Howling Squid Review

I have been trying an experiment on Squidoo for the last two months to see how much republishing lenses made a difference on lensrank. What I have been doing is refreshing and republishing my top two tier lenses every day. What I noticed is that while my lenses do not go up in rank too much, they also do not go down in rank as much as they do if I leave them alone. With the drain on my time, I have found that I normally do not republish a lens more than once every two or three months, and that affects my lensrank quite a bit. So while I cannot continue to republish every lens daily, (because ...

I thought that I would preface this post by saying that I really do like Squidoo as a site in general, and will continue working with Squidoo for quite some time. I have had success, and learned numerous things as well as become part of a very interesting and dynamic online community because of Squidoo. However, I have to say that I am very frustrated by the very slow load times that I face on a daily basis on Squidoo. I have come to realize that the best times for me to work on Squidoo are either extremely late at night or very early in the morning, most likely because the bulk of Squidoo

Squidoo has just made a new change, that in my opinion is a very long time coming. That change is moving from a star rating system to a thumbs up system. In the past, we had to choose how many stars to give a lens, and it was extremely subjective. Many people used the 5 star or no star method of rating. On the other hand, it was also a attraction for jealousy and mean spirited behavior. There were people who would rate lenses with one star just to bring down the star average for that lens.With the new system, you either like the lens or you don't. Very simple. I like the lens, it gets a

For those of you who do not already know, Ning is changing their system to a paid network within the next few months. This is a sad moment for many of us who have used Ning for all kinds of networks, but I have wondered for a long time how Ning paid for such an involved and complicated site.As many of you know, I have been advocating and recommending that you check out Professional Squids since I found out about it. Professional Squids is really a wonderful network for all level of Squidoo members and it is really just getting off the ground. Unfortunately it is set up on Ning, so that will

I have been working with some very talented lensmasters on the Professional Squids Ning which by the way, you should all join already. The information and the teamwork is just astonishingly good, and I am not just saying this because I am involved. Anyway, back to my main topic, while I have been working with them, a very big void has made itself clear to me in how we are all taught to make lenses.We have learned through some very excellent resources, how to make our lenses attractive, how to find keyword, how to add html, how to use the various modules, but what we are not really taught is

I just started using the new Squidcast promotion program that Squidoo changed recently. I have to say that I like it much better than the old Squidcast. The main reason is that the new Squidcast is very user friendly, and it doesn't just promote internally. You can direct it to your Twitter account and Facebook account too.The reason I didn't like the internal Squidcast before, is because I rarely remembered to look at the page they came out on, the Favorites page. I only use that page when I am looking for a lens that I don't remember the title of. I don't use it to bookmark lenses like

I wanted to invite all of you Squidooites who are not already spending some of your time dipping your toes into the water on Crabbysbeach to come and check it out. Crabbysbeach is run by none other than Alex Crabtree, who you might know as Drifter.What I like about Crabbysbeach is the constant level of creativity and innovation going on. Alex is sharing his knowledge with all of us and we are soaking it up.There is always a party going on at Crabbysbeach, so come and join the fun.You can follow the directly from Twitter.

I wanted to bring everyone's attention to the experiment that AJ is conducting with coaching from Alex. AJ is chronicling this experiment starting with her blog post, Blogging for Profit. AJ does a beautiful job describing what she is doing step by step and the results so far, but to help explain this process, you need to read the blog post by Alex, called Publishing Sites Content Indirectly Pay Off. The chart pictured above is what Alex describes in his blog post. His frustration with making...

We talk a lot about backlinks on Squidoo, and on the internet in general. And many times, in the interest of getting more traffic to our lenses, we go on a backlink rampage from social networking site to social bookmarking site to forums, without ever really considering the value of that particular backlink.Well, I am here to tell you that most of those will not help raise your article's value, and at the same time, may anger forum, or network memberships. Many of them consider that kind of linking spamming and could get you knocked of the network or Squidoo or other sites banned altogether

New Year's Party Invitation by gravityx9 Create notecards at zazzle.com Happy holidays and a happy healthy New Year to everyone! This week between Christmas and New Year is often one that people waste when it comes to business, but I recommend that you use this "down time" to assess the last year, and strategize for the year to come--2010. This is the time to take a summary of your activities, figure out which ones have brought in the most money, and which ones were a waste of time. There...

I am a strong believer in maximizing and compounding your online earnings as much as possible and getting as much earnings from the same articles as you can. It seems that lately several websites have popped up that will share Adsense earnings with you for bookmarking your pages with them, so I thought I would compile a list here to make sure that everyone knows of the websites, and is taking advantage of the income and backlinks available. Some of the listed websites give credit for...

Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut If you haven't already become an Amazon associate, now is a good time to do so, because Amazon has just added convenient usage for associates to Blogger. I do a lot of blogging to promote my articles and websites, and I thought I would try it out with this article so here it goes. If you see a link in this article, it was put in with the new Amazon tool.As the year winds down, I am reviewing what I have learned from my online ventures, about making money online, and affiliate marketing, and I can say that I have learned a lot this

As I sit here sipping coffee this morning here in Cleveland, Ohio on a frigid, windy morning, I am trying to work out some last minute kinks in my Lake Erie Artists Gallery website that I didn't realize were there until an order wouldn't go through earlier this week. For those of you who don't realize it, tonight is the first night of Chanukah, which my family celebrates and my husband and I just started shopping for holiday gifts yesterday. This is the mindset that I believe many Americans...