Sometimes we get so busy cooking up new stuff here at SquidHQ that we wind up with a backlog of cool features to tell you about. So consider this a post to officially get stuff that has been flying under the radar, ON your radar. It’s worth it.

First, you saw the new lensmaster bio page launch yesterday. Here are just a few of my favorite examples.

Next up is the sweet new Lijit module. “Unify your content and make it searchable” is the catch phrase from the Lijit team, and that’s a pretty cool way to put your stake in the ground online. Basically, it makes it easy for you to make one big list of all the places you save or create content, like Flickr and Squidoo and Facebook and Delicious and your blogs, then roll that list up into a you-specific search. (Hint: Yep, it will roll all your lenses in there too). Then when readers stop by your lens, they can search all your content on the web with just one click. Told you it was sweet. Check it out in action on Corey’s lens. Then go try it on your own.

Finally, we also released a Feedmysearch module. Works like the older Google Blog Search module, but better. You just type in a keyword, choose whether you want to show news, blogs, web or local results, and bang… live, fresh news and posts right on your lens.

Oh, and after a few weeks of ironing out the wrinkles, the Lens of the Day blog is back and hot to trot. Have you been picked yet?

And that’s all she wrote. For now. Lots more soon.

Giant Squid Organizers and Giant Greeters are always on the lookout for potential Giant Squids, and they’re usually the first to discover hidden gems because of it.

But with nearly 700,000 lenses and 250,000 lensmasters, it’s a big challenge to stumble across all the goodness out there! So they thought: who better to help us hunt than our existing roster of hotshot Giant Squids, lensmasters and friends on Squidoo and SquidU. Afterall, you guys know best what makes a masterpiece.

Ergo: We’re running a Giant Squid Treasure Hunt. Details here. (And some cool prizes, too). Just hunt for lenses that match the clues we’ve given you. If the lens is exceptional, and the lensmaster isn’t a Giant yet, voila. You get a point. And so on.

Help us find people with impressive lensmaking chops, people worthy of becoming Giant Squids in the future. And maybe learn something you didn’t know along the way.

Happy hunting!

For those of you that haven’t noticed it yet, Squidoo released their new ‘lensmaster profile’ pages yesterday and they look pretty sweet!.

If you check out mine, you’ll notice that you can add some websites about you on the left (including up to 3 of your personal sites), your favorited  lenses are shown that you have marked as ’shared’, your fans, and your lens list in alphabetical order. The lens list can also be sorted by lensrank, which is a nice touch.

The lensmaster profiles on Squidoo also display the ‘Real’ name for you that you have on your account. Hrmm… not sure how a few people are going to feel about that, especially the more private types. Although you can easily go into your profile information and change your name.

I’m almost positive your tax info is stored separately so you wouldn’t have to worry about getting a 1099 for Maniac McGee at the end of the year or anything.

One interesting feature is the ‘Featured Lens’ area below the lensmaster bio. It works like a Featured Lens module and allows you to feature any of your lenses you would like (or anyone elses). The idea being that if the lens is at the top with a thumbnail then it is more likely to be clicked on.

I think this is pretty cool, but I have plenty of my lenses listed on my lensmaster page already. Combined with the fact that I am woefully behind on starring and giving angel love to well deserved lenses, I’ve decided to do something creative with my Squidoo Lensmaster Profile page.

What I’m Going to Do with My Profile

The Five Featured lens spots on my profile page are currently for rent as part of a lens review by yours truly. For $25 bucks a month right now (going up when there is a waitlist, of course ) You can have your lens featured front and center on my profile page.

There are a few caveats to this deal:

I reserve the right to say no and give you your money back if the lens rubs me the wrong way. I don’t forsee this happening often but it’s got to be said.

If you like, I will also write a review of the lens on Captain Squid. I think this is a great way to see how different lenses are put together. In these reviews, I’ll provide thoughtful, constructive criticism with ideas for monetization and promotion. If for some reason you don’t want me to write your lens up, you have to tell me.(duh)

I’ve got some other little caveats, rules, and such over at ‘Your Lens Here‘. Check it out.

But for Today (or just while) Only:

If you leave a comment with 2 sentences or so about why your lens should be seen by 10,000 people a month or so (The link to my lensmaster profile ‘gets around’ as we say…) then I’ll throw it in the running for being a free featured lens for this next week (Aug 20 - 27 ).

3 lenses of my choosing will be chosen each week for as long as I want to run this little game. ( or as long as there are spaces available) No, you can’t whine if you don’t get picked one week, polish it up and re-submit it or submit something else.

On Tuesday I’ll post a reminder for the week and on Wednesday I’ll announce the winners and give a short review/critique of each.

Each lens is only going to be able to win once.

The one thing I’ll ask is that if you do win you wouldn’t mind letting me know what kind of traffic you get for the time your lens is up ( a little ‘testamonial’ if you will). Doesn’t have to be glowing, just has to be the truth.

Okay, I’m tired of writing rules, if I missed something, ask me in the comments. Otherwise, throw your lens in the ring for a little free promotion!

Launching in 3… 2…. 1….

Just go look at your profile page and you’ll see it. For example:
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/realnerd.

A bunch of new features come with this, which you’ll discover as you dig in a little. For starters, go to the Profile tab on your Dashboard:
http://www.squidoo.com/member/profile.

Scroll down to the “More about me” section. Answer as many questions as you like! Some of them are intended to highlight your favorite external links, like your blog and your Twitter and Facebook pages. Others are chances to creatively point to your favorite Squidoo lenses. All the links you add here will populate your new Bio page.

Neat feature #2: You can spotlight up to 5 lenses (yours or a friend’s) right smack dab in the middle of the page. That’s what the “Check out these great lenses” section is. Also controlled, by you, via the Profile tab.

Neat feature #3: Now you can show a list of lenses you’ve “Favorited” in Squidoo. That shows in the left-hand sidebar, but only if you have “Share my Favorites” turned on in your Profile tab.

Play around with it and see what you think. As always, we’ll be testing this out with you for a few days and tweaking based on feedback.

My 2 cents: This is a really cool new improvement to the bio page, and turns the page into a content-rich destination for your fans, and for people Googling you.

Have fun!

UPDATE: We’re working out a few kinks with the Trivia Questions / More About Me part of the bio. Stay tuned.

Sound familiar?

Make huge piles of money with no work and no effort, anyone can do it regardless of who you are?

Sorry, not this time.

Why can’t everyone just be rich? That would fix everything, right?

Squidoo is an awesome tool and is used by tons of people to raise money for charity, make a little money, tell people about their passions, and find new friends. The time put in by volunteers to police the SquidU forum and new lenses boggles my mind. It is certainly the most powerful community on the web that I’ve ever found.

Will most of the lensmasters on Squidoo ever make significant money from Squidoo? Probably not, but then again that’s not necessarily Squidoo’s fault.

Actually, the more time I spend on technology related projects the more I come to realize that the internet is really just life on a timer. Sometimes it moves at fast forward and sometimes it slows wayyyy down. However, that doesn’t make the internet any less real.

In fact, I would argue that traits that make you successfull in the real world can make you MORE successfull on the internet. Conversely, your worst habits are also magnified.

Squidoo is still growing very quickly (as is the rest of the internet!)

Instead of trying to come up with that latest ‘niche’ that no-one else has found, why not take a look at yourself and see what qualities you are good at?

Leadership, Teamwork, Creativeness, Attitude, Work Ethic, Communication, Determination etc…

For me, I tend to do okay at Leadership, Attitude, and Work Ethic. I love coming up with new ideas and can conceptualize where things will be (hopefully ). However, I can’t really draw a picture, sometimes I don’t play very well with others, and while I’ve been working on my Communication skills, they aren’t there yet a lot of times.

If you play up to your strengths, you will find that not only do you make more money, you truly enjoy what you do. And that is worth more than any bajillion dollars ever, no matter how easy.

I’m a observing soul and my curiosity tends to get the best of me at times.

I’m participating in this year’s Thirty Day Challenge being presented by Ed Dale and gang. I must say the information that they are providing is top notch, with one exception. That exception would be comments on other blogs to gain links back to your main content.

As any good search engine marketeer knows, backlinks are the #1 way to get the search engines, Yahoo in particular, to take notice of your content. This can be done in many ways. The best and easiest way is to post comments on the blogs. Ed tells the participants of the 30DC to be relevant when posting comments on others blogs and I couldn’t agree more.

But..are these relevant comments?

- It can occasionally become problematic to set apart the good vintage text from the dreadful
- Also the natural next question is: ‘What’s if Worth?’
- So for the collector - what are the key things you need to know?
- There is just not enough information on this topic as far as I am concerned!

Ed has created a blog about Vintage Electric Guitars, which is a great market. I have been watching the progress the backlinks that are being created for the blog and I must say I’m a little disappointed. To my dismay, the backlink strategy that is being employed is verging on the edge of spam.

First the backlink results:

40+ backlinks in less than a week….pretty damn good!

Now the comments I pointed out above, taken in the right context and found on blogs about music and guitars would be perfect, but these comments are not on relevant blogs at all. In fact, many of the sites are far from the topic of Vintage Electric Guitars. These links are coming from blogs about wine, pruning shears and photography. Don’t get me wrong, there are comments on blogs that are targeted to music but they are far and few between.

I have followed Ed for 3 years now, learning about him while I was a member of StomperNet. He is the genuine deal. With that said, I’m a little disappointed to see this type of comment tactics being used to game other blog’s comment sections. Now to be fair, Ed is probably not building these back links himself, rather he has the lab doing it for him. I lean towards the lab doing the linking and if that’s the case, the lab folks need a little better training.

Now I’m sure Ed (or a lab member) will see the incoming link from this post and thats ok. I don’t mind spreading link juice to his guitar blog. Like I said, I think he is a stand up guy and I know he’s into guitars. The point I wanted to make here is when making comments on another person blog, try and be respectful and interested in the owners content. If your going to post a comment at least post a comment because it interests you..not just to gain a link.

Edit: One thing that did not occur to me when writing this post this am was it may be possible the there is a campaign to smear the work and teachings that Ed and team are graciously sharing with the world. After a little investigative reading and contemplating, the incoming links that are showing up for Ed’s blog are more than likely the work of people who have bad intentions. It is a shame that this is happening to his blog, of which is actually a true passion of his and could have worked well for him. It’s a real shame that a few ‘turd balls’ are ruining it. My hats off to the 30DC team. The information they are sharing is far and above what most people deserve to receive for free.

We are happy to say the the Squidoo Charity Fund raised over $4,000 last month AND 90 other charities raised close to $3,000.

Wow! That’s not small change at all!

The Squidoo Activists nominated that $500 of the Squidoo Charity Fund be donated to Randy Pausch’s Alice Project in his memory.  Thank you all for making it possible.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while and I noticed that Spirituality wrote an awesome post on her blog yesterday about all the Dynamic Links in Squidoo and how it affects Search Rankings.

I want to expand a little bit more on a few of the ideas that Spirituality threw out there. Here’s a brief excerpt I want to talk about:

I’ve been thinking about this, because squidoo is a place where a lot of the links are dynamic: they stay up only as long as your lens has a high lensrank. Getting your lens into the top 100 for instance is great for several reasons - one of which is that it’s a great link to have. BUT it’s a temporary link if your lens doesn’t actually stay in the top 100.

The links to your lens through squidoo can update on a moment’s notice or they can update daily or over an even longer time period.  Squidoo is built on two or three primary drivers that help build links to individual pages.

The first factor built into Squidoo’s site architecture is Lensrank.  Lensrank controls the appearance of your lens on the top 100 lists, how high your lens appears on tag pages, and to a lesser extent, how often it appears on the ‘Explore Related Lenses’ box.

The second factor to consider with Squidoo’s on-site SEO is tagging. I wrote a huge tutorial on tagging with squidoo for a reason. Tags are directly controlled by the Lensmaster and they directly determine which tag pages your lens can appear on and which lenses your lens will show as a ‘related’ lens for.

The intersection of these two factors is that the order of the lenses that appear on tag pages are governed by Lensrank.

Now, when you have a lens that gets a good chunk of traffic, this can quickly become a self - reinforcing cycle. When your lens climbs the ranks it begins to appear on more tag pages which causes those tag page backlinks to increase in quality significantly, possibly sending you even more traffic.

However, if your lens is just starting out how do you get enough backlinks to catch the eyes of the search engines if you don’t already have the traffic? There are a few simple solutions.

Go after some ‘medium’ tags that only are used by 20-40 other lenses. These tag pages are awesome for lenses that need to get indexed because it’s easy to get on the front tag page for these terms within a day or two (usually).

Go after one or two ‘huge’ tags. The giant tags on squidoo like ‘music’ or ‘business’ can actually be helpful. I’ve noticed that the ‘explore related lenses’ area of lenses don’t always take the top lenses from the tags to display. Sometimes a few of the lenses will be from other lenses that are tagged similarly and have a Lensrank in the same range. This can get you a little more exposure on other lenses plus even the second and third page on some of those big tags can still get you a visit by the search engine.

What do you think of the Squidoo on-site SEO? What tips do you have for getting into the lensrank/tag cycle quickly?

You’ve probably seen them around.
Or come across some of their lenses and blogs.
Or maybe you’ve even heard from them directly, with encouraging words (and a hint or two) for your lenses.

I’m talking about our 3 Giant Squid Organizers. Bonnie, Robin and Patti.

These women are passionate lensmasters who give a lot of their time (and even more creativity and energy) to help make the Giant Squids program the robust, incredible community that it is.

They work hard to bring interesting ideas and perks and spotlight attention to our few hundred existing Giants.

But they also spend a lot of time with their ears to the ground, on the lookout for potential new hotshots with Giant Squid potential.

So, if you see a Giant Squid Organizer (and soon, a Giant Squid Greeter) show up on your lens, or in your inbox, chances are it’s because you’ve hit their radars as someone worth watching. And hey, why wait. If you think you’re making knockout pages, if you’ve got a growing addiction to Squidoo, why not drop a line to “giants at squidoo.com”. Bonnie will get back to you with some more info for upping your odds at becoming a Giant Squid yourself.

Weird #1 lens today…….. (I didn’t photoshop this except to crop it and it’s not one of my lenses.) You can find the lens here. Not sure how long this will stay up.

Weird Squidoo Lensrank

As I was lensbuilding this weekend I noticed a new evergreen Module has been released into the wild for Squidoo lensmasters. (What is an evergreen module?)

The Feed My Search module uses FeedMySearch.com to pull relevant news, blog posts, and search engine results into lenses. It works similar to the google blog search module which is also evergreen.

Uses -

I tried out the new module on some lenses I was making this weekend and had some mixed results. It seemed as if the module timed out about 40% of the time returning no results. However, when results were returned, I found the news and blog search results to be more relevant than the google Blog Search module.

Whenever squidoo gets new modules, I like to take them for a test drive to see how they perform. On several of the lenses I used the Feed My Search module on, they were indexed very quickly compared to other lenses I made this weekend (less than 24 hours for some). While the sample size was very small (I only made like 7 lenses this past weekend) I think that the initial results are promising.

I’m going to use Feed My Search going forward for the next few weeks and see how it does. If it seems to be performing well and has a minimum of timeouts, I may even go back and replace the hundreds of google Blog Search modules I have on my lenses. This is a big project though so I’m not going to undertake it lightly.

Have you seen any new modules lately? I try to keep an eye on the new module releases but I’ll be the first to say I miss them every once in a while. If you let me know about one I haven’t heard of I’ll credit you with the find and do a write-up / analysis of it.

New Week and New Modules, make some new lenses!

I have a set of images I pretty much use on each lens I make. You may well recognize some of them. One of them is the RSS image you see just to the right here. The ball. It's a cool looking RSS image, don't you think?

So what do I do with it? Simple. Every time I use an RSS module to feature some blog posts on a lens, I put this image in the Module Description box. It is set for the text in the module to wrap around it, so you end up with a list of links that isn't as boring as a list of links!

If you want to use it too, here is the code I paste in:

<a href="http://www.buildmylens.com/lenses"><img src="http://www.buildmylens.com/lenses/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/rss.jpg" align="right" hspace="5"></a>

Well, there must be something about getting married that helps to kick it up a notch because for whatever reason, July was my best month ever from Squidoo by far!

I didn’t quite reach the $4,000 level this month but I was well over $3,000 which is a first for me.

Note: I count the paypal payment received during the month and affiliate commissions generated during that month (but usually paid out later) when I calculate my squidoo earnings for you guys. I realize this is terrible accounting and I do it different for my internal bookkeeping, but it allows me to give you guys a quick and dirty number of what I made.

My Top Programs in approximate order:

Pepperjam
eBay
Squidoo Revenue Share
CJ

The Payouts from Squidoo for June hit this week as well, and I got crushed. I was out of town getting married and didn’t have the time to pay to lenses for about the last half of the month. No big deal, it was well worth paying that price :D. I expect my numbers from adsense to jump back up next month.

I’ve updated the adsense payout tiers for squidoo as well … I really need to make a graph to show the payout changes over time… maybe I’ll do that today along with the other bajillion things that I have to do… hrmmm….

Anyway, I hope your month was excellent also and August is even better for you!

I look at a lot of lenses.

Tons.

I would say without a doubt the single thing that turns people off to lenses, hurts conversions, and causes visitors to hit the back button is how the page is written.

Common mistakes on lenses I run across all the time:

• Non-specific module headers - If I’m looking through your lens for information and your module headers are all sayings like ‘Here’s a thought..‘ instead of ‘5 ways to reduce your energy bill‘ it makes it hard for users as well as search engines to understand what the heck you are talking about.
• Repeating the same point in the same way - Don’t just re-hash the paragraph you wrote in your introduction and reprint it in 3 different modules throughout your lens. I’d rather have no text to read than the same 4 sentences repeated in different combinations. Squidoo has a huge pile of ways to make your lens interactive, use them.
• Random footer modules - I see a lot of lenses that have random modules tacked on after the guestbooks or a bunch of banners or buttons in a text module. If you are trying to tell someone about the best way to protect themselves from mosquitos, why in the heck is there a banner linking to a ringtone site? or a knitting circle? It doesn’t look as professional and it dilutes the overall relevance of the page. (Note: I’ve seen some people leave a ‘logo’ or ’signature’ in the last module, that can look good if done well and is not what I’m talking about.)
• Grammar…please? - If your English grammar needs some work or your spelling leaves something to be desired, Squidoo is a great place to improve your skills. That being said, I try a lot harder to read through a lens that is poorly written if the lensmaster says something about learning english in the lens. Sometimes very important points are lost in translation…
• Huge intro modules - Intro modules should be 1-5 sentences in my opinion. Max. no extra pictures, graphics, buttons, huge text, flashing gifs, or any of that other junk. 1-5 sentences telling me what the lens is about. Simple.

Do you have a pet peeve with lens  content that immediately turns you off?

Am I going crazy and the only one that notices this stuff?

Lensmasters are excited about two great things this week, and we’re excited that you’re excited!

1. Finally! The time has come for a certain lensmaster to come clean about her love for Squidoo. I’m talking about beeobrein’s breakout lens:How do you know if you’re spending too much time on Squidoo? I mean…not that that’s a bad thing. We ARE a great place to be…

2. Who knew we had such great looking Giant Squids! *wolf whistle* Join SemperFidelis, Christene, and Johann the Dog by posting your best photo wearing your Giant Squid t-shirt (or any Squidoo shirt, for that matter!) Not a Giant Squid yet? What are you waiting for?

Thousands of our lensmasters joined Squidoo to build a lens and stay because of awesome people like you. Give yourself a big SquidSmootch.

Okay, there are 8 plugins that you absolutely can not live without if you want to create Squidoo lenses and manage them effectively. I find myself using all of these quite often for various tasks.

Squidoo Lens Editing

Greasemonkey - This lets you add little mini scripts to your browser (don’t worry you have to push one button and that’s it). In a less frightening description, it makes web pages look and work cooler. As a corollary, you must download The Fluffanutta’s script that soups up your Squidoo Dashboard and Workshop. (It only works for FF right now, IE support is supposedly on the way..)

Scribefire - I’ve written about Scribefire before and what I said then still holds true. I use it all the time when flipping between tabs in FireFox and I want to keep data or content in one place.

Squidoo Plugin - The official plugin released by HQ. It allows you to add your current page as a link on any one of your lenses, placing it in either a link list or a link plexo. This is incredibly useful if you remember you have it available..

SEO / Analysis -

SEO For FireFox - Awesome plugin by Aaron Wall at SEO Book. Shows backlinks and other relevent data on top of your search results as well as lets you easily see which links are no-followed on the page.

SEO RankChecker - Part two of SEO Book’s must have plugins is the SEO Rank Checker. Use it to monitor your search engine rankings for specific terms on all three search engines by domain and by keyword. Awesome Tool.

Compete.com Toolbar (aff.)- Shows you estimated people counts and site rankings for whatever site you are on, also adds more cool information to your search results. This is a good one to check out if sites you are looking to submit links or content too actually get any traffic.

Bookmarking / Networking -

StumbleUpon Toolbar - I use this a lot for doing market research with StumbleUpon as well as for reviewing and tagging sites (and lenses). Don’t go ‘thumbing’ all of your lenses at once, but when used judiciously it can pack a punch. Oh yea, and it’s a great fix for when you are feeling burnt out.

I usually have another toolbar of whatever social bookmarking site I’m hot on at the moment, but the only one I’ve consistently used over the last year is StumbleUpon.

I would also advise getting a Google/Yahoo/MSN toolbar just for easy searching and bookmark management as well.

This isn’t a comprehensive count of all the plugins I use, but these are the ones I use most often. Try a few of them out and see if they improve your performance or researching for Squidoo.

Got a plugin I’ve clearly missed? Let me know!

A few weeks ago I posted about some of the backend changes we were making to the Lens of the Day newsletter.

We’re working with Google’s Feedburner to make this popular program better… but the nature of being one of their first, biggest lists means that we’re also experiencing some unexpected issues.

Lens of the Day will be back in action soon. It’s not on permanent vacation, I promise!

Thanks for hanging in.

Our Giant Squids are pretty awesome. No question.

Bonnie put together this video (yay, Animoto) of pics the Giants have sent in lately.

Of course, this means the squid’s out of the bag about the goodies we’ve been sending our Giants. If the Giant Squid Organizers see you do something special, mentoring a new user, starting a killer new lens, blogging something insightful, they just might drop a tee in the mail to say thanks….

And hey, if you’re a Giant, your chances of getting one are, on average, 99.99999999999% better than winning the lottery. Batteries not required. Void where prohibited. Don’t swim with sharks. No bribes accepted.

The Giant Squid Organizers send me a super special treat! My dog, Tank, stole it and wanted to show that he too had what it takes to be a Giant Squid…. I’m not sure, what do you guys think? (click thumb to enlarge, big photos…)

Heads up! We’re going to take the Squidservers down for two hours tonight, from 12am to 2am EST (4am - 6am GMT).

Just regular maintenance to further engooden the site. Join the SquidU forum thread for the latest updates.

Update: We’re back! Thanks for your patience.