A Few Good Tools for Lensmasters

A brand new lens has just been written by Spirituality about traffic patterns on Squidoo lenses that is well worth every lensmaster's time to take a look. It is a great overview of some typical types of lenses and how their traffic has behaved over time with screen shots of traffic charts.

It really helps you understand how traffic works looking at the long view so that you as an author do not get so caught up with the day to day. The lens is called SEO traffic stats: ranking report for squidoo lenses. She makes a very good point about how backlinks work as well, talking about her links from a well established very busy site and how they have helped drive traffic to her site.

On another topic, I am happy to announce that Redgage has finally gotten their act together and the pages load at a normal rate of speed. I like the site but had no patience or time to deal with the slow load rate. Now Redgage is so much better, so if you have been holding back from using Redgage, sign up now. You can earn money and create backlinks to your pages.
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I Have Decided to Give Redgage a Try

I have decided to give RedGage a chance. I have to admit that I was very annoyed by the way that Squidoo lensmasters were originally contacted by RedGage. But it seems that that may have just been an error of judgement, and since RedGage is willing to really pay people for content, I will give them the benefit of the doubt right now.

RedGage currently has a contest going for the month of July that could net members some good money and at the same time bring new readers to your lenses, so I recommend giving it a try yourself. We can all use a few extra bucks in our pockets. Here is the contest information right from the RedGage site:


Rules

For the month of July there will be a daily raffle, a weekly raffle and an end of the month raffle.

* Every day one winner will receive a $50 prize.
* Every week (Sunday night) one winner will receive a $150 a prize.
* At the end of the month one winner will receive a $400 prize.

Throughout the day you can earn points that will convert into "raffle tickets" based on your RedGage activity. At the end of the day, a computer will randomly select a raffle ticket declaring that day's winner.

As each day begins, all tickets accumulated from previous days will be cleared, starting everyone on the same page. However, points from your daily activity will also be counted towards the weekly and end of the month contests.

A different number of raffle tickets are awarded depending upon the interaction with RedGage.

* 1 Point is awarded for each Page View your content receives
* 2 Points are awarded for Rating someone's content
* 7 Points are awarded for Commenting on someone's content
* 35 Points are awarded for the First Comment on a content page
* 100 Points are awarded for Mentioning RedGage on other websites
* 200 Points are awarded for inviting a new user to RedGage
*

You earn points for inviting people when a person enters your username into the Referred By field, during his/her Sign Up process. You can also send your invites with a referral link: http://www.redgage.com/?refby=YOURUSERNAME


A minimum of 10 points are required to enter the contest.

To track your points, sign in and check your Dashboard. You can click on Contest Scoreboard to view a breakdown of your points.

The winners will be selected at midnight (12:00 AM EST). After verifying the user's actions were genuine2, the winner will be declared.

Each winner is only allowed to win once in a seven day period. To view the list of previous winners, click here.

Winners will be rewarded a RedGage Visa Debit Card with their winnings. The winner should keep their card as it will be used to withdraw his/her future RedGage earnings.

1A mention is when you reference RedGage on another website and you include a link back to any page on RedGage. To get credit for a mention, you must fill out and submit this form. The submission will be evaluated by the RedGage team, only after the submission has been reviewed and approved will points be awarded. Mentions must be deemed appropriate by the RedGage Team. You may only receive credit for a maximum of 3 mentions per domain each day. Any mention written by someone else is not a valid submission. Each submission must be new and unique.

2Any attempt to manipulate, interfere with, or otherwise alter any entries, other systems or services of RedGage will immediately disqualify all those implicated. Determination of qualification of entries and selection of winner is at the sole discretion of RedGage. An example of disqualifying behavior is comment spamming.

Winner must withdraw the earnings or respond to the confirmation by email within 72 hours of receiving the email confirmation.

Should the selected winner be disqualified, or does not respond within 72 hours, an alternate winner will be selected. RedGage reserves the right to cancel offer at any time without notice. This contest will begin on July 4, 2009 and end on August 1st, 2009.

Obviously, this is a mention of RedGage in my blog, and I will only do this once. It is up to you whether you think RedGage is worth your time. But at least in the month of July, it may be worth your time for the next week and a half to spend some time adding your content in the quest to earn some more money for content you already have.

You can follow the Howling Squid Review directly from Twitter.