One of My Lenses Has Outgrown Its Space

As many of you know, we can write lens after lens, and never really know which of those lenses is going to be the one that really takes off. Well, for me, my best lens did not start out as a top lens, but over the course of it's lifetime, it has continue to grow and flourish. That lens, is Eco-Chic Green Fashion. It has grown over time in steady traffic, and has been in the top tier for quite some time. I have been gathering more and more information and the lens has pretty much outgrown itself.

Therefore, I have begun creating a site dedicated to the Eco-Chic Green Fashion topic in the broader sense which is going to allow me to tie together several of my green lenses, and continue to explore and broaden the topic by finding new vendors, products, books, and information to share with anyone who is interested in living green.

I relate this to all of you as encouragement to do the same. Squidoo is a great site on its own, but it is also a terrific testing site. See if a topic is really going to grab traffic. Build a following, then expand it into something more. You can use traffic from your lens to send to your blogs or sites or vice versa. Connect your articles with your blog or connect your blogs with your articles. Each place someone follows you is creating more of a connection between you and your reader.

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Seth Godin Hits the Nail on the Head "Everyone Gets Paid on Commission"

CHA-CHING! by bagack
design your own coffee mug with Zazzle

Once again, I have to praise Seth Godin for jumping straight to the point of any issue in his post Everyone gets paid on commission.

In our era of statistical analysis, and computer tracking, why shouldn't everyone be responsible for the income that they bring in to their respective companies. Anyone who makes a living selling any type of product or service, or owns a company will tell you that the bottom line is what makes a company run. If you are good, people will buy from you, read your blog, follow you, or whatever it is that drives your market.

Anyone who sells a product can tell the rest of the people that it is the sales of the product that determine whether they go on vacation this year, pay their mortgage, or have to find a new job. In order for companies to pay their support staff, they have to be selling something. Ads, newspapers, or widgets. That is what drives the economy.

When companies are paring back to the essentials, they absolutely MUST look at what is keeping them in business. If you are working, and not thinking like this, then it is time to do so now.

And in the same token, it is time for you to view your online work this way. Spend the time on the items that bring you income. Let the non-income producing items become non-priority items for when you have done all you can to create income.

What is your opinion?

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Adding Links to Lenses

Due to the reported success of the Infolinks on the Introduction modules, I have been slowly adding links in my introduction modules as I update lenses. I haven't taken the Infolinks off my lenses yet, still waiting for some definite analysis on earnings which will take another month. But I figure that if the links in the introduction modules are the most successful for them, it only stands to follow that putting relevant links in the introduction modules of my own lenses will be even more profitable for me.

So as the lenses come up for updating, I am changing them.

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Click

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

I am constantly forced to remind myself that the only way that I can earn an income online (or anywhere else for that matter) is by understanding how customers think, and what people are searching for. What that means in a practical manner is that when I write an article online for which the goal is to earn income, whether that is for myself, or for a charity, I need to think like the people online that are searching for my topic, and learn how and when they want to learn more about my topic.

For instance, if I am writing an article about how to write a better Squidoo lens, I need to think like people who want to write a better Squidoo, why they do, and when they will work on their lens, who they are. Who is my audience, and why are they interested? Only by doing this, can I tap into that audience and write an article that they might want to read.

I say might, because no matter how good your article is, and how well you write it, there will only be a percentage of your target audience who will actually take the time to read it.

I recommend the book above, Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters as a great beginning to start understanding why people go online.

For more resources to making money online, Click here.

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Using Zimbio for Backlinks and Promotion

I just finished reading How To Promote Your Content: Getting More Out Zimbio and got really excited, so I had to write about it here on Howling Squid. Zimbio is one of those sites that I have been on for a while but haven't used it to its full advantage.

Cleanerlife does a great job explaining how to use Zimbio step by step and also how to really get more attention there. I can see that I will be spending some quality time on Zimbio today.

One of the best features of Zimbio in my mind, is that you can feed your lenses and other items to the site via an RSS feed, so that you do not need to manually add each article. But you do need to go to the site and clean up your queue of articles to add them to wikizines.

In his lens, Cleanerlife does an excellent job explaining how to make your articles on Zimbio more attractive to readers and how to add links.

Another great way to add traffic and make your articles stand out.

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Hubpages Progress

I am two thirds the way through my Hubpages Hubchallenge, to write 30 hubs in 30 days. I think that I will make it, but even if I do it in 31 or 32 days, I still plan to write 30 hubs.

I have to say that I am pleased with the outcome of this experiment so far. I have been getting adsense income about 4 out of 7 days a week so far. I have had numerous clicks on Amazon, and some sales, and today I got a sale on Shareasale which is one of the affiliate companies that I am signed up for. I am only getting about 550 pageviews per week so far, and many of the pages are brand new, so I am sure that all of this will go up as the pages mature, and I have more of them.

The Hubpages Community has been quite helpful and supportive, although it has not been hard to figure things out.

Hubpages forces a person to be more focused on their pages. Since you are only allowed two affiliate links per page, I have chosen on any given page to have both of them go to the same company, one at the beginning and one near the end of the page. In addition, I can add products from Ebay and Amazon.

I understand that some Hubbers are having trouble being accepted as an Adsense or EPN associate. I already had a well established though not very productive Adsense account from Blogger, and had no problems with EPN. If nothing else, I am learning how to use the Adwords Keyword tool better, and understand the SEO information better, which can then translate both to Squidoo and any other site I use including my main website Lake Erie Artists Gallery.

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Blogging for Business

We are talking about blogging in RocketMoms today so I thought that I would talk about it here as well. Blogging is a great way to create backlinks to anything you want to create backlinks to. Lenses, for instance.

You can extend your content to your blog, write a short article about your lens material, and point people to your lens. By doing that you have started a pathway to your lens. Blogs work best if they are niche blogs, or blogs focused on a small topic. For instance, this blog is focused on Squidoo, and making money and being successful on Squidoo. I have other blogs that focus on other topics. Everything I write about in this blog will have something to do with making money and succeeding on Squidoo.

You can create a blog in the blogging platform of your choice, or you can join Squidtop.com where there are several Squidoo related blogs. Once you have a blog, you can use the RSS feed from the blog to send your blog posts out into the internet, to Twitter, to Facebook, back to your lens, or anywhere else that accepts an RSS feed. For instance, this blog feeds back to RocketMoms forum on Ning. There is an endless amount of places your blog can take you.

If you like the T-shirt, you can buy it on Zazzle.

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Using Success to Build Success

I am sure that most of you have heard the 80/20 rule.

Here is the Squidoo version:

Spend 80% of your time on the 20% of your lenses that are the most successful.

You can define success any way you want, but for the purposes of this post, and blog, I will define a successful lens, as one that draws consistent targeted traffic, and creates a steady income through lensrank, or purchases. You may have some lenses that perform steadily only during a certain time of year but they do year after year. Those would be ones that I would include in this definition.

In my lens repertoire, my most consistently successful lens is Eco-Chic Green Fashion. This lens has steadily grown over time in success, and I have continued to add to it, update it, and it is the first lens that I try new tools or ideas on.

But there is another way to take the success from one lens, and create more success. And that is by building lenses on similar topics, that you can springboard from the successful lens.

The queen of this method is Janet21. I will admit that I am not as good at this as she is. But if you look at her top lenses, she will send people to newer lenses, to her blogs, and vice versa, to get traffic moving where she wants it to go.

Here is an example from my successful lens: Eco-Chic Green Fashion. I just finished creating a new lens on a related topic called Eco-Chic Green Decor. This lens is brand new, published yesterday. My goal is to take the targeted traffic from my first lens, and interest them in the second lens, which is essentially "eco-chic green fashion for the home". I have used some of the same keywords that are drawing people to the first lens, and will be placing links to the second lens on the first lens in several ways.

This method is something that all of us can do with our most successful lenses. Almost like building the chapters of a novel. The first lens Eco-Chic Green Fashion is Chapter 1, built to draw the reader in. The second lens Eco-Chic Green Decor is Chapter 2. Starting to get to the meat of the story.

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