sockii's blog

Yesterday: working on some lens drafts but nothing much. Wasn't feeling very good so spent more time reading than writing.

Today:
New lens published: Easy Stir Fry Chicken Thighs with Chili and Basil for the September Chicken Recipe Quest

Drafts in progress: worked on several. Need to get at least the scifi quest lens done by deadline on Sunday.

New lens on Squidoo: Campari Gifts, Posters and Accessories

Updated lens on Squidoo: MasterChef US 2012: Season 3 (finale spoilers and recap)

Other work: added 5 more jewelry listings at Designs by Sockii

...because it surely can't last for long, but, as of this morning my What is Gelato? lens on Squidoo is the Number 1 Lens on the Entire Site.

Wow.

That's...something I always kind of dreamed about hitting, but never thought I'd ever manage. Especially about a specialty Italian dessert instead of laptop bags, coloring pages, or Justin Bieber. :)

It's really kind of amazing when you consider that there are typically about 400,000 active, published pages on Squidoo daily (and over 1.5 million more in progress, unpublished status, etc.)

Seriously. 18 months of work on Squidoo, but I really feel like it's starting to pay off.

I realized last night that while I talk a lot (ok, primarily) about Squidoo here, some of my friends don't actually really know what Squidoo IS. What's a lens? Who is a lensmaster? What's all this about, anyway?

Let me see if I can summarize quickly and simply :)

Squidoo is a platform for publishing on-line, individual webpages - which in Squidoo-language are called "lenses". Anyone who publishes a page on Squidoo is a "lensmaster" - just like "webmaster" elsewhere.

Squidoo lenses can be about virtually any topic you want (although some topics are prohibited for legal reasons, and due to past spam abuse.) You can make a fan page for one of your favorite musicians, blog about personal experiences, share a favorite recipe or even publish a travelog. There is a large assortment of modules you can add to a lens: simple text modules (write anything you want!), photo gallery modules (share your pics!), quizzes and polls, formatted recipes, rss feeds, Twitter streams, Google news search results, link lists, voting lists, you name it! With the variety of modules available, you can really come up with a unique-looking and varied spotlight on a particular subject - part of why Squidoo pages are called lenses.

A successful lens in many ways combines not just your own original content but serves as a gateway for the reader to then go out and explore the topic from your lens. Indeed, my top-performing lens at the moment, about MasterChef US, combines both my own episode recaps and polls with lengthy link lists of where you can find all of the contestants on-line (their blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter streams, etc), YouTube preview videos, and yes a few products and cookbooks by the Master Chef judges themselves.

Because that's the other type of module you can add to your lenses: sales modules. Ebay, Amazon, CafePress, Zazzle, Etsy...these all have preformatted modules you can add to your lenses to promote related products (even your own, if you have say an Etsy shop!) If something sells from most of these modules, you earn a commission (split with Squidoo) on the sale. There are other ways you can earn sales commissions as well on Squidoo, by joining affiliate marketing programs like those offered by AllPosters.com or Commission Junction. Doing so is perfectly fine with the Squidoo TOS, as long as the affiliate program is on the up and up and not selling products against Squidoo's TOS.

But it's not just via sales that you can earn money with a Squidoo lens. Every lens earns a "Tier rank" on the site, and at the end of the month you can earn a payout based on Squidoo's overall ad pool revenue for the month (any clicks on Google and Infolinks ads on Squidoo lenses go into the general ad pool, not directly to the person who created the specific lens.) Lenses in Tier 1, the top 2,000 or so lenses on the site, earn the highest payout - these days around $50. Lenses in Tier 2, which have ranks between 2,000 to 10,000 approximately, earn around $10. Lenses between 10,000 and about 80,000 are in Tier 3 and still will earn perhaps $0.50.

If you rank worse than 80,000, you won't earn a tier payout - put you still get any sales commissions you might have earned. So it's different from other content sites which pay directly by the "hit", or by ads clicked on your pages alone. When Squidoo overall does well, the top lensmasters do well.

This system naturally makes Squidoo a bit of a competitive environment - everyone is out for one of those coveted Tier 1 positions, and at first it can seem impossible to achieve (at least if you want to play by the rules and avoid BlackHat techniques, which can get your account closed if caught immediately.) But there are many great lensmasters at Squidoo who work to encourage new lensmasters to do well, and to encourage good lenses to improve in their rankings by "Liking" lenses or even "Blessing" them (SquidAngels are lensmasters given "extra powerz" to Bless lenses they consider exceptionally good.) Yes, there are people who don't understand copyright and intellectual property, and Squidoo HQ hasn't always been the best at following up on content abuse unless directly served with DMCA notices. But they're getting better about it, particularly as Google continues to try to push down "junk" and promote Unique, Updated and Useful information (which are in fact the "three U's" of Squidoo lensmaking :) ).

You aren't going to make thousands of dollars overnight joining Squidoo. In fact, you have to have a lot of patience because payouts are 2 months delayed, and it can take quite a few months to learn the tricks of good keyword research, promotion, and lens structure to start building your rank. I can say that after about 18 months on Squidoo, I'm earning a steady 3-digit amount from them monthly - enough to pay at least a few household bills regularly, which is nice. My to-date best performing lens on Squidoo has earned over $400 alone since I published it last year. Squidoo is also a great tool for promoting my other businesses and activities, like my artwork and jewelry. I would recommend that some of my friends who are fiction authors might want to investigate setting up a Squidoo account, as you can easily create pages to promote your writing blogs, published books, or just continue to create a web presence for yourself in a different environment.

Some would say "Why not just monetize a blog, why use a platform like Squidoo?" Because getting high enough traffic to a personal blog, unless you devote an EXTREME amount of time to it, can be difficult. And generally a blog needs to have a tight focus to do well from ad revenue, so if one wanted to write, say, about 10 different topics (art, music, food, travel, etc etc) you'd need 10 different blogs to maintain. That gets to be a lot of work. In over a year of having a personal food blog, I haven't even earned enough to get a threshold payment from Google Ads. Compare that to how the money comes in from Squidoo, and...yeah. There's good reason I like the platform.

Does Squidoo sound like something you might want to try for yourself? If so, just click thru to Squidoo here and see how easy it is to set up an account. And be sure to let me know your lensmaster name once you get started!

...to start the month of May with four lenses in Tier 1 instead of my usual two. However, I'm not sure they'll be able to all stay in T1 for the entire month, but I'll be happy if two of those stay where they are and I at least get a T2 payment out of the others.

I'm feeling a bit burned out on lenswork at the moment, as in April I really went a bit overboard and finished 14 new lenses and did a lot of work on some older ones. But that's okay as I have a lot of other things I should be focusing on this month, including getting back to my jewelry work in time for this summer's conventions, the first of which (Media*West) is only a few weeks away. I also need to get outside more as soon as the weather is less unpredictable, and work on my vegetable garden. The seedlings I started inside are getting crazy big, but we still had frost last week, and then this week was too rainy to get outside much. It is exciting though to see some of the foxglove I started as seeds last summer just getting ready to bloom. I've missed having foxglove in my garden the way my mom does, and they aren't the easiest plants to get started from seeds. It encourages me to pick up some more seeds this week and see what other varieties I can get started for next year.

So, yesterday I published my lens about Philadelphia's Magic Gardens - my entry for the Squidcademy Awards contest. And in one day, the lens has already not just scored 100% (meaning getting 20+ likes among other criteria) but is featured on the Squidoo homepage.

Dang! Whether or not it wins the contest, I'm pretty chuffed at how this one seemed to hit a target just right.

So I've been following the Buying and Selling Squidoo Lenses Facebook group for a while, even though I've never bought a lens before - and I'm not especially interested in doing so, either. I like working on my lenses from the ground up, using my own words, etc.

But I'm thinking about working on some new lenses with the sole purpose of selling them. Not lenses that would take an awful lot of time to set up, but good basic starter lenses for people that are more interested in doing things like constantly monitoring Amazon links for expiring/sold out products and stuff like that. Which happens a lot on jewelry lenses, and I find them tedious to maintain.

So I basically want to try to create a starter set of about 20-30 lenses, ones that shouldn't take me more than 1-2 hours each to build and basically promote, and then see if I can sell them after a month's "test marketing". Because while I hate to give away lenses that might eventually become big successes, it would be nice to get some quick cash for lenses that don't take me a lot of time to build and create.

I'm going to be starting with jewelry sales lenses featuring different, more unusual stone. This is the first one I've created for this project/idea:

Moss Agate Jewelry.

I haven't had a single lens locked or flagged yet since the new Squidoo filter for duplicate content was launched. Of course it could still happen, I suppose, but I do write all of my content myself, and have very, very rarely copied any product descriptions or reviews from Amazon or elsewhere. My method/motto is, if I don't know a product well enough to talk about it from personal experience? I shouldn't be trying to sell it. I link out heavily to all of my references, I only write about topics I'm personally passionate about. I think that goes a long way toward creating quality lenses.

I'm not saying there aren't "false positives" resulting from the new filters. But. But. I feel like some of the extreme resistance to the new filter is coming from folks unwilling to admit that just copying & pasting content from Amazon and elsewhere, based on trying to jump on the newest "hot topic" bandwagons, isn't going to keep up with those who are writing about things they know, love, and want to share for reasons beyond commercial success. I can only write about things I love, and I only want to try to sell products related to the things I'd love.

March continued to be an insanely busy month right up until the end due to a lot of personal stuff best not discussed publicly here :) (Nothing bad, just things under contract which hopefully will all go well.) So I'm glad I did the bulk of my Squidoo writing work at the beginning of the month. I just updated my 10 Most Recent Lenses page and am pretty satisfied with getting 7 new lenses created for the month, along with doing a lot of maintenance and updating on some older ones.

I have several lenses in my WIP queue I really hope to complete in April, but I also plan on doing a lot of work and promotion of my lenses related to Infertility Awareness as National Infertility Awareness Week is quickly approaching. (Of course nothing would make me happier than seeing my NIAW lens get a Lens of the Day spotlight during the week, but I know that's a pretty far-fetched possibility. Still, it would be nice, as I remember how upsetting it was to me that last year NIAW coincided with the week Squidoo decided to spotlight "RocketMoms" every day for LOTD. Oh, the irony...)

Okay, so the debate, whining and arguments about proper image usage on Squidoo rages on (and probably will forever until HQ cleans up and clarifies its policies). Today's latest entry into the kerfluffle: If an image is free and clear for use (public domain, your own work, or from a free image source like morguefile), why "waste valuable space" on a lens including image credits if you don't have to?

Let me tell you why.

1. HQ is at least starting to ask for image credits to be included on Quests for front page placement. Certainly this is the result of several recent Lenses of the Day coming in to question because of their dubious image sourcing (one was flat out taken down last week before the day was out). I'm not thrilled that they're only requiring credits, not checking that the images are free and legal to use, but it's a start. So if you want to see your lens get extra traffic from being on the Squidoo entry page? Credit your photos.

2. Credits are a way to easily get click-outs. Click-outs are good. Click-outs boost your lens rank. If you're using a photo from morguefile, wikimedia commons, or any other site, why not include a small image credit with a link out to the source file? Some people might want to see the image in original/full resolution, or check out more of the photographer's other work.

3. Credits prove you are working with the system. Many Squid Angels (like myself) are diligent about only blessing lenses if we can see clear, hard evidence that any/all images on the lens are legally allowed. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between a great personal photo, a great photo from morguefile, or a completely copyrighted photo that isn't supposed to be used on a commercial site like Squidoo. So why not make it easier for us, if you want the lens rank boost of a blessing? Even non-Angels may only "Like" lenses or share them around if they are sure the lens is following legal image usage.

4. If a photo is your own work, why not brag about it! If you're using your own photography on a lens, tell the world! Who knows, someone might like your work well enough to commission you or pay you to use your photography on another website or for other purposes.

5. Ease of future editing. Say you've uploaded an image to a module after grabbing it (legally I hope) somewhere on line. A few months later you want to reformat the image/crop it/enhance it/answer a question about its origin and original photographer. Or maybe there's a system bug/crash that loses your original image upload. By including a credit/link when originally adding it to a lens, you save yourself the trouble of having to hunt down the source of that image again in the future.

6. It's just good etiquette and polite. Whenever I see or hear someone whining about having to provide image credits on a lens, I wonder if they aren't protesting too much. Yes, it takes a few seconds extra work. But even if you don't HAVE to credit someone for using their photography, isn't it a nice thing to do? Good karma, people.