Plexo Bots

If your lenses are like mine, they have been flooded with spam on the link plexos lately. It has wasted hours of my time going through and deleting the garbage posted on many of my lenses.

Squidoo wants us to report the plexo spam. It took me a while to finally do this because I didn't believe that reporting it would help because they should have already known about the problem. Hopefully my reporting the spam will help the Squidoo staff to find the culprits and find a way to block these vermin from littering our lenses with their garbage links.

SquidooKimberly said in the forums on March 2nd that "We've tracked down the problem and are working on a solution for it. Keep in mind for the future that you can set your Plexos up like guestbooks, where comments must first be moderated by you in order to display."

Well, its only one day later but the spam is still there. Hopefully this problem will be resolved soon.

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.

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.

Obama Wins!

Wow, what a run it has been. The candidates began their campaigns well over a year ago and it is over.

In this election with record breaking turn out Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. This is a historic election not only for its turn out, but also because it is the first African American to ever be elected to president.

The elections have played a large part in the Squidoo content of late. There are some excellent Election 08 lenses. Be sure to check out the many lenses on Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, and Sarah Palin.

Tip On Joining Groups

I made a discovery today that will save me a lot of time when it comes to joining groups.

If you have hundreds of lenses like I do, it can be difficult to find the right lens why trying to join a group. One option is to try to scroll down until you find the right lens.

Tonight I found that there is an easier method. Simply move your cursor over the the top of the drop down menu where you find your lens title and start typing in the title of the lens that you want to submit to the group.

If you do this, the correct lens will show up and it can be a real time saver. Hope this helps.

Keywords and Tags

Adding the right tags can make a world of difference when you are designing your lens. This can greatly help your traffic in two ways. It can help search engines find you by highlighting your most important keywords, and it can also generate traffic from withing Squidoo through Squidoo searches and the "explore related pages".

To help find keywords related to your theme I recommend using the free SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. All that you do is enter the main keyword that you want and hit submit. Then you are provided with a list of related keywords along with estimated daily searches on each term in the major search engines.

You can use these search terms to either help you come up with new ideas for contend in your modules. Or, you can edit your existing content to incorporate these new keywords. After a few days to weeks, you should start noticing more traffic to your lens from the added keywords.

Mighty Muggs

Have you seen these things? They are so cool. I am a big Star Wars fan and these are about the coolest collectibles that I have every seen. They are sleek, cool, and stylish.

To check these out for yourself, here is a great Mighty Muggs collection. Right now, there are Star Wars, Marvel, and Indiana Jones figures available.

Christian Jewelry on Squidoo

One of my first lenses ever is on Christian Jewelry. I have had to update it quite a bit over the past year and a half as some of my products from my Christian jewelry store are discontinued or as new items are released.

This lens is basically hands off for me. I maybe update it every quarter. What amazes me is that it continues to rank anywhere from 900-2500 in lensrank. It also drives my Christian Jewelry website a fair amount of traffic and conversions.

This just goes to show the power of Squidoo and what it can do to help you promote your website.

Bob Marley, Reggae Legend

I have liked reggae music for over half of my life. I started listening to Bob Marley at age 15. I bought my first Bob Marley poster and t-shirt at age 16.

Now years later at age 32, I made a lens highlighting some of my favorite Bob Marley Posters, CD's, and T-Shirts.

Marley is a legend that teaches love, peace, and justice. Sadly, his life was ended too early but his music lives on.

Strategiclly Updating Lenses

I have been attempting to update more of my lenses of late and I have seen an increase in traffic and lensrank.

But not until I read CaptainSquid's recent post did I consider more strategically updating my lenses. I highly recommend reading his post, Sneaky Squidoo Lens Label Trick, to learn more about why and when you should update your lenses and how you can help organize your dashboard when you have hundreds of lenses to manage.

For now, I am just updating lenses on my different accounts that are on the edge of tiers. After the beginning of July I will start labeling my lenses into tiers like the Captain is doing to help notice changes in traffic and performance.

My First Go At The Squidoo Superheroes Project For Charity

Tonight I made my first Superhero Charity lens, on the founder of Vitamin Angels, Howard Schiffer.

Howard Schiffer has helped to save thousands of children from blindness and has also done important work in providing proper nutrition to the poor around the world through is important non-profit organization, the Vitamin Angels.

If you have not heard of the Superhero project, it is designed to help raise awareness of people who are everyday heroes. They can be people who directly influence your life, or just someone you admire from afar. The important thing is to raise awareness about the good that these people do and to help raise money for charity.

To learn more about the Superheroes project visit the Squidoo Superheroes CoBrand.

Longest Word In The English Language

I feel like the only time that I have been on Squidoo of late has kept me updating my groups. My Natural Health Group has been a lot of work reviewing every lens and only allowing and featuring the best.

Tonight, I needed a break and made an experimental lens. I wanted to see what kind of traffic a lens could get as an oddity. I made a lens on the topic of antidisestablishmentarianism.

I'm looking forward to see if this lens gets any traffic or interest to speak of.

I'd like to encourage my readers to try the same thing from time to time. If you ever have writers blog, or need a break from a tedious lens, make a fun, quick and light hearted lens just to mix it up and see what happens.

Adding Ever.com Sites In Featured Lens Modules

Thank goodness for Squidu. I went there because I was at a loss on how to add an ever.com lens to be featured in my Natural Health Group.

I did a search on Squidu.com and found these results.

To add an ever.com lens, Christine Suggested: "for: http://best.cameras.ever.com/
use: best-cameras-ever"

Sure enough, it worked great.

Still Updating Groups

Boy, updating my groups has been very time consuming. I hope that the work will be worth it. I am only about a third of the way at the time of this post on my Natural Health group. So far, the work seems to be paying off as it is now number 2 in the health category.

I am hoping that Squidoo will find the time to fix the groups. They desperately need new modules and tools.

It has been so time consuming that I have barely had the time to make any new lenses. I snuck in a quick Squidwho site today on one of my favorite mixed martial artist, Urijah Faber.

Using Squidoo To Promote A Charitable Event

My wife came to me to ask my help in regards to lens building. A friend of hers from work has a son named Ausin who recently passed away from neuroblastoma. This June, they are throwing their third annual cancer crushing carnival to help raise funds for neurblastoma research.

The carnival is small, mostly friends and neighbors. It was always fun for both kids and grown ups alike, and most importantly, they have raised a decent amount of money at every carnival.

This year, they wanted a website, but did not have any funding for building one in their budget. This is where Squidoo comes in.

Thanks to Squidoo, we build a free site to help promote the carnival, give directions, and to get a head count.

Being a lensmaster is really a blessing, not only can we help supplement our incomes, we can also help others. Keep your mind open to ways that you too may be able to help with a charity or a fund raiser.

To learn more about Austin's fund raising carnival, visit Cancer Crushing Carnival

Using Amazon Spotlight To Promote Star Wars Books

For my first post about lenses I want to talk about how great Amazon Spotlight modules are. Amazon Spotlight modules promote one particular product instead of up to five like the traditional Amazon Module. You can see how I use these modules at my Star Wars Books lens.

In my opinion, the Amazon Spotlight is the best choice if you are highlighting 1 item, or in this case several that are all on the same topic. I did not use the traditional Amazon Module because the individual books would have been clustered in groups of 5 and I believe that they look better and are more detailed with the spotlight.

I also took advantage of using the Amazon ratings and the list price which can be selected when editing the module under the display options.

My First Post From A Giant Squid

I created this blog to help showcase some of my favorite Squidoo lenses. Some of these will be my own, and others will be from some of the best of the other Giant Squids out there.

I will also be sharing tips and tricks for building lenses and some of my favorite methods of lens promotion.