Quest to Big Squid

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A few days ago I read on the Squidu forums how a bunch of people are trying to shoot for Giant Squid by the cut off date of March 31. Honestly, I thought I was too late to the game. I was 20+ articles away and thought there was no way, no how of making that many articles by the end of the month.

Somehow, I have been able to. It probably helps that I created my own template and have followed it religiously. It also probably helps that I've been dedicating between 8-10 hours a day solely on the articles.

Currently, I'm 3 articles away from the magic 50. Once I hit it, I'll go back and edit some of my older articles to make sure they are up to par.

Do I think I'll get Giant Squid? No, I don't. I don't know if my articles are of quality they are looking for, but who knows? I have to give it a try!

So here are some of the articles I wrote recently:

Sonnet Poetry
Sara Teasdale
Wallace Stevens
Walt Whitman
William Blake
E. E. Cummings
Robert Frost
Poetry T-Shirts
The Right of Gay Marriage
Famous January Birthdays
Famous December Birthdays
Emily Dickinson
Oscar Wilde
William Wordsworth
PoemofQuotes
PoemofQuotes: The Community

Squidoo + AdWords = waste, for me anyway

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Google sent me a $100 AdWords bonus to try to get me to use their service once again. In total, I probably spent around $30 there, but received over $150 in return. So I figured, hey, why not? It's "free" money, right?

Right now, I don't have anything to sell. I don't make anything and my last experiment on getting people to sign up for a premium membership didn't work too well, especially since I have a free alternative.

Therefor, I was left with one choice: to spend the money trying to get people to buy products through Amazon. I tried this before and it was fairly successful. It was nothing fantastic, but I thought why not try it again?

Instead of running it straight through my website, I figured to give Squidoo a try. It would do two things: 1) Get more traffic to the Squidoo page and increase the lensrank and 2) Get people to buy through Amazon through Squidoo and give me money.

How much did I spend?
$52.65 over 4 days.

How did it work?
I chose the cheapest keywords I could find for the page and picked to geo-locate the ads to the US. Why just the US? Because Amazon is more friendly to the states.

What were the results?
It increased my lensrank up to 1,180, 62 in Movies & TV. This is up from around 5,800 in the days before I set up the campaign.

The ads helped provide around 5 star ratings and a couple comments. I'm not sure if this is directly related to the ads or indirectly, through increased exposure on Squidoo due to the lensrank. Either way, it has to do with the ads.

Squidoo says I received ~600 visitors through the ads. Google says I paid for 865. I'm guessing people clicked then went ahead and pressed the back button around 265 times before the javascript could load. Not cool.

How much money did I make?
$0.00

Yep, absolutely nothing.

Why did I stop?
At first, I was hoping to receive more traffic through Squidoo as the lens went up through the ranks. Once it started to appear on the top 100 for the category, I noticed the amount of clicks didn't increase substantially. Actually, the page received zero clicks from the top 100 page. It was a huge let down. I wasn't ready to commit another $48 to the page in hopes of it going up another 1000 spots, because I know it wouldn't. The pages within the "real" top 1000 probably receive upwards of 1000 clicks a day, this wouldn't have paid for that.

Was it worth it?
No.

Conclusion
You're better off spending your money elsewhere if you wish to get traffic to your Squidoo lens. Of course, the page in question isn't optimized for sales, but I did expect to see at least one or two buys.

If you don't wish to spend anything, great. Just comment on other Squid lenses and you'll get around the same amount of star ratings in no time. Hey, after 7 days the traffic doesn't count anyway.

I Love Squidoo But...

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I love Squidoo but there are just a few things that bother me about the community over there.

One thing, is the need for incredibly long lenses. Almost every lens in the top 100s within the categories are 10 miles long. That might sound great, right? I mean, that has to mean tons of info... well, not exactly. Most of them simply include an intro and then a starter paragraph followed by 10 modules of ads. Besides, even if the lens did create a ton of info, the longer it is the harder it is to find what you are looking for. For pages which are selling items, that is great, but for information lenses it's not.

Second, is the conformity the community possesses. I'm not talking about the type of lenses (although there is a large amount of lenses selling something), I'm talking about how the lenses are organized and the type of information each lens has. If you have a lens of a recipe, it doesn't just include the recipe. The lens also includes the history (which is OK), pictures of the food (alright), history of the ingredients (what?), a twitter page following the food (why?), and a blog RSS which includes nothing about the page (why?).

Thirdly, the community wants information about the authors. I can see why, in some instances, this is wanted. For example, if read a lens on a specific subject it is nice to know it is coming from a reliable source. However, if the lens is about baking cookies, why do you need to know what gender I am or where I grew up?

Fourth, even though this is related to #3, why must I enable the contact form? I know, if I make a spelling mistake you want to contact me about it, right? That's all fine and dandy, but I already have enough spam in my mailbox (I'm not saying the previous example is spam, just that some people might use the contact form for other means).

Squidoo Lens Update

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I've decided to go ahead and (slightly) change the direction I was going with Squidoo.

At first, I just wanted to create a funnel to every lens and send it back to my websites. Although this has had some limited success, I thought there was something else I could do.

I decided to create a funnel to one direct page and then send that juice to the individual lenses, which in turn send it to the websites. This will serve two purposes:

1) It'll increase the rating of the page, which may increase direct click-throughs.

2) Allow me to better manage the amount of links and link-juice.

Of course, I'll still be trying to get links to the other lenses, just so they'll rank decently. But nonetheless, I will be more focused on the single page. What is the page?

Gary R. Hess lensography

Finally, I've Remembered

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I completely forgot about this site for well a while. Actually, it looks like it has been almost a year and a half. Life has gone a way which I didn't predict over that time. Sadness set in, moving became a big part, and then finally once I resettled (well, temporarily), I started to work more on the websites and didn't bother talking about it.

So here I am, I'm back!

So lets just skip to now. I almost all but given up on the previous blog I tried to do. I'll probably go back and change it once again, but I have no idea when. I have three domains which I'm currently just losing money on. Fantastic, right?

But, in the meantime, I have been working on the major player. I've written articles, worked a bit on another blog (and almost but all gave up on it as well), and started working on more seasonal content for the site. When there aren't holidays, I've been writing articles and working on other areas to improve the site.

The most recent articles I've written have been on Squidoo. Here they are:

Free advice on life (this was really meant more of a way to tell my story and help others. It may also later give some juice but who knows)

and

How to be a proper Atheist (this was suppose to be humor, but I suppose I have a very weird type. I blame my ancestors)

Neither is getting much attention, but that doesn't matter too much. Squidoo has quite a few ways to get link juice and I'll pass it back to the website in question. As of now, Squidoo has made me just a total of $2.81. Not good at all for the amount of work I've put in. Over 20 articles now, most within the past month however. Most of the articles have been written as a way to get authority, so the *plan* may come to fruition sooner or later.