Archive for September, 2007

Found out today that I did achieve Giant Squid Status. I’m very excited. About a month ago (?) Squidoo staffers sent out announcements to certain Squidoo lensmasters letting us know that we had about a month to make sure we had at least 50 lenses that were up to snuff for inspection.

I only had 22 at the time, because I normally delete many lenses and focus on a few. But this time, I worked my fingers to the bone and made sure I had more than 50 lenses. I created business lenses, lenses on missing children, lenses on Ronald Reagan and Tinkerbell - whatever I had a passion for.

Today I got the congratulatory email that I had, indeed, passed inspection. It’s a great honor, not to mention the perks are nice. I don’t know if we can divulge the perks, so I won’t. But it’s cool. Not to mention, it will help my Build My Lens customers even more!

tiff

Got my email like everyone else from John Reese about Income.com’s new BlogRush tool. As you can see when you scroll down my blog on the left side, I have a BlogRush widget on there. It promotes other people’s blogs. My own blog will be promoted on other blogs, too.

I like this free traffic exchange. I signed up under Lance Kading when he sent me the link. Even though I already had a direct link from Income.com, I wanted to give someone else the chance to build their traffic by me signing up under them. So now, if you follow this link: http://www.tiffanydow.com/blogrush.html and sign up under me (for free), both Lance and I will benefit from YOUR traffic.

And whoever signs up under you helps you get traffic.

Kind of like free MLM in the the web 2.0 world. I like it. You gain credits for exposure. We’ll see how it goes, and although it’s Javascript, I’m hoping Squidoo somehow finds a way to put it into lenses for us.
Tiff

Hey everyone!

I have been so swamped lately that I’ve had a hard time keeping up with all of the changes, but I wanted to pop in and post about something you may find useful. If you head over to SquidUtils, you’ll find what another lensmaster has created to help us maximize our revenue through Squidoo.

One thing I’m greatly impressed by is the Amazon Feed. If you log into SquidUtils and click on the left sidebar where it says Amazon feeds, you can create image-links for Amazon products with your own Associates ID embedded in them. This is separate from an Amazon module, where you’re splitting the revenue via Squidoo’s co-op.

I like to use a combination of the two - sometimes an Amazon module is much easier than creating a feed. But this way, instead of having to use text links, you can also see the products and the little Buy Now buttons. Through our new Build My Lens service, I just finished my portion of the work on a client’s lens where I used this feature, so if you want to see it in action, go to http://www.squidoo.com/cheaphomegym and scroll down to the dumbbells module.

SquidUtils also has other neat tools you can use. From your dashboard, you can see all of your lenses and groups, edit your lens with the aid of a toolbar, access stats for lenses and groups, get links to your lens in HTML or BBCode, see the PageRank of your lenses, and have access to instant social bookmarking.

You can also create RSS feeds of all of your lenses, so in addition to using the Featured Lens modules if you’re trying to cross-promote your lenses, you can plop an RSS feed near the bottom of your lens that lists every one of your lenses. I’ve done this on one of my lenses, as a test, but now I have over 50, so I forgot which one I used it on. LOL. I will have to revisit them and check them out.

Squidoo just keeps getting better and better, but the great thing is how people like Fluffanutta (I think that’s his username) put together whole sites dedicated to assisting lensmasters with their creation and management. It’s the best community on the ‘net bar none, in my opinion.
Tiff