The Journal of the Travelling Squid in Bristol

Me, The Travelling Squid, The Journal, the SS Great Britain & The Matthew

This is a great project started by Jaguar Julie, inspired by the film the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

The idea being to connect squidoo lensmasters from around the globe by sending a journal and a Giant Squid T-Shirt, around the world. Each participant would then include an entry in the Journal and supply a phot of themselves and the shirt and journal.

As you can see, I chose quite a special backdrop for my photo! The SS Great Britain and the replica of John Cabot’s The Matthew are a pretty familair sight for visitors to Bristol and the weather was perfect.

My journal entry was quite an effort and took me a while, so I must just apologise to Julie and other lensmasters awaiting to recieve the journal for the delay. My entry (quoted below) does partially explain the delay, but visitors to this blog and my lenses, may also notice that my allocated squidoo time has been cut drasticaly over the last few months as well.

I’m spending less and less time on squidoo at the moment and this is not likely to improve much over the next few months. This is due to taking a long break of 3-4months living in the campervan and touring the southwest of the UK.

I’ll try and post the odd blog as now having an iPhone I can post quite easily from vrtually anywhere. Though I’m likely to be concentrating on a couple of new blogs whilst away and working to develop these.

I’ll add the blog links here when I get them sorted and have made a few posts on them worth reading.

Bristol April 22^nd 2009

The journal of the Travelling Squid arrived in Bristol last Thursday, and it was delightful to read the previous entries by fellow squids. I had a plan of writing a quick entry and getting it posted off a lot quicker than I actually have, but it is quite a busy time here currently. We are in the process of leaving Bristol having lived here for 3 years now and moving down to the south coast after spending the summer in my campervan. The amount of stuff needing dealt with just seems to be increasing in direct proportion to the number of things we manage to get ticked off the list! But anyway, less about that and more about fun stuff.

The weekend just gone saw me and my partner, Sasha, travel to a friends 40^th where we had a great time. Though didn’t really allow us a moment to find a scenic place to take a pic. So we did this on the return journey whilst we passed through the centre of Bristol and could use the Magnificent backdrop of the SS Great Britain, the worlds first steampowered propeller driven iron hulled ship, built in Bristol by the legendary Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The wooden boat in the foreground being The Matthew, the replica of the boat sailed 500years ago by explorer John Cabot who originally discovered New Foundland, well before Columbus.

Currently the Journal finds us in quite a period of change as we close a chapter of our lives by leaving Bristol and the bookselling business I have run for over 3 years now. During this time, we have been through quite a lot as my partner was diagnosed with CFS/ME shortly after first moving here, meanwhile I was trying to build up the book business. The good news being that within 18months Sasha was well on the road to recovery, and had published a book (Joyful Recovery from ME/CFS) about her healing story and the methods she used to aid her recovery. I also discovered the joys of writing in this period and discovered Squidoo after some minor flirting with blogging.

Through squidoo I began to enjoy writing about the subjects that caught my interest – the first being Perry Mason, which almost broke into the top100 on a number of occasions! Squidoo suited my short attention span fantastically, with my previous blog I struggled to maintain an interest in books I was writing about, and a format that allowed me to write just one article about a subject that interested me or as many as I felt like before the next passion or interest seized me. I also discovered the joys of affiliate marketing due to squidoo and have found that by using good products to link to, and finding interesting niche subjects, that I could reach a much wider audience through squidoo. The direct result of this was the ability to then earn a passive income for months, if not years after originally publishing just one article. I have found it very hit and miss choosing the right subject matter and also finding the right affiliate programs, but I have learned a lot about increasing my hit rate over the last few years. My interest in being a bookseller gradually waned, as did the profits due to increasing competition on the market. But from finding squidoo it has allowed me to increase my earnings through affiliate sales, whilst my profits from bookselling dipped as well as enjoying the activity of writing and sharing my passions and knowledge in a fun way.

As Sasha’s recovery, and subsequent training in the techniques she used, developed into a passion, training up as an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) practitioner and then qualifying to teach others this technique. She is currently working on developing a new technique which has been developed from EFT, with Karl Dawson EFT Master, this partnership is currently writing a book on ‘Matrix Reimprinting’ and hoping to have it published by a major publishing house within the next year. This coincided with the book business becoming more of a burden than a source of wages or pleasure that the time had come to change a few things. So it was decided we would close the book business and I would concentrate on increasing affiliate earnings and set up a business which would offer website design services with a difference.

Recently we made the decision to leave Bristol for a number of reasons, and start fresh on the south coast, within walking distance of the beach. First we’re going to be taking off on a UK tour in the campervan, so squidoo presence will be very low for the next couple of months. The arrival of the travelling squid couldn’t have been timed better and I hope it has as interesting and fun time on it’s travels as we are planning!

Squidoo has been a great training ground for learning about affiliate marketing and has given me a great source of additional income whilst learning. In total I’ve created over 150 lenses, many of these I quickly lost interest in, some I still keep updated, but my future plans are to develop further websites using many of the things I have learned on squidoo. I’ll still make the occasional lens to test out a niche or for something that inspires me that won’t fit in other projects.

Apologies for stalling the travels, but it has been very busy here!

Roo (aka the_book_garden)

Check out the Journal of the Travelling Squid on squidoo for the latest adventures!

Squidoo Resources & Rip-Offs

Squidoo is such a popular mode of making money online that people are now starting to exploit and profit from new and inexperienced lensmasters. Personally I’m a big fan of paying for nothing that can be obtained freely, though I can understand those who may  wish to part with a few bucks for a  short-cut or to obtain some ’secrets’. Unfortunately the ’secrets’ that are often advertised  aren’t actually secrets and surfing a few popular squidoo blogs, the squidu forum and squidoo itself will reveal these so called ’secrets’.

The situation is obviously becoming more of an issue as more ‘products’ are created and this appears to have inspired Squidoo’s Editor In Chief, Megan Casey, to write about it in the squidu forum.

But there’s another category of people there: The vampires.  Vampires are people out to cheat and trick and scam and make money off of YOU, off of people who want to use Squidoo. Vampires happen. But that doesn’t mean you need to be suckered by them.

Don’t buy ebooks promising secrets and results and instant traffic, without checking with some real, honest people first. Don’t use an automator tool (and certainly don’t buy one). Anonymous, computer-generated content isn’t content. And someone will catch you, 10 times out of 10, and will shut you down. Don’t sell or swap or engage with people who hound you or disrespect you.

Here I’ll mention a few of the more respectable resources and ones I use myself.

Squidutils – free resources, blog &  revenue sharing tools. This is run by Fluffanutta, a prolific and respected lensmaster and tool developer. Fluff  does a great job keeping on top of squidoo developments in his blog, and the free resources he provides, such as the squidutils dashboard, are great. The tools to give you  alternate ways of linking to amazon and ebay are also pretty cool, especially if you are not in the US and wish to provide links to other amazon and ebay sites. This linking service does have one snag  though – your affiliate links will include some of Fluff’s affiliate id’s. This, I believe, is calculated to give Fluff a share of the revenue you would earn. You may ask why is  this any different to sharing with squidoo? Well, with squidoo you  get a share of the revenue on any purchase made via your links, using Fluff’s tool is different that it is more hit and miss and more like roulette whether you  will get the revenue or Fluff. Having said this I do feel it fair that he does earn some revenue for the work he has done creating the tools and to cover the costs of hosting squidutils, I just am not particularly thrilled about the ‘roulette’ method of revenue sharing. If he could create a similair structure to the squidoo system, where he creates the links, tracks them, allows you access to the reports and then pays you a share I would be giving him a standing ovation and placing his links on all my lenses rather than just some.

Captain Squid – blog with lots of tips. Loyalis is the man behind Captain Squid, Isle of Squid and a number of other squidoo projects. The Captain is a top earner on squidoo and does seem to make it look remarkably easy to earn money from it. I think it’s a great blog, though like many other squidoo blogs (including this one at  times!) it can make it seem too easy to earn money via squidoo. There are a large number of tools in the Captains’s toolchest which can be used by lensmasters, though again much of the info can be gained by searching the net and the prices of the tools may be a little off-putting, though some pretty big claims are made about the performance of these tools!

WidgetSquid – A creation by  the  captain to take advantage of the new Clearspring module which is going to revolutionize squidoo in the near future.  I particularly like the ebay tool he’s made, the captain has quite cleverly introduced some ads to this widget which will give an opportunity for him to earn some money from the time he invested in setting up this widget. Which in my opinion is a much better way of doing this than his previous ebay rss affiliate tool which the results were limited to 5 results and 2 of those results have the captain’s PID inserted instead of your own, for those not keen on giving away 40% of their affilaite links there was a version you could buy as well. Currently the new ebay tool looks as though it gives you all the ebay affiliate links and the captain will do ok from the ads served with it. (I’d love to work out how to do more with the clearspring tools to enable me to add my own ads to the widget, but my code experience just isn’t up to it!

BuildMyLens – premier lensbuilding service from Tiffany & Lewis. If money is no object and you have a great idea or product to get out there Tiffany and Lewis  can create you an all singing, all dancing lens on the subject of your choice. Perhaps a little out of the reaches of most newcomers to squidoo for a business looking for some web promotion it can seem to be a very good way of  gaining visitors, customers and sales with little required from  them apart from paying the lens building fee.

Did I miss any resources out that are worthy of mentioning? I may be making subsequent posts on this subject so will include suitable suggestions.

Did I give a fair review of these tools?

Feel Free To Comment ………

Showcased!

Today was a great day for my lenses! When they refreshed I had 4 in the top 1000, and one in the top 100!! Yesterday only 1 of these was in the top 1000, and 2 of them in the top 2000. Though going to see whether others were reporting such a shakeup of rankings on squidu, I found most people reporting slides the other way. Gil jumped in the thread to state - “…in the middle of some optimizations to minimize the effect that lensrank recalculation has on site performance every morning. It looks like there are a few minor bugs and I’m working to sort them out now.” So we expect things to return to normality tomorrow. Though it wasn’t surprising to see so many people up in arms about their lensrank falling, I guess people are just in the habit of chasing lensrank!

Then I got a real nice comment on my,  currently, top lens about Green Computing, informing me that it was the featured lens over at the Giant Squidoo Community Showcase! My first ever award or acknowledgement for any of my lenses! I was over the moon about it!

The Importance Of Image

Stock Image of Sunrise

IMAGE IS EVERYTHING!

Content comes second!

Agree?

If you want to keep your reader on the page, or even attract new readers, you need to provide some eye-candy to keep them on the page. Plain text is such a turn-off when it  comes to presenting anything, and it doesn’t matter how good or important the text is, unless it’s an academic text or novel. images help keep readers on the page and give readers a more pleasant and memorable experience than just plain text would.

Images get visits!

Well tagged images will also increase your search engine ratings as well as bringing in visitors searching for images associate with your tags. Even If you are not using your own hosting or html to display  images, simpluy giving them an appropriate name will help your ranking rise. For example a lens about ‘widgets’ will do a lot better if the uploaded photos are called widget.jpg, bluewidget.jpg, widgetwoman.jpg. If you are using html use of the alt attribute will also help if you use an appropriate description. SemperFidelis has written an entire lens about how to optimize images to get Traffic From Image Searches.

Where do I get Images to use on my Website or Lens?

Many people will just blindly steal images from others by  finding  them on Google Image Search. This has 2 big drawbacks – Firstly it is theft and you could be prosecuted for stealing, or improper use of copyrighted images. Secondly, it can take for ever searching google to get the image you  want and then you  have to take the trouble to seek permission for it’s use if you wish to legally use it.

The other alternatives are often sited as being sites such as Photobucket or Imageshack, both of whom provided a limited free account for you  to upload images to so they are hosted online and can be used elsewhere online. Many  members actuallymake their uploads free for others to embed in their websites.  The disadvantages of this are that unless you are paying a subscription, you  may well use your allocated ‘bandwidth’ by too many people viewing your images, either on your own pages, or becauseyou enabled others to embed them elsewhere too. When you reach your capped limit your images will show with a simple placeholder image informing the viewer that the image is currently available.

A similar program to photobucket and imageshack is Share-A-Pic, there are no restrictions on bandwidth here at all. You also can accumulate credits for people viewing your images. The disadvantages are that the code provides a thumbnail of the image and only clicking on it will reveal the bigger image, also viewers will be subjected then to pop-up advertising. Though that said it is still great for many uses.

But Where To Get Professional Stock Images?

Good Question! You  don’t want to be spending time uploading and coding an image to appear to the public if it is amateurish. So, the solution is to look at Royalty Free Stock Photos. These are widely available online and companies like iStockPhoto and 123RF specialise in providing millions of stock images for you to browse and most are avialble for under a dollar in price. 123RF even have a huge range of stcok images for free download, when chcecking this evening I discovered they  have oer 18,000 currently available. From Stock Photos of Lions, to Stock Images of Lice, all subjects are catered for.

Recently I have been checking the free stock images on 123RF on a weekly basis and seeing  which images are available for free. With several hundred provided daily I usually find 2 or 3 great images I can use to go and spice up a few of my lenses. The free images are provided by members who usually earn a percentage of the sales of their work release a number of free downloads for a period of 30 days in the hope that it will bring more traffic to their actual part of istockphoto.

Search Engine Lovin’

I’ve been watching traffic to one of my lenses on Squidoo the last  couple of days with amazement as the number of visits suddenly started skyrocketing. All this traffic was suddenly coming from search engines, both yahoo & google! Never before have I experienced such loving from both search engines at the same time, and such good loving too! This lens has experienced a dramatic rise which I can’t really explain, suddenly receiving hundreds of hits a day! It was first published back in Feb ‘08 and has had some moderate success with steady visits and some regular commission, but no real spikes in traffic in all that time!

I knew nothing about the subject and can’t really recall the inspiration that lead me to create the lens to begin with. I knew I was aiming for, was very much a niche, on a topic I knew nothing about! The creation and setting up a few ebay  feeds I recall was the work of one evening, probably 3 or 4 hours research, writing, creating ebay RSS Feeds (so I get 100% of the commission ), and adding a few books from amazon (sharing the commission with squidoo on these cos they do provide a great site! ).

I published it the same evening, and submitted it to a few of the usual places, such as Lensroll, The Isle of Squid, Squoogle. I then sat back and watched it get, what I consider to be, moderate traffic, for what I had thought to be quite an extreme niche, and the occasional sale, both from amazon and ebay.

This sudden rise in visits into the 100’s a day has stunned me, it has had more visits in the last 72 hours than in has seen in the last 6months!

Sometimes I can only think that karma smiles on you and the search engines are one way of receiving good karma!

What was the lens? It’s quite an odd one, and some may even be disturbed by the subject, if they’ve never come across these before. Have you ever seen a doll so lifelike it could pass for being a real human baby or infant? They are called Reborn Babies and you should have a look at  how lifelike they are, how popular they are and how much they sell for! I’m still a little stunned, and slightly disturbed that this lens is showing as my number one on my profile as I’m not at all sure it’s suited to any of my other lenses at all, perhaps I should try and sell it whilst the traffic is so good! Anyone want to offer me a couple of hundred dollars for it?

I’m already seeing a very nice proportion of click-outs to ebay and amazon so am expecting the lens to earn very well and start showing results on ebay and amazon within the next few days. And if you look below you’ll see the squidoo royalty payout hasn’t been the best, though I feel it stands a good chance of staying in the top tier for this month!

Date	Type	Amount
9/8/2008	Cash	$1.76
8/7/2008	Cash	$5.45
7/10/2008	Cash	$0.07
6/4/2008	Cash	$0.07
5/7/2008	Cash	$1.42
4/8/2008	Cash	$1.53
Total		$10.30

So, here’s to those unusual niches!

Learning the Squidoo ABC

Have you been looking for a simple start-up guide on how to Squidoo in a few easy steps? Here’s a good blueprint for creating lenses that have the potential to help you position yourself as the go-to expert for your niche:

First, register for a free Squidoo account if you have not already done so. This just requires you to enter your name and email address, and then pick a username and password before you agree to the terms of service for the site. You will have to create a lens to begin with, but don’t concern yourself about getting this to a stage to publish, perhaps youcan use it later as a lensography where you can showcase all your squidoo content or just a simple bio. So when selecting your url and title, use your username here.

Then you’ll get to learn how to Squidoo by building your first lens! You can use the new Squidoo Quick Builder page to help you do this where you have one screen to register your new lens rather than four separate screens.

It’s located at squidoo.com/build/quick, where you’ll enter your lens title, choose a URL, pick a category, let others know how it should be rated (G, R, or X), and add a tag or more. A good tip on how to Squidoo properly is to not use Quickpick to choose some modules from this screen because then you have to go in and reorder them anyway, so save that step for later. Enter your captcha code and click the Done button!

Try to get the keyword(s) into your URL and the title and make sure your tags are all relevant to your niche topic. Because of Squidoo’s new nofollow rule on tag pages, you don’t need to enter all 40 tags now – just use as many as you want in your content and it will serve you better in your quest to rank high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The next step in learning how to Squidoo is to build the layout of your lens! Start by clicking on Add Modules at the top. Here are some important modules that work well on lenses (and remember that all modules will have a built in introduction Text module):

1.) Text/Write – for all of the valuable content you plan on providing. You can hyperlink to your domain and add code to insert a banner ad here.

2.) Amazon and eBay – for those who want to sell tangibles from their lens. The description area can be hyperlinked to your domain, too)

3.) Guestbook – A very important part of the web 2.0 experience, a guestbook allows others to let you know how you’re doing as well as what they need from you in the way of more information. This is another module where you can hyperlink in the description area.

4.) Poll – Ask a question and post several answer choices for your audience. You can hyperlink these choices so that before or after their participation in your poll, they can link out to one of your sites.

5.) RSS Feed – If you have a blog on your domain, insert a feed for more traffic to it! It will post excerpts of your latest entries and update on a regular basis.

6.) YouTube Videos – if you’re employing video marketing techniques, then you’ll want to showcase your videos right on your lens using the one video per module rule so that visitors never have to click out and leave your lens to view it!

7.) Twitter – a Twitter module is perfect for marketing involved in social networking whose Tweets are followed by many people.

8.) Blackbox, StickyNote, Talk Bubble, or The Most Important Thing – all modules that allow you to make one link or message stand out on your lens.

After you add the modules that you want, click the preview lens layout button and order them any way you want, with the guestbook at the bottom so they can sign it after seeing all of your hard work.

Then click the Save button and it will take you back to your lens, where you can begin editing each module. After you edit it, make sure you save it and publish the lens after you’re done.

Free Stock Image

If you want to learn how to Squidoo and make a really good lens, you’ll also want to add images! You can find a free stock photo site or use iStockPhoto and buy the smallest versions available that relate to your niche. Personally I prefer 123rf.com for supplying images, the ones on this post are from their constantly updated Free  collection, and are of an  excellent quality for sprucing up your lenses. You’ll need one for your introduction and ideally one for each text module you include on your lens.

After publishing, join some groups on Squidoo so your new lens gets exposure! Then visit Squidoo and ask for a SquidAngel to visit your lens to bless it, though only do this if youthink it  worthy of a blessing as angels can ding your lenses too! If you’ve done a good job, the blessing will help your lens rise in the ranks!

Learning how to Squidoo can be intimidating even for the best writers or most prolific website designers. If you’d rather hire professionals to build your lens for you I would highly recommend Lewis and Tiffany at http://www.BuildMyLens.com Their lens design service is excellent and their finished lenses do extremely well conveying the professionalism that you want to be known for in your niche!

Lastly, have fun and leave a comment with a link to your lenses!

Squidoo Myths!

Why do people think squidoo is spammy? Why do people think it’s so easy  to earn money from squidoo? Why is it so widely promoted as a Get Rich Quick scheme by so many? I came across a Work-At-Home advice blog today promoting squidoo, and wasn’t very impressed by it.

There are a bazillion ways to make money on the Internet. But one of the easiest is creating Squidoo Lenses and profiting from the revenue generated from them. First of all, Squidoo is super easy; you can build a basic lens in about 15 minutes. And they rank high in Google’s search engine results, so they’re traffic magnets. – Work At Home Mom Revolution
**

The article does cover a few basics, but gives no insight into how realistic earning more than the price of  a cup of coffee a month was. (I did leave a comment to suggest that  it wasn’t a particularly accurate of how easy it was to earn income from squidoo)

There are so many articles on blogs offering advice on Work at  Home Income, many of these that mention squidoo do seem to oversimplify it, resulting in poor returns and dissatisfaction among those that follow the methods given. Usually these articles state you <b>can</b> create a lens in 15minutes. Well, this is true to an extent if you use RSS modules and grab info from wikipedia, stick in a couple of youtube videos andthen fill the rest of the lens with product links, whether theybe to amazon, ebay, cafepress, netflix, to name just a few of the companies squidoo can help you  promote and will share revenue generated from them. It would be a very poor effort as the key to getting your lens ranked and receiving good traffic is actually having well written, well presented, interesting information and this is just not possible in 15minutes.
You can just write a quick blurb on the intro to a lens, then use the multitude of modules available to pre-fill the rest of the lens with content, what you will get is a spam lens, and search engines pretty much ignore these as there is no original content. If you look on squidoo, the number of these sorts of lenses is increasing rapidly, alomng with the dissastisfaction that squidoo isn’t what people have been lead to believe, it’s not easy money, it’s not guaranteed traffic, it’s what you put into it.

Squidoo works well for me, though it has been a long learning curve to get to the stage where the revenue share from squidoo is enough to pay enough for even my internet connection.
Having said this, I do have some success with promoting products etc through affiliate links and the income from this now dwarfs the revenue sharing from squidoo. It must be said though that  my earlier attempts following a similair model to what was suggested by the blog post quoted, creating a longtail lens with affiliate links in a short space of time, were an unmitigated failure and rarely earn more than a few cents a month, some not even that! So in essence a  very poor use of my time, I would even go as far as saying a comlete waste of time if it was not for the fact that I had learned what not to do!
What has worked well for me is spending time writing about subjects that  inspires me*, doing some research for it and in total spending several hours creating a worthwhile lens. Now I may spend 2-10hours on a new lens, but I  then can sit back and watch that lens earn me double figures a month. That may not be seen as a great return but what you have then got to take into account that over the course of a year the several hours you spent were a great investment as you recalculate your hourly rate for these each month you see your return on investment increase.

For people new to squidoo, or those fresh squids trying to find the ‘magic formula’ to get rich quick, I can only repeat – “You get out of it what you put into it!”. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, then good luck and be aware that many that are advertised as such are only getting one person rich – the person pushing the scheme!

The more of these type of blog posts that exist, and the number is rapidly increasing as bloggers turn to ‘wealth creation’ and visitors look for that magic formula that will earn them a fortune with little or no effort, the more squidoo will see of spam-like lenses and these new lensmasters will ‘damage’ squidoo’s credibility with search engines and visitors. The worst of these are those that spend 15minutes creating a spammy lens, and then spend an hour promoting on other social networks, directories and blogs by just posting a link and not contributing to the community or blogger they hope will help promote their lens. Squidoo is already a banned url on some social networks such as Propellor for this reason. Hopefully though, most newcomers to  squidoo will learn and improve the qualityof lenses they produce, those after fast results will drift away quickly and their lenses will drop like a rock to the regions of being out side the squidoo payout tiers and even below the threshold of quality for getting featured in search results.

I would like to add though that for those who do want a Quick Solution to creating a great lens to promote their products, businesses, websites, blogs, etc., You may want to have a look for professionals to create you a lens. There are a few services out there that will do this for you. Two full-time lensmasters offer their services to make a lens for you on any subject. BuildMyLens provides astoundingly professional lenses that work well in getting traffic to them and ranking highly on squidoo. Though the price at $249 a lens, or $799 for a group of 4, may seem a bit steep, if you have picked the right niche to market they will quickly return your initial investment.

*some subjects only provide me with fleeting inspiration, sometimes this is long enough to create a good lens, sometimes this means one stays as work-in-progress awaiting my inspiration returning. I often publish these incomplete as work in progress to see if they will fly, often they won’t, but if  they do start getting visited and climbing the rankings this is often enough to reinspire me to go back and polish it up a little

** Lisa, the creator of Work At Home Moms Revolution has visited to respond to my criticism of her blog post  and has apologised for suggesting it was simple to earn lots of money from squidoo. Her blog is actually very well written with lots of good and interesting articles about Work At Home opportunities and worth a visit.

Harry Potter – Prequel and The Tales of Beadle the Bard

It’s a while since I posted here, mainly due to spending a lot of time in Busyshire! So my latest lenses areon a fairly easy and popular subject!

The last couple of weeks have been full of news about Harry Potter spin-offs and news. The latest news about the release of the movie being delayed on top of those who wanted to see it as 1 movie rather than a 2-parter can only increase the number of disappointed fans everywhere. Confusion about the reasons for this have abounded but it is not as a direct result of the recent writers strike delaying the film, but the movie studio delaying it’s release to fill the gap in their schedule caused by the recent writers strike.

Though news of the publishing of 2 Harry Potter associated books can only help restore faith in those readers that hope to read more of the adventures of Harry Potter in the future.

Though news of the publishing of 2 Harry Potter associated books can only help restore faith in those fans that hope to read more of the adventures of Harry Potter in the future. A brief intro to the 2 lenses I created on squidoo

The Tales of Beedle The Bard

Limited print run of 100,000

This is the extremely publicised pre-christmas release of the book that was originally bought at auction by Amazon for almost £2 million or nearly $4 million dollars. In original statements at the time it was said that the book would not be published, though whether a deal was done or the opportunity to raise a lot more money for charity changed her mind, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the book would be published in time for christmas with proceeds going to the charity set up by JK Rowling to help underprivileged children in care – The Children’s High Level Group.

Three different editions are being printed by Scholastic, Bloomsbury and Amazon, whilst the publisher is the charity so all profits from the sale will be going to the charity. Pre-orders of the books various editions have pushed the books to the top of best sellers lists already and the limited collectors edition is likely to sell out well before they are due to ship from the printer. Assurances have been given that the number of copies of this printed is being split between the US & UK amazon sites and only 100,000 will be available. You can get the UK Edition for £50 & the US Edition for $100. Normal copies being considerably less and heavily discounted currently!

The Harry Potter Prequel

Most people may not have even noticed the publication of a prequel to Harry Potter at the end of last month. The fact it is only 800 words and is included in a collection of short stories by other established British authors, and only 10,000 copies being printed has certainly started a frenzy among Harry Potter collectors.

STOP PRESS!!!! – November 23rd 2008

Win a Signed Collectors Edition with Amazon UK!!

Amazon UK have announced a competition for people to win a signed collectors edition!
Click Here For Further Info!
We are happy to announce that all customers who pre-order the Collector’s Edition of J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard on or before December 2, 2008, will be automatically entered into a prize draw (“Prize Draw”) to win a copy of the Collector’s Edition signed by J.K. Rowling herself. If you have already pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition, you have already been automatically entered into the Prize Draw. Terms and Conditions apply.

Amazon.co.uk will randomly select 10 winners among the customers who have pre-ordered J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector’s Edition from Amazon.co.uk. Each lucky winner will receive a prize which comprises one (1) copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector’s Edition, signed by J.K. Rowling.

Each winner will receive their prize, a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector’s Edition signed by J.K. Rowling, in addition to the non-signed copy that they pre-ordered!
Good Luck!
Unfortunately buyers in the US are not being offered a similar competition!

Chasing Lensrank On Squidoo

This subject is something that constantly bugs me! Why is it that I feel good when my lens is ranking high and not so good when I see it start to slide? Why does this bother me when I should in fact be more interested in overall traffic and actual affiliate earnings of a lens, rather than some arbitrary ranking of popularity?

This is a subject that has come up on squidu.com, the squidoo community forum, time and time again as people get hypnotised by the bright lights of lensrank! In the beginning sufferers will be proud of having created a lens that ranks well, then they’ll ponder on how to increase it’s rank just a little. Then when they see it slip a few hundred/thousand places over a couple of days, they update it and add to it again. This then shows another jump in lensrank and the frown is replaced by the smile. Yet their is still a twinkle in the eye wondering what the magic ingredient to get it to go up and stay up. This is where logic leaves and obsession takes over!

I posted this in reply to a question on squidu, ‘Trying to break into the top 1000 – any constructive critisism / ideas’ an innocent enough question as 12months ago I was asking the same sort of questions!!

If it is just the top tier payout you may need to think about how many hours obsessing over lensrank divided by the payout to get the hourly rate you are willing to work for. Though if you are hoping to earn through people clicking on your affiliate links and earning you money, why are you worrying about lensrank, when you should be looking for quality traffic instead! Social Networking bookmarking may bring you some traffic, so may using stumbleupon, though do you just want a crown of people crashing through your lens wearing out the carpet following the ‘buzz’, or would you be happier with a few visitors who were interested in the subject and prepared to interact with the topic and even possibly buy something to earn you some money?

Just Build Quality Interesting Lenses – If the search engines don’t pick up on it, it’s likely their are either few people interested in the subject, or the net is swamped with other sites on the subject.

One of my early lenses did really well the first few weeks, and I kept tweaking it, adding to it, rearranging it, just to see a small surge in lensrank followed by a slide. The amount of time I was putting into keeping it up and getting traffic to it was getting to be crazy. Then I earned my first affiliate sale from it and it was a flashbulb moment! Why am I chasing lensrank when I should be chasing traffic and potential customers?? I only update this lens every few months now, yet traffic to it varies between 50 & 200 visitors a week. It doesn’t earn a lot of commission, but usually a dollar or so every other month. Since creating it in July last year squidoo has paid me about $30 for it, and I have earned maybe the same from my own affiliate links. Not megabucks, but if I had 30 lenses like this that performed as consistently – I’d be pretty happy!

This inspired me to blog here a little about the lens I mention and provide some more analysis of the stats

Here we see that the lens has stayed in the top 10,000 for most of it’s life, with a good start it did make it as high as 107, but dispite spending a month adding content and working on getting links and traffic I could not get it higher and each slide in lensrank was bigger than the last. So after a month I gave up and moved on to spend time creating other lenses.

This image shows earnings from squidoo over the last year for this lens. $30 may not seem like much considering all the work I put in, but I have strong faith that it will perform as well over the next year and only require an update every few months to maintain it’s average traffic and click thru’s. This also does not show how much I have earned from affiliate links, which I haven’t an exact figure on, but having looked at my amazon figures for sales of related products, as most of the amazon links in this lens are to my own amazon affiliate account, and a few sales of cafepress items I created specifically for this lens, I made another $60 at a rough guess.

Whilst this one shows where the traffic is coming from. Mostly it’s google as you’d expect, though there is also a good proportion of referrals from various sources. In it’s lifetime this lens has received about 2,200 visits, with 1200 clickouts, which is a pretty good ratio in my opinion. Though this has inspired me to check the format of some of my amazon links as this is the mos popular destination of those clicking out and the numbers don’t add up to my amazon clicks!

So I hope this info will provide encouragement to those who are devoting time to achieving good lensrank, and that maybe instead of chasing lensrank, which is a pretty arbitrary form of peer approval, you’ll spend your time chasing good traffic and creating more content.

There is a phrase that springs to mind here, that may help you remember to move on if you don’t get the success you’d hope for. It applies in particular to having chosen a subject matter that is either completely over-subscribed with just too much competition, or so niche that only 6 people a month will actually search keywords on your lens.

You can’t polish a turd!!

Revenue Sharing

If you’re publishing anywhere on the web that has some form of advertising on it, someone is earning money from your writing. Very few places make any attempt to share revenue they raise with you, which is why I’m such a fan of Squidoo and other social networks that allow you to publish content and earn money from doing so!

Recently I worked on a tutorial that showed squidoo users, and others, how to create an Ebay RSS Feed. Many responded saying thanks for the tips, though a few lensmasters who wished to share their revenue with squidoo and some who donate to charity via squidoo, who did not want to use this tool. I have just updated with a tutorial on how to include your squidoo campaign and custom id so that your lens gets the credit for earning commission.

Thinking more about why people wanted to share did make me realise that some were doing this just for fun, as an interesting hobby, and to raise money for charity. Others also seemed to feel that it is only fair to share with squidoo as they share with you through the monthly  royalty payouts. It may well be thin line between squidoo paying staff to continue doing a great job and the site deteriorating because they can’t afford to pay the staff, but until I see Gil turning up for work in a ferrari or Megan dripping in diamonds, I think squidoo is worthy of at least one or two modules on a lens that will earn them some money too!