Are You Spending Your Time on Crabbysbeach?

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.

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Experimenting in Creating a Link Wheel or a More Organized Lens Cluster

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 pennies by writing online is evident, as is his determination to make real money or "a living" as many of us call it. I have to say that I believe that it is only by experiencing and understanding how writing online works, that this experiment can work, but I agree with Alex, that many publishing sites are looking for "junkies" when it comes to participants, and we can take ahold of our income more directly.


The link wheel concept is really just a better organized version of the link cluster idea that has been mentioned by several successful lensmasters including Captain Squid. However, it is interesting in that it takes your articles that assuming you already have a niche, point in a one way direction and to your money making venue for that niche, again assuming that you have a central money making center.


This concept organizes an idea that I have been finding intuitively, and fine tunes it. I am going to examine how my articles in various niches are organized and most likely change some of the link structure.


AJ, I will be following your experiment avidly, while reading your excellent posts. You are so good at taking the concepts apart and describing them to us all, so you are a great person to be blogging about this.


Hopefully, this project will help us all make more money in our online effort.

You can follow the Howling Squid Review directly from Twitter.

Content Anchored Backlinks

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 for that behavior.

What is a better use of your time is to create content anchored backlinks. Content anchored backlinks are content with a link to your lens included. However, the link is anchored by the blurb, article or few sentences that you write about it.

Some sites will not only allow you to write about your lens, but also will generate additional revenue for you. However, each site has rules, and most of them will not allow more than two links to one particular site in their article or signature.

Here are some sites that I recommend joining or at least looking into:

Hubpages
Xomba
Squidlog
InfoBarrel


You can follow the Howling Squid Review directly from Twitter.