Wednesday, February 25, 2009

YouTube For Traffic

If you are serious about getting traffic to your lens I highly recommend using YouTube as a weapon in your arsenal.

If you are new to making videos, it is not as intimidating as you may think. I recommend buying a Flip camera if you do not already have one as they are easy to use and make a good quality video that is easy to load onto YouTube.

Once you have your camera, make a demonstration about a product, or a how to video that relates to your lens. Do not simply make a sales pitch. The demo or how to will be much more likely to draw in an interested visitor to your lens.

The traffic will come naturally once you load your video. The keywords you enter for your video will bring in viewers that are interested in the topic of your video and this will bring in highly targeted traffic. Just remember to put a link to your lens in the description of the video and you should soon see the traffic coming in.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Squid Spam

There has been a lot of uproar of late in Squidu over the recent locks on lenses and there has been a lot of talk of what some feel are junk/spam lenses.

Things started slowly and began to snowball into quite a mess that peaked on 2/18/09 in the evening when all of a sudden the Squidu forum was flooded with complaints of locked lenses.

At first was was concerned about a lack of communication and transparency from the small but dedicated Squidoo staff. When panic starts in the flock, rumors, lies and half truths spread like wildfire.

Thankfully early in the morning on 2/19/09 the staff of Squidoo was direct and clearly communicated what was happening and what to expect and what to do. Some of the best statements by the Squidoo higher ups are this one on the spam filter, and one on Squid junk.

The Squid Staff has also been much more active in the forum lately as well. I just want to complement Squidoo for working so hard at doing their best to keep Squidoo the great place that it is. I also want to give thanks to all of the wonderful lensmasters who work so hard to make Squidoo be my favorite social Web site on the net.

What I think we can take from the last few days of mild chaos is that we should focus on the positive. Work on making great lenses that you care about and do it with passion. Don't worry too much over lenses that are made that you do not appreciate, but if you find real spam, report it.

Squidoo is a great place and it is largely up to us as a community to keep it that way.