Now is the Time to Brush Up on Your Fall and Winter Lenses

Today is August 27, 2009, and now is the time to dust off, improve, and publicize all of your holiday lenses, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, and any other holidays that I have left out.

As we all know the biggest gift giving holidays of the year are Christmas, Halloween, and Valentine's Day, in that order. Two of them are coming up, and that means that if you want to make money from them, you need to get ready now.

It takes time for people to browse, bookmark, decide, and buy. It also takes time for backlinks to establish, search engines to find your sites and lenses, and word of mouth to spread. These activities should be ongoing on your part, continually publicizing your lenses, and other sites, but we all know that it is inhumanly possible to do these things at a high rate all of the time.

Summer is usually a lull for most of us, and what I am saying is that if you aren't going to do this any other time of the year, now is that time. Focus your mind, come up with a strategy, add backlinks to lenses that have been sitting, update the rest, make new lenses, and DO IT NOW! Give your lenses time to be recognized by search engines and people.

In the spirit of this push to holiday lenses, I invite you to read my favorite holiday lens of my own, A Christmas Story's Leg Lamp: The Wackiest Christmas Gift. I live in Cleveland, Ohio and the Christmas Story house is here. So the Christmas Story is a big tourist item here.

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Best Selling Online Marketing Books

I have put together a list of the Top 10 Making Money Online Resources for you to look through. I am looking for people to give me reviews of these books so that we can post them online. If you have been wanting to or have already read them, please email me a review, so that I can include it and you link on the blog. Also, if you can suggest some other references to add to the list please do. I will be updating this list frequently.

Best Selling Making Money Online Resources

I had some questions about the new Module Pages on Squidoo that I asked yesterday. And here are the answers that Kimberly gave me.

1. Do ad clicks go into the general pools already set up?
Yes, same as lenses.

2. Do purchases off the page (some of my plexos have links to affiliate sites) go to the lensmaster?
Yes - they get credited to the parent lens.

3. Is there any way lensmasters can alter the pages?
These pages are generated based on existing data on the parent lens. They can't directly be altered.

4. Do i need to have a toc in my lens for that to appear?
no - we automatically put that in at this time.

5. tell us how to get the address for the page without clicking on send to twitter, etc.
For now you can right click and copy the link. We're looking into making getting that link easier.

Thanks!
~Kimberly

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The Power of Networking

Networking

We often forget the awesome power of networking whether this is online or in person.

The RocketMoms project within Squidoo is the perfect example of the power of networking in a small way. Last night we had a chat for the members of RocketMoms, and it showed how much people can learn from each other, and how much power a group can generate. Everyone walked away having learned something.

I just revisited a lens I wrote about the power of networking almost a year ago, but as I went over it, I felt that the information was still valid and quite powerful. When I think of just one aspect of my life, Squidoo, I realize that I have gained so much in just one year, and most of what I have gained is through the people that I have met.

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New Squidoo Module Pages

From time to time, I forget how much I love Squidoo, and then the incredible team at Squidoo comes out with just one more reason that I love it.

This time the reason that I love Squidoo is the new Squidoo Module Pages. Squidoo has created a separate page to highlight the interactive modules on each lens. So you can tweet, digg, bookmark just the interactive module. I just tried it on one of my lenses, and the feature is top-notch.

Here is an example:

My lens is Eco-Chic Green Fashion.

Each of my interactive modules has a new sharing capability, so that you can send just that module to twitter and several other services.

Now here is the module page for my Duel module on the lens: How Eco-friendly is Your Wardrobe?

and the module page for my Guestbook: Are You Eco-Chic?.

Both module pages lead you back to the main page, and are revenue producing on their own.

I have always thought that the interaction modules were a key to Squidoo, and this just makes them better. What will they think of next?

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RocketMoms Were Children Once

Yep, it's hard to believe, but RocketMoms were once children, and had favorite toys. For a glimpse at the childhood toys of the current group of RocketMoms, RocketMoms Session 3: Project #1 - Favorite Toy Lens. I chose an artist easel to write about.

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Day 1: Taking the Hub Challenge

I have decided to take the 30 Day Hub Challenge which is to write one Hub each day for 30 days. I had already decided that I wanted to focus my attention for one month on each of my income streams to increase them and stabilize them. Since Hubpages already had a month long program, I chose to work on that site first.

You can read my reasons in my first challenge hub, My Art Gallery Business (or Why I Have Joined the 30 Day Hub Challenge), but Hubpages is providing me a growing regular income through Adsense, and there is a lot of potential there.

So at the end of each post on this blog, I will attach my newest hub for you to peruse. We will see how much it increases my income by September 15.

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Buy a Hat and Save a Family's Home

Dear friends,
I have just read the most inspirational and clever plan I have heard of in a long time. A Squidoo friend, badmsm is in danger of losing her home due to forclosure. To save her home, she has come up with a ambitious, yet simple plan--to sell 500 Hats by the end of August. Simple but not easy, because first she has to sell 500 hats, and then she has to make and ship 500 hats.

Yet this truly shows the power of Squidoo. badmsm thinks that by posting this on a Squidoo page, she can make enough money to save her home. And you know what? She is absolutely right.

I challenge every reader of this blog to buy one hat, for themselves, a gift, or to donate. If you yourself do not need the hat, badmsm will donate one in your name to Modesto Gospel Mission.

$10.00 is one meal in a restaurant, or a few gallons of gasoline. All it takes is one hat. I challenge you all to buy one hat, and then pass this message on to just one friend. Let's see if we can not only provide badmsm with her 500 hats, but maybe even a few more.

Who is going to be first?
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RocketMoms Session 3

The third session of RocketMoms is beginning next week. The new RocketMoms are already getting onboard, meeting their peers and graduates of Sessions 1 and 2.

RocketMoms is open to anyone who is a mom of any variety, grand, step, natural, adopted, and a new or existing Squidoo lensmaster. Our leader and Grande Dame of RocketMoms is bdkz who has created a energetic, supportive community for moms of any variety to learn and flourish on Squidoo.

Look for Howling Squid Review blog posts related to RocketMoms as we get started for this third session.

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Learning a Lot Through My Hubpages Experience

Inventions that Changed the World - Microscope Art Print

As I have already mentioned, I have been spending some time getting to know Hubpages. I have to admit that learning Hubpages is way easier than it was to learn Squidoo only because I already was extremely familiar with Squidoo. It made the learning curve much smoother on Hubpages.

That being said, Hubpages is very different than Squidoo, and lensmasters can learn a lot about better lens writing from creating a few hubs. One terrific clue that I learned is that your Adsense ads reflect your hubs keywords closely, so you can see if you have conveyed your keywords properly by the ads that show up. They show up pretty quickly after you publish, usually within 15 minutes or less. The first ads that show up are the default ads, then if you refresh the page a few minutes later, you will see the real contextual ads.

Because you earn money differently on Hubpages, it is a great complementary site to work on if you are ready to explore another site. You also have to be a better writer to make it work for you. And by better writer, I don't mean that you have to be a novelist or poet, but someone who writes down focused ideas that clearly state and expound on a topic. Just like lenses, hubs work best when they are narrowly focused.

If nothing else, writing on Hubpages is good writing practice. I think that I will be a better lensmaster having spent some concentrated time on Hubpages.

Now that we know that tag pages are once again searchable on Squidoo, it is even more important that you choose your keywords and tags with care, focusing on the most search topic that relates to your lens. Think of it like a microscope, focusing ever tighter to bring the slide into clarity so that you can view it better. That is what you need to do with each and every lens that you write.

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On Helium's HomePage

Well, I was totally astonished this morning to find out that one of my articles had made it to Helium's homepage. Very cool.

My real life has taken me away from the computer somewhat over the last few weeks, and some of the deadlines that I had created for myself have not been met. I need to really buckle down this month to catch up.

My traffic has been down on Squidoo lately. I am not really sure why although I would guess that summer is not a big time for people to be glued to the computer. But just to make sure that I am taking advantage of all my options, I am currently looking at every lens and checking the keywords and SEO. Some are over a year old and haven't been overhauled, and I am working on that.

In the meantime, though, my Hubpages are doing quite nicely. I only have 21 hubs so far, but they are getting regular increasing traffic, and regular clicks on Adsense ads. So I have a few more hubs planned and will most likely write them tonight or tomorrow.

Back to Squidoo, there is a new internship being offered. If you want to apply, you have until August 10.

Where are you finding success online these days? List your successes here!


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Creating Backlinks

Running Towards Your Lens
Believe: Marathon Runners Art Print
Buy at AllPosters.com

Backlinks are important to the development of any website, blog, or webpage. So what exactly is a backlink?

From Dictionary.com:

Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Being a visual artist, I visualize backlinks as pathways leading from one place to another. So each time you create a backlink, you are creating a pathway for traffic to flow towards your lens, blog, or website. Traffic is wat flows on the path. Picture all the people in the picture above running towards your lens.

The more people who visit, the more traffic, the more clicks, the more revenue, etc. Of course, that works even better if the traffic is targeted, but that is another discussion altogether.

Bottom line is that by creating solid backlinks, we get more visitors.

Mentor jeffwend is the lens promotion mentor for Squidoo, and has just updated his lens on Promoting Your Lens Outside Of Squidoo. This lens is an excellent resource for creating solid backlinks that drive quality interested traffic to your lens, article, or hub. Although written for Squidoo, the advice will benefit any online webpage or site. I highly recommend that you bookmark the page and use it as a reference.

Another page to take a look at that relates to Promoting Your Lens Outside Of Squidoo, is my page on Exponentially Increase Your Squidoo Traffic and Reputation Through Other Article Writing Sites gives you more ways to increase your traffic through writing articles. There is some overlap between the articles, but they are mostly complementary.

It is not enough to just write an article and let it sit. Promotion is a key to getting notice to your sites.

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