 100 lenses by the end of the month is still certainly possible, but I need to buckle down. I have 93 published lenses now. After a couple of “recreational lenses” I did manage to squeeze out two more related to my “niche”.  I did The Best Cell Phones for Music Lovers and  A Rugged Digital Camera. Not everyone is as much of a purist as the typical Squidoo lensmaster apparently. Based on my lens comments, it seems we like to keep our devices separate and distinct.

I have managed to spend time each day on Tagfoot, a committment I made to get more involved in the social bookmarking scene. Thus far, I’ve had a bit of success in getting some additional traffic but until I make more non-squidoo friends it’s probably not going to be anything dramatic.  I’m trying hard to seek out other interesting sites and videos to add in order draw more attention to my submissions in general.

My Qassia writing has had similar results thus far.  I’m definitely adding backlinks which is boosting my rankings a bit but traffic itself is minimal from this source. No AdSense revenue from those articles as of yet. I have still avoided doing a Knol but wonder if others have given it a go? There is so much writing to do between articles, a couple of blogs, Zimbio, Qassia, Squidoo lenses, and my own website (which gets neglected) that I can’t imagine doing more.

Well, I spent time over the weekend writing Qassia articles rather than lenses.  Now it’s time to get back to Squidoo.  I managed to put together one this morning about one of my favorite activities and the result is my Rail Trails for Family Biking lens.

I had also seen people discussing Tagfoot recently and signed up.  I’m not big in the social bookmarking world, I think it requires a great deal of time!  However, I think it’s time for me to focus my efforts related to this and I think perhaps Tagfoot will be my focus along those lines.  It’s kind of interesting, pretty slick looking and easy to use.  It also allows you to get a little bit of additional AdSense revenue.  We will see how it goes.

Well, I apparently need to research more about using feeds to get my affiliate links. One of my major advertisers switched to Google Affiliate Network in September and feeds are now my only option for getting individual product links. 

I submitted a request for the feeds; they had me enter my e-mail address to receive them. Unfortunately their e-mails will not open. They’re large and slow but even once open I just get a blank page.  In the interim I’ve removed their products from my lenses and inserted products from Amazon; my Hard Drive Camcorders and Which Type of Camcorder is Best lenses are the only ones I’ve had to change. Shew!

My internet connection is basically back to normal now. Guess I need to get back to making some lenses if I want to hit 100 by the end of the month.

It defies logic but I created a lens about a fun summer festival I attended earlier this year; the Circus City Festival. The festival includes an amateur circus which, to my surprise, was a lot of fun. I knew immediately I should do a lens about it but it kept falling further down on the list.  Finally, as I sat around pulling my hair out with a very intermittent internet connection this week. I felt compelled to do it because it seemed simple enough that I might get it done between “blips”.

I hope to add more to it in the future, but for now it’s out there.

It’s been a slow few days recently.  My internet connection has been intermitent at best; and completely absent much of the time. That’s particularly bad, since our only phone is also VoIP. I’m waiting patiently, or not, for Comcast to come out and remedy the problem.

In the meantime, I’m pretty limited.  I did manage to put together a shopping type lens, Electric Fireplaces.  My mother decided she wanted one for her 3 season sunroom, thus I’ve learned a bit about them.  I think it will provide her a cozier spot this autumn. I tried to include information about their features, how to choose them, the various styles available,  and how to “install” them. Hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Hope to be back to full speed before the weekend.

I was on it this morning.  Oh, yeah.  Up early, throwing together a “quickie” lens with some new content that I thought would really hit a specific niche; just the start of something bigger, a series of lenses. Whipped through it, found some great resources to link, some reasonable knowledge products to offer, and even some good video content for people who prefer that.  It was looking pretty reasonable when I published it in time for it to go live immediately.

What a happy moment it was too. Now I had the rest of the day to write some blogs, a qassia article or two, and maybe even venture over to Knol for my maiden attempt at that.

But no. Before I left the page I glanced up at my URL.  HUH?? I had transposed a couple of letters and had jibberish for my URL. Following my outrage and subsequent despondence I accepted that I needed to start over.  Oh, yeah an hour or so of copying and pasting to a new URL was just what I needed to suck the life out of my productivity.

Ok, got that off of my chest. My Text Messaging for Business lens is published (not live) now and I can move on.  Wonder if any of the more experienced marketers here have ever used text messaging for marketing purposes?

The time flies by so quickly.  I checked my Squidoo dashboard stats today with it being the last day of the month. I’m not sure if Squidoo has already shifted how they allocate the AdSense share of payments, but if things will still be based on the last day of the month I have 14 lenses in the top tier and only 31 in the second tier. Then in the piddly department, I have another 37 languishing between 10,001 and 30,000 and an additional 4 between 30,001 and 52,000.

The good news is that my Royalties were up this month and so were my non-Squidoo paid affiliate sales. Hoping that this trend continues.

I was on a slow burn in August, I created only a handful of new lenses.  My Cell Phones without a Plan  and Cell Phones with GPS lenses were my last lenses of the month.

For now, I’m going to enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend (Tomorrow is Labor Day here in the US), and jot down more ideas for lenses in September.  I am determined to hit 100 by the end of the month!!

Good luck to us all for next week’s pay day!

I put together a brief survey on Internet Marketing that Works a few weeks ago, knowing that what works will vary based upon how well it is implemented, the business, and other factors.  However, I wanted to find out what the average internet marketer or Squidoo lensmaster felt was the most effective use of their time. The survey allowed people to vote for as many items as they wished but only for those items that they felt STRONGLY were either beneficial or basically a waste of time.

Thus far only 12 people have responded to the survey unfortunately but here is an overview so far.  (I’m still hoping for responses!!)

The Most Useful/Effective Marketing Strategy:
Blogging garnered the most votes (8) with Forum Participation and Authority Pages coming in second with 6 votes each. Microblogging (such as Twitter) came in significantly lower with 3 votes, and surprisingly, participation in social sites (think MySpace, Facebook, and others) coming in with only 2 votes.  Directories and Traffic Exchanges got 1 vote each while reciprocal linking, classified ads, and article writing got no votes. The results obviously don’t mean certain tactics don’t work at all; people merely didn’t feel as strongly about them.

Most Effective Marketing Strategies within Squidoo:
Visiting and commenting on other lenses was the top activity with 7 votes.  Squidcasting and participation in the SquidU Forum tied at 4 points while lensrolling to your own lenses received 3 votes.  Joining related Squidoo Groups and lensrolling to other high ranking lenses both got a single vote.

Squidoo Related Sites:
A list of Squidoo related sites such as SquidTop, Squoogle, the Isle of Squid and so forth were options. Respondents felt SquidTop was the hands down best way to spend their time with 5 votes and all others getting 1 to 0 votes. This seems to correlate with the first question where Blogging was identified as the most effective and worthwhile marketing strategy.  SquidTop is a blogging platform where as others are directories, forums, and social sites.

Best Social Sites:
According to results thus far, Stumble Upon led the way with 4 points, Twitter with 3, MySpace, Facebook and Delicious tied with 2, while Reddit got 1.  All other received no votes.

Best Content/Blog Promotion Site:
Technorati and Zimbio tied for the top spot with 4 votes each.  MyBlogLog got 2 votes, and Vox 1. No other options received votes.

Best Authority Pages:
Not too surprisingly, respondents felt Squidoo pages were the best use of their time (9 votes), while Wikipedia pages got 2 votes, and Google Knol 1 vote. With Google Knol and Qassia sites still being fairly new only time will tell how effective they are in generating revenue and promoting.

If you haven’t, please take the time to visit the survey and participate. There are only 7 questions and then some optional discussion items. Don’t be afraid to vote items “down”, this will help to further differentiate between activities that are most effective and those that aren’t.

*Note: I left out the results of one question because response was insufficient.