Sojourns Squidoo Journey

I have a full-time job that often requires more than 40 hours a week. I work in an office and manage a large department with offices in three cities. I travel at least once a month for business and cannot access Squidoo from work other than on my cell phone - which I do when on break purely out of curiousity about the day's visitor counts. I am also a wife, mother of three boys - ages 15, 11, and 5 - and have my share of household responsibilities. My point is simply that you can Squidoo even if you have a full time job and a full family life. Some things suffer, such as sleep (I average 5 hours a night) and my least favorite household chores (there's laundry building up in the corner of my laundry room), and TV. I am watching far less TV than I was before and that can't be all bad.

I learned HTML from a book several years ago and love to read. I have no personal internet marketing experience although I do manage a segment of internet sales in my full-time job - as it's a captive relationship, there is no need for Search Engine Optimization so that term was new to me when I joined Squidoo.

Photo used under Creative Commons from macfanmd.

I joined February 22, 2009, and have 36 lenses to date (this will be #37). Lens #35 and #36 were both published in the past 3 days and are not yet indexed in Google. My remaining 34 lenses have received 2,718 visitors in the past 7 days - 1200 of those attributed to one lens. That's an average of 11.4 visitors per day per lens. Excluding the lens with the 1200 hits, 33 lenses receive an average of 6.5 visits a day. I've written only four articles and focus on links from the Squidoo forum, my puny, little blog and a few bookmarking and RSS feed sites.

My first three lenses receive almost no traffic what-so-ever. That's because I was missing two important ingredients in lens development - keyword research and Search Engine Optimization.

Update August 1, 2009: Thanks to joining a potential Giant team, WiWon in the last session, I now have 78 live lenses which currently generate about 7500 visitors a week, or an average of 13.7 visitors per day per lens. I'm still learning but I love the fact that the numbers are going in the right direction! I've even made...gasp...sales!

Squidoo, or the web for that matter, is not based on the mantra of Field of Dreams. You could write the best, most insightful, helpful lens on how to save the world but it won't bring visitors without the right preparation before you build and the right promotion afterwards.

Before you build your lens, you should figure out how to do keyword research and then optimize your lens for those keywords. The post I found the most helpful for that is on PotPieGirl's blog. I follow these steps pretty religiously now and have seen much better success in getting visitors than before I used these tools. I'm able to create lenses that get visitors more quickly and with less promotion (meaning - less effort and time on my part!) than I had before.

3/8/09 - Rank now #7 in Animals. Yay! overall rank 360. But, something's strange. Can't find my lens in Google anymore. Something I did with tags must have messed it up? In searching for my lens on Google, I come across my imacros-for-squidoo lens before I ever find this lens. That is so wrong. I discover my main tag has changed but I don't remember why I would have done that - I change it back.

Watch those tags! You think you optimized for one word or phrase, but your visitors show up under another word or phrase first. Make sure to add those new tags to your lens and SAVE them. Those tags don't help with Google but they do help with other search engines.

My tag change had nothing to do with lens falling out of Google. Lenses do that for some reason but I haven't had one yet that didn't come back in a few days. I've stopped obsessing about it and understand now this isn't a race, but a long journey.

I've mentioned Apollo kicking his ball like he's playing soccer. I need to add a video.

Submitted lens to Animalsites.net and added reciprocal link. Submitted article to EzineArticles - pending approval. This should be interesting....my first article submission. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I no longer do reciprocal links to any site unless it's a Squidoo-related page or tool. I've stopped hunting for directories to which I can submit lenses. Read too much information that you're ranking in Google can be negatively impacted if you are linked to sites with a bad reputation. I stick to Squidoo-related directories now.

3/9/09 - Received email that link to Chazhound under Personal Pet Sites was accepted. Yay! Posted again on the Chazhound forum. I find this the most supportive, friendly forum and very active. Great info. Also, don't remember receiving email approving my animalsites.net link request but did see my lens is now listed. Another Yay! Now just waiting on the article decision.

3/11/09 - Signed up for shareasale.com affiliate program and requested to join Embrace Pet Insurance so can put banner on the lens. Checked BBB and no complaints. Business has an A rating and in operation 3+ years. Waiting to hear approval.

I try to be very careful which companies I link to for affiliate business. I check the website and look for complaints online. I don't want to refer people to sites or companies I wouldn't trust myself.

Added pic of Apollo in cot I've advertised on Goldendoodle lens. Posted on chazhound. Hits have died down to a trickle. New Google tag showing up in lens dashboard each day.

3/12/09 - Submitted lens to Stumpedia.

3/13/09 - Received approval from ezinearticles.com! Expert author status (I have no idea what this means - Google - find out you get it automatically with first published article. Hey, as long as I did it!!!). My article begins to generate some visitors.

Received email from fellow newbie Squidoo'er asking how I had gotten this lensrank so high so quickly. Had to fess up to it being a whole lot of luck. SquidRank helped, my posting helped, joining in the Squidoo forum helped but I'm absolutely not an expert. Gave some tips and hoped they'd come in handy.

3/14/09 - I added affiliate ads to my lens but no clicks. I'm wondering if those visiting my site tend to be dog owners or not. If not but they're led here by my article because they're thinking about it, then too early for pet insurance. Maybe it should go on the grooming lens but I don't get a lot of traffic on that page. Really have to figure out how to do the affiliate thing....

When I first set up this page, I couldn't make Cafe Press module work (and the search feature is horrible) so I just put a link in to a search landing page on Cafe Press but I wasn't going to get any credit. I'm getting a constant stream of hits (ok, for me this is big - 20/day) so I messed around with Cafe Press until I could make it work and put up some relevant merchandise. Another item on my Amazon list getting clicked on is the last item. Considering moving it further up the list of Amazon products but I leave it for now.

Good thing I fiddled with Cafe Press until I could make it work. This is the only module on this lens from which I've received royalties! In fact, I've made no money from any affiliate links from any of my lenses so far. All of my royalties from all lenses have come directly from the selling modules in Squidoo. Only after I'd launched a good 10 lenses did I learn that the conversion rate on affiliate links is very low for most lensmasters. I've seen quotes of anywhere from 1-3% conversion. Finally, I don't feel so bad.

3/16/09 - While I'm indexed in Google and Yahoo is now delivering hits as well, I'm not selling anything. Most people are clicking on the Flickr photos and the search terms delivering visitors mostly have to do with grooming. I don't have anything about grooming on my lens but this bodes well for the new lens I created specifically for the topic. Next decision is whether I should leave my intro text alone or change it. Do I use more of the words that are showing up in searches so my first few lines in Google are a better match? Or do I leave it with the personal story part up front? Can't focus on it now....the trainer just called and she's coming early today. Good thing I JUST bathed Apollo!

I did not change the intro text for this lens. However, I try very carefully to craft an intro now that will catch the attention of those who see my listing in Google. Most often, this is what shows up as the description in my Google listing and it needs to stand out against the other 9 listings on that page. For instance, I have a lens that comes up just below Disney's website but mine gets a lot of visitors and I'm certain it's because my Google description gives more relevant information.

3/27/09 - Posted a comment on a blog with dofollow comments. I removed the Flickr module and replaced with Creative Commons photos I can use by downloading them to my Photobucket account and show on the page without allowing them to escape by clicking on images.

This seems to have been a good move as visitors have stayed on my page longer than they did before they could click out through the Flickr module. I track visitor length with Statcounter.

3/28/09 - Four more visitors as a result of the last post.

4/4/09 - Huh...I just read a post on SquidU that leads me to think that maybe there is affiliate income for CafePress items after all. I didn't think there was but glad to hear it because I get a fair number of clickthroughs to Cafe Press.

Somewhere along the line, I'd become confused about whether or not the Cafe Press items had to be mine in order for me to receive referral income. Had I stopped to think about it, I would have realized that didn't make sense. Why would I get a referral bonus for referring visitors to my own products? Duh - but really there was a post I'd come across that made me wonder. In either case, I've since confirmed that you do, in fact, receive income from Cafe Press referrals.