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December Is Off To An Awesome Start!
I’m starting this without a title, so much has happened this week.
First, I mentioned last time that Natural Gifts And Decorations For Christmas and Eco-Friendly Christmas Gifts, Presents and Decorations, both about two weeks old now, had become my top Lenses. They are both in tier one, and both are getting most of their traffic from Google. The incredible thing is that I’m not doing all of the traffic tips the SEO gurus talk about. I’m doing some things, I ping the Lenses as soon as they become featured. I post the links here and at SquidU (only posting at SquidU as part of the Potential Giant Challenge December 31 Deadline thread – I don’t think I should be spamming links there), I Squidcast and I post feeds to two of the RSS services on thefluffanutta’s How To Get Deep Links with RSS Feeds. I use Lensroll, Featured Lens and the Intro module’s Discovery Tool to connect the Lenses together. I’ve joined Christmas related Lens Groups with these Lenses, and added them to several Plexos – the latest is the Plexo on poddys‘ The Daily Joke – December 2008.
I think this is something I heard Loyalis talk about at the Squidoo Chat Room, and I’m not going to try to quote him, but what I got out of it was for me, I’m going to get my 50, or so Lenses made to qualify for Giant Squid, then go back as part of my polishing process, see what’s working, what’s not and start looking at ways to promote them. I haven’t even bothered with the social bookmarking sites.
The seasonal nature of these Lenses is certainly a factor, and I fully expect traffic to drop off after Christmas, still I went from jut barely 200 weekly visitors across all my Lenses to over 600.
The next bit of news is even more exciting. Now my dashboard hasn’t been much to mention, but my affiliate accounts are doing very well. At least with CJ and PepperJam they are, I have over $100 in commissions pending between the two of them just in the first week of December. This is very exciting, especially since I have been a member of CJ since the Spring (before I joined Squidoo) and this is the first time I’ve had any commissions from them. It’s the power of Squidoo, for sure, but also things I’ve been picking up from Loyalis (at the Chat Room and at the Captain Squid blog), and other successful Lensmasters.
In my quest for Giant Squid status, I only completed 4 Lenses to get me to a total of 38 published and featured Lenses, but I did take the time to start enough Lenses to get me to 50, so I now have 12 WIP. These may not be the finals, and I hope to have time to squeak in a few extras to make sure I have a little more than 50 Quality Lenses.
Finally, as you’ll see, with these 4 Lenses I sort of have a bit of a theme going, but the best thing is that these are topics I am passionate about and I’m recommending products I actually use. In fact, one of the pictures in the intro of one of the Lenses is a picture I actually took myself because all of the pictures for it I found online were just so small, I couldn’t find one that looked good enough to use as the main picture.
Clean Water – Water Filtration
Finally figured out a title! 
2 Comments »
Veronica said :
December 7, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Way to go! I love seeing things done that the “gurus” haven’t a clue about! Woot! Good job!
aj2008 said :
December 9, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Great to see you doing so well!