Cleaner Life

When I agreed to be a regular contributor to the Squidoo Music Blog, I thought that it would be easy to find Lenses on Squidoo to link to, but now that we’ve been rolling for a few months, I’m not so sure.

There are plenty of music Lenses, but not all of them are “Quality”. Finding goods ones that are relevant to the subjects I want to cover can actually take a long time.

I’m not the only one with this problem, mysticmama has already put out the call for links to Squidoo Music Lenses on her Squidoo Music Awards and Sounds of Joy Lenses. GrowWear has put out the call for County Music Lenses on her Country Music Fest Lens.

Now I’m calling for more Classic Rock Lenses on my new Classic Rock Posts Lens!

With so many rock bands being related to each other, from influences and cover songs, to band members who have belonged to more than one famous band, there’s plenty of opportunity to link back to related Lenses… if they exist!

If you have a Rock related Lens, make sure to add a link the Plexo! If your Lens is related to an upcoming “rock anniversary”, make sure you leave me a note, it may go a long way towards your Lens being the next one I link to!

Whoa! Long time since my last post here!

I’ve been busy with an awful lot, including learning Drupal as I built my Career’s Resources website, starting a new Blog at Crabysbeach appropriately entitled What Was I Thinking since I can’t seem to keep up a regular posting schedule on any Blog I’ve started so far!

I also redesigned and relaunched my NRICS website as a Web Development and showcase of my Online endeavors, so far, but today’s big announcement is the release of the Squidoo step by step guidebook!

Ten Lensmasters, including yours truly, all of whom have been very active on and around Squidoo (including achieving the very prestigious status of Giant Squid), joined together based on an idea from Squidoo’s founder, Seth Godin, about the secret of the new marketing starts with finding “Ten People“.

We may have put our own spin on this idea, but one of the basics is spreading the idea to real people, not just the anonymous masses. To that affect, we’ve also setup an Online Hub at Ning called “Professional Squids” where people can interact with the authors behind the eBook, ask us questions, and learn more about Online Marketing success using Squidoo and numerous other tools across the vast expanse of the Information SuperHighway!

To find out more, and download your own copy visit Squidoo step by step guidebook now!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Tenfinity!

I’ve been busy since completing September’s Giant Squid Challenge,  just not that busy on Squidoo. I’m sticking around the WiWon Team Ning now that it’s the new home of a_willow’s Fresh Squids and it’s exciting to see people so new to Squidoo getting a good start at Lensbuilding!

This particular post was inspired by a comment left in my Lens about Cash Gifting Scams. The subject still fires me up, and I just had to stop everything I’m doing to freshen it up a bit. I repositioned a few things, and added some new images.

Since the last time I had worked on this, I’ve discovered a bunch of sites with excellent quality Public Domain Photos and Images that are also Royalty Free. It’s nice to be able to add some pizazz to an article with images that help to break up the text and get the point accross.

I really need to free up some time to go over all of my Lenses, I’m sure that I now how access to more than enough Quality Photos to visually enhance all of my Lenses!

I was successful in my Quest to become a member of the Giant Squid 100 Club on Squidoo! A big thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way. I hope I’ve returned your support in kind and helped you in some way, too!

In some way it seems like it was a quick journey, in other ways it seems like it had been a long, hard road, but now that I’m done, I’ve come to the revitalization that I had never added the original Giant Squid Badge to any of my online profiles.

Now I also have the badge for the 100 Club to add, so I’ll be adding them in different locations, like this blog and my squidoo profile.

My next phase has already started, I have several projects I’m working on, and Squidoo will continue to be a part of what I’m doing, even if I may not be building new Lenses as fast as I had been.

It may appear as if I’m slowing down, but you can be certain that my online activities will be continuing at a very steady pace.

I still have a lot I want to do!

The Giant Squid Challenge for September 2009 is finally over, and I can’t believe that I haven’t posted anything here in almost 2 months.

My 100th Lens, Lensbuilding Blues, was done at the very depths of desperation. I probably could have slapped together some mini-Lensographies, but I really wanted number 100 to be something more special than that. I think, in the end, it came out pretty well.

Halloween is coming up real soon, and I was excited to get my only Halloween-related Lenses for this year, one about Spooky Party Songs and one about Scary Party Songs, into the SquidBoo Blast! These were very fun, and my only regret was only being able to fit 13 songs into each one.

Now it’s time to settle back, and figure out where I go next as I wait to see if I’m accepted into the 100 club. I’m sure that working on Squidoo Lenses will still be in the mix, and I hope to keep updates posted here.

100 Lenses was just the beginning!

Yes, I’m back on the WiWon Team, looking to qualify for the Giant 100 club! My first group of Lenses for the challenge are 2 product Lenses, Alice In Chains Music Bank & DeWalt – The Best Cordless Drill and 3 Squid Tip Lenses, Correcting Problems With Special HTML Characters On Squidoo Lenses, How To Promote Your Content: Getting More Out Zimbio & How To Link Squidoo Modules.

I have 62 published Lenses, and I’m really not thinking about how many more Lenses I need. I also keep getting distracted by other things. Not only did my Lens How To Disable PHP Register Globals — Drupal Status Report manage to get onto the first page of Google for the search term “php register globals” which gets a global monthly search volume of 4.4k, but someone posted a link to it in the Drupal support forums. I’ve been getting 60 – 80 visits a week on that Lens!

My Cash Gifting Lens is one of the few Lenses about cash gifting left on Squidoo, because it is one of the few that wasn’t actually promoting it as a money making opertunity, but exposing it for the scam it is. It has gone to the first page of Google for “cash gifting scam”, but has recently slipped to #11 over-all, which is the second page. I’m actually not too bothered by that, because in the past 3 weeks I’ve watched it go from page 9 of Google for the search of “cash gifting” to page 4! I don’t know why it lost ground on the first term, but I’d much rather get to the top for the second term, which is much more general, more sites are returned for it (more than 47x as many) and more searches are done for it — sadly, most people don’t think to question if it is a scam, especially when so many of the top sites say how wonderful it is!

Wow! Seems like I’ve been waiting forever, but I did make it this time!

I suppose it really hasn’t been that long, I’m coming up on my first year Squidoo Anniversary, but it feels like it took longer. It’s weird, but for some things it seems like I haven’t been a part of Squidoo for very much time, but as far as waiting to become a Giant, it’s been way too long.

The good news came after being removed from the Amazon Associates program due to Rhode Island passing a new law meant to collect sales tax from internet sales. So far it doesn’t appear to affect any of the other affiliate programs that I belong to, or being on Squidoo. Many of the merchants who dropped their affiliates in New York State, aren’t ones I have relationships with. Other merchants just registered with NY, and started collecting the tax. Amazon did, but for RI, North Carolina and Hawaii, they’ve decided to punish the affiliates over their disagreement with these laws.

I do most of my Squidoo’ing on my Laptop, which is about a year and a half old now. The cooling fan began to get noisy while I was still doing the final updates on my Lenses. It held up long enough to finish, but now I’m reducing my time with it until I change the fan. When the fan begins to run, it’s a steady buzzing, and the vibration feels weird on my wrists while I’m typing. Before I opened it up, and blasted some canned air into it, it would be too loud to run while the TV was on. At least I know I can handle replacing it myself – I’ve never replaced a laptop fan before, there’s a lot more to getting into it than it takes to get into a desktop.

Plans for the future will include working towards the 100 club, not sure if I’ll actually apply before the next deadline, but I think I already have my next Lens planned. The one about John Wetton has become too big. I could easily divide it in two parts.

As you are probably well aware, Squidoo Introduced Themes for Lenses, and as I was cruising around enjoying all the variations as people began experimenting, I couldn’t help but notice some of the unexpected “quirks” due to custom HTML people have using to add to the visual impact of their modules. How To Add A Custom ‘Contact Me’ Button To Your Squidoo Lens, which is one of my newest Lenses, had some serious problems before the change (I was a bit lazy not taking care of the problem right away), but it presented me with an opportunity to make a new Lens, Advanced HTML For Borders & Backgrounds On Squidoo.

It seemed like the week went so fast, I had spent a lot of time reworking King Crimson: A Tribute To One Of The Most Influential Progressive Rock Bands by removing almost all of the videos, and using Bonnie’s great Add Music to Your Squidoo Lens to replace them with nifty little music widgets.

I was a little worried at first, because all of the examples of people using this technique on their Lenses, so far, have had music widgets that are set to auto-play, and I really find that annoying, no matter how good the music is. Luckily, I found that there is a setting when making the music play lists that sets the auto-play option on or off – my vision of placing widgets to sample King Crimson’s music throughout the Lens was possible, and that’s exactly what I did.

I didn’t have much luck with the companion Lens, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp because absolutely none of their songs were available. So I found new links to the videos that had stopped working, and added some borders.

I was also able to find time to improve Hotel Bedding Sets | Bedding Featured in Many Hilton® Hotels and Back To School Bedding. These Lenses actually do very well for me, but until now, I’ve ignored my own advice (that I give out to others) about making use of the module titles. I was just learning about placing images in Text modules, and linking to them when I made these Lenses, and I made the mistake of lumping all of the content into just one or two modules.

Sure I was taking advantage of all the character space available in the Text modules, but the result was a very cramped looking Lens. Many people advise against having too much white space on a page, but the opposite is also true. You really need to balance the white space with the content, and not have everything jammed together.

One of the points from Katinka’s SEO for squidoo – getting found in google: search engine optimization that I was missing out on was the part about optimizing my Lenses using the Headings, which in this case was the module titles. Some of the “SEO tricks” I used to get Cash Gifting | Cash Leveraging | Giving Programs | All Are Pyramid Schemes | Scams to the front page of Google for the words “cash gifting scam” simply involved adding certain words to the module titles.

One thing that really upset me before that Lens reached the front page was being outranked by someone’s video where they obviously used keyword stuffing to get ahead of me. Beneath the video was just a long list of the keywords that they wanted to make sure they were optimized for. I was worried people would complain that I was using the same phrases to often, and I was being beat by someone who was clearly just loading in a list of words.

In the end, I passed right by that guy, and I keep bobbing back and forth from first to second page on Google. It may not seem like the most competitive search term to get found by (with about 600k pages returned), but as I loosely watch my competitors, I keep seeing new pages I hadn’t seen before suddenly pop up, then disappear. I believe this is due to sites removing these pages as they get complaints.

Certainly, the original pages that the crew in the Squidoo Chat Room reported for abuse one night, several months ago, have all been removed from Squidoo. That’s what inspired me to do that Lens in the first place!

Back to polishing, looks like I really had a lot on my mind this time, but I need to focus the energy that’s left on getting my Lenses ready for the end of the challenge!

Should I stay at 56 Lenses or go on to make more? I added Natural Hair Products – Shampoo & Conditioner, How To Add A Custom ‘Contact Me’ Button To Your Squidoo Lens, How To Keep Track Of The People You Follow On Twitter Using Seesmic Desktop, and How To Backup, Export & Import Seesmic Desktop Userlists.

If I make more Lenses, I risk not having time to finish my polishing by the deadline of the 15th for the Greeter ontest. If i finish polishing after the 15th, but before the Giant Squid Challenge June 2009  deadline on the 30th, no new Lenses will count towards the Greeters contest.

Decisions, decisions!

In a bizarre twist, the FEED for Auto Backup Camera: How To Install A Backup Camera On Your Car, Truck, SUV, Or RV is now on the first page of Google for “auto backup camera”  – the actual Lens has fallen off, and is out of sight. This has caused a huge loss in daily traffic.  :(

What a week! I Really hit a good stride this week! I didn’t do any updating, but I added three new Lenses!

First, I completed Lawn And Garden Plants Transplanting: A Personal Adventure In Plant Relocation. I had been planning it for weeks, and it feels great to finally get it published. Next I came up with How To Disable PHP Register Globals — Drupal Status Report which is based on a real problem I just ran into last weekend, so completing this happened really fast. As fast as that went, it wasn’t as fast as my first TwittrList, Best of Primal Foods on Twitter. Less than twelve hours from concept to publishing, and less than twenty-four hours after I started it, I was fully promoting it.

The one step back was deleting my Lens about MagicBuilder. MagicBuilder was suspended, or disabled like three months ago, and it really wasn’t any kind of tribute, so it wasn’t worth keeping.

I still plan some more Lenses before the end of the competition, and hopefully I’ll still have time to finish the updating I had been working on.

I don’t know what anyone else really thinks about the Squid Greeter Teams for the current Giant Squid Challenge, but I’m loving being a part of Willow’s Wonder Squids, I’ve made some new Squidoo friends, and strengthened some existing friendships. The extra encouragement and feedback has been awesome, and looking closely at other team member Lenses also helps me to look back at my Lenses with a more critical eye.

I remember the last time I went for the Giant Squid Challenge, and I barely looked at other Lenses, even though they were being posted right along with my own on SquidU, but back then it was easier to think that the cheerleaders and the GS Organizers would take care of visiting those Lenses, and I could catch up after the challenge. Now, I feel more responsibility to spend some time looking at other Lenses, especially those belonging to my team members, and give an opinion in the team forum, a comment on the actual Lens, and a much needed rating.