Featured At Wizzley Under Interesting Authors

Just finished adding a new article today to Wizzley when I've noticed that not only 2 of my articles are on the front page, but also my author link is there (on the right in the screenshot below).

It's fun to be featured for a little while, makes me more motivated to write there.

I like writing at Wizzley and Squidoo as well because I can write about pretty much anything I want. For example my latest article at Wizzley is about the Day of the Dead in Europe. It is a bit different from the Halloween celebration in the US, and I'm pretty sure not everyone knows about this rather somber and serious tradition. If I had to set up a site to write about this topic, I'd get bored of the subject after a few articles.

Here, I wrote what I wanted to say, and now I'm moving on to something else that I want to write about.

On Polishing Rocks And Jewelry

As a jewelry artist, I keep gravitating around the subjects of jewelry and semiprecious gems. Today I took a second look at how to polish rocks and jewelry. The two are not the same, even though initially it might seem so.

Polishing silver is all about tarnished silver cleaning, which means cleaning the final pieces of jewelry (or other silver objects) from that dark urgly layer of deposit that occurs after a while due to the interaction with oxygen.

On the other hand, polishing stones is about taking rough stones (pebbles from the seaside, or rocks from the mountain, those kinds of rocks) and polishing them to a nice shine. Usually rockhounds are searching for beautiful rough rocks, polish them, even cab them (create cabochons out of them) and then sell them to jewelry designers - or keep them for themselves in case they make jewelry as well.

So here is the article I wrote on How to polish stones on Wizzley.

I've noticed that it takes me about the same amount of time to write one lens at Squidoo as it takes me to write 2-3 pages at Wizzley. It's so darn easy writing at Wizzley, and such fun. The tarnished silver cleaning article took on quite an interesting layout with all those moved up, down, left and right modules. I love the side-by-side modules, sadly Squidoo doesn't have this option. I think Hubpages does have it too, but I personally don't like to write there.

At Wizzley I have currently 14 pages and counting. And I've only started there a week ago...

Are You Good With Making Things By Hand?

I like doing crafts, from making jewelry to handmade greeting cards, to bookmarks, polishing gemstones. While I"m a lazy person in general, I'm quite good with some crafts.

Of course this is why I've added a few lenses related to my hobbies, either to showcase some of my works or teach others how to do what I also do.

For example my last lens is on learning how to make a bookmark for a book. My main passion in life is reading books and of course with that many books, I need some bookmarks. While I do buy at times bookmarks and I also trade with other book lovers from all over the world, over time I've also made bookmarks on my own.

It'\s really not difficult and it can be a fun activity when you have kids as well. The lens shows various types of bookmarks that you can make, from simple printing out bookmark templates, to bookmarks make of wood, origami bookmarks, and beaded bookmarks, it's all there. As a jewelry artist, making beaded bookmarks is something I like doing a lot.

Another craft I used to be interested in (sadly not anymore because I simply don't have the time for it) is parchment craft. If you've never heard of it, then head over to the lens called Pergamano - Parchment craft and check out some of the works I've done. Hint, it's about making beautiful handmade greeting cards with vellum paper. Totally awesome stuff!

And of course, making jewelry is another hobby of mine, but I've already mentioned that here in the Designer Jewelry post.

Are you doing any crafts with your hand? It's not only an awesome way to spend your time but it can be also very rewarding and relaxing. Sometimes when I make some piece of jewelry or another, I don't even realize the time flies. I'm somewhere else, in another place, zoned out I guess. And yet, before I know it, the jewelry piece is finished and especially in these cases it turns out to be a real winner.

Tidying Up My Squidoo Lenses

I've come a long way since 2008 when I first made my initial Squidoo lenses. There was a discussion today on the squidu forum about people who didn't get accepted to the Giant Squids. I am one of them so I also posted. Some people looked over my lenses and the critique on my first lenses from 2008 were rather negative.

Swallowing my pride and ego, I went ahead and started a cleanup job on my lenses. Removed some older ones that were just taking up space and were junk, cleaned up a few others (improved titles, added some more modules, etc).

I hope that this update on my Squidoo lenses will help me become a Giant Squid next time. I know that 1-2 years ago the criteria for entering the GS was quite easy, but since then the Squidoo "masters" have tightened ship quite a lot, so the quality has a different meaning now.

Since (hopefully) I'm here for the long haul, I've decided to really play along and do the best work I can here.

For example one lens that I fixed up a bit was about gaming mouses. I'm am avid online gamer and PC gamer, and while waiting for Diablo 3 to arrive (still takes a couple of months), I've decided to review some of the mouses (mice) that I've had experience with.

I've added a better title to the lens, added a few extra modules and made it more appealing to the visitors. Hope it looks better now.

Popular Articles At Wizzley

Just checked out Wizzley and I noticed that two of my articles are on the front page as popular: The Tipping Hairdressers article and the How to do Meditation at Home.

I've never been on the Squidoo frontpage yet, but I guess with a smaller community like at Wizzley, it's easier, so I'l enjoy my fame as long as it lasts!

Google Indexing of Wizzley Pages vs Squidoo Lenses

From what I've noticed, it seems that Wizzley pages get faster indexed in Google than Squidoo lenses.
Take for example one of my first Wizzley pages on doing meditation at home. I made it about 2 days ago and it's indexed.

However one of my Squidoo lenses that I made 10th of October (!!!) on Christmas tree toppers stars is not yet indexed in Google. That is exactly 10 days from when I made the lens.

That is just too weird. Squidoo has a PR 7 and it's loved by Google. Wizzley has only a PR 3 so far, but it seems that Google likes it too.

I do remember checking a few of my previous lenses and they were indexed quite late compared to what I used to see with my own website pages (which were indexed at times in a matter of hours). Maybe it's the fact that Squidoo has so many lenses, maybe it's something else, but it's definitely noteworthy - even if I don't know yet what I'll do with this information.

3 More Wizzley Pages Done

I've spent yesterday and today adding 3 more pages to Wizzley. One more to go and if all goes well, my nofollow backlinks to Squidoo and my site will become dofollow.

So what have I been busy writing about?

The second article was a fun fact finding mission for me. It's about tipping hairdressers. How much to tip them, when it's good to tip and then some other useful tips related to keeping your hairdresser if you really like her (or him). This was a fun Wizzley article to write, I truly had fun with it.

Then this morning I wrote about adding the Wizzley widget to a Wordpress blog. (You can see the widget right here in the previous post about joining Wizzley). The problem with this widget is that it's an iframe code, and Wordpress got rid of all iframe related code for various security reasons. So besically if you add this code to your Wordpress blog, upon publishing, you end with no widget on your blog at all. Btw, As you can see, Blogger blogs have not been affected by this.

So anyway I spent my morning creating a step by step tutorial, taking pictures and putting it all together as a Wizzley post. Hope some people will find it useful. Btw, with this solution you can add pretty much any iframe code to Wordpress, you are not restricted by Wizzley.

And finally this afternoon I wrote another fun article about meaning of eye colors, basically debunking this issue. So many people are trying to find the meanings to their eye colors and are taking online quizzes and reading article after article, and all this is crap really. The article looks at all this and tackles what the truth about eye color really is.

When I look at Wizzley compared to Squidoo, I have a feeling that somehow Squidoo lenses are more commercial in nature, they are more salesy, while Wizzley is more for writing information article. In a way it makes sense, since Adsense takes such a prominent place at Wizzley (we have our own accounts there entered in the preferences, and the money goes directly to our own Adsense payment). For example while at Squidoo I might have a long list of favorite books on a particular subjects, like my Best self-help books for women, I wouldn't do this type of article at Wizzley. But I guess I'll see as I go along and learn more about the Wizzley platform and way of doing things.

Joined Wizzley

I've finally bit the bullet and joined Wizzley. I first heard of this site over at the Squidu forum, but because it's so new, I didn't want to bother with it. Big mistake! From what I saw, Wizzley is off to a great start! There are so far no spammers, and the quality of the articles is just great.

And you can earn with Wizzley, albeit in a different way than with Squidoo. With Squidoo you earn with its modules (Amazon, Ebay, etc) whereby you get I think 4% of the profits when somebody clicks through, and you can also add your own affiliate links (even to Amazon if you are an Amazon affiliate). This way you get to keep all the earnings. However Squidoo doesn't have Adsense (at least not directly to your own pub id).

With Wizzley you can earn from Adsense, Amazon and a few others as well. As a starter, you earn 50%. With 50 good articles you earn 55% percent and after 100 great articles, the commission goes up to 60% which is not all too bad.

I used to be at Suite101, a site that I really liked, but it got hit by Google earlier this year and my earnings pretty much plummeted along with everyone elses. As you only earn there from Adsense impressions, I lost pretty much all my revenue from there.

However Wizzley and Squidoo are different. The earning potential is much higher and I truly like to write that incorporate also other elements such as videos, images, Amazon modules, pols and quizzes. It's much more fun than some simple articles in a dry text format like Suite101 has.

So here is my first article at Wizzley on a topic that is very dear to me, meditation: How to do meditation at home.

Since I am meditating regularly from home, I like to teach others to pick up this helpful practice because it does help a lot with stress relief and it has some benefits that everyone can gain from (health and otherwise).

If you want to see what Wizzley is all about, click below to see some of the best articles (not only mine) at this great new promising site.

Lensrank Update Late Today

Everyday the lensrank update for the Squidoo lenses happens at about the same time (at about 3pm my time). Today it's awfully late. Too late. Way too late. And I'm getting pretty annoyed. I've been pressing the Refresh button of my browser every couple of minutes - nothing, nada.

But why is the lensrank update so important? Well personally I like to start creating a new lens after the lensrank update (or way before that so I can actually publish it before the lensrank update happens).

The reason is that if you're still working on your lens or you haven't published it on time, once the update happens, the lens goes into WIP (not VIP) mode (which is work in progress), and it usually goes to a low rank of a million something. Dohhh. And this only means that it takes longer for it to come back up to higher ranking from the start.

So when I start working on a lens AFTER the lensrank update, then I have the whole evening and the next morning to craft away at it. Or if I'm in a good mood and I know well what I'm writing about, I can time myself well so that I do 2 lenses, one before lunch so I can publish it on time, and one after 3 pm.

So since now it's already 8 pm, I won't start on a lens anymore. Instead I'm blogging here and reading the Squidu forum.

With this in mind, here is my latest lens I've created yesterday on pendulum charts. If you like the subject of dowsing with a pendulum, this should be quite interesting to learn about (shown here is a dowsing board).

Not Quite On Halloween

Around here in Europe we don't really celebrate Halloween. We do have something else instead, much more serious, called the Day of the dead. This is when families of people who passed away visit the cemetery, clean the grave site and headstones and generally pay homage to the dead. It is a serious type of 'celebration', nothing like the crazy Halloween pranks people play over there in the US.

This is why I haven't created any Halloween lenses, because I don't really know much about this event. Well, unless you consider Triskaidekaphobia a Halloween lens.

What exactly is triskee..what?

Well it is a very specific type of phobia which focuses on the number 13. The work triskaidekaphobia is actually Greek (living in Cyprus, at least I know that much Greek, lol) and it means the phobia about 13.

Considering the many Freddy Krueger Friday the 13th movies that people enjoy around the Halloween times, I guess this particular lens sort of qualifies. What do you think?

All About Bela Bartok

Today I published a Squidoo lens on Bela Bartok, and have to say I worked at it for several days before feeling that it's ready to be published.

But why publish a lens on him in the first place? Afterall it's not like he's a popular modern song writer or anything.

Bela Bartok is one of the biggest 20th Century composers of Europe. He was of Hungarian nationality. And I have to proudly say that we are related (well were related really since he passed away long before I was actually born) through my father's family line.

His music is classical, so if you don't like this style of music, you might not enjoy reading about him too much. I researched a lot, found pictures in the public domain and common creative from Flickr and put the lens together. I really slaved a lot over this one, but I feel I managed to pay him tribute.

So here is the lens talking about Bela Bartok biography and music. I'm quite proud of it.

Designer Jewelry - My Favorite Topic

I am a jewelry maker / designer by heart making handmade sterling silver jewelry and I love working with sterling silver and semiprecious gems. I don't always have the time to create, and this is when I like to peruse new designs, new jewelry or learn about new stones.

I thought I knew everything about tourmaline but it turns out I was wrong. I didn't know there are so many different types of them out there!

One of the types I got in love with (it's a rare type from what I understood, very treasured by collectors) is the watermelon tourmaline. It's amazing just how gorgeous this stone is with the 3 colors, green, white and pink. Truly awesome!

I wrote about it on a Squidoo lens called watermelon tourmaline jewelry and I showcased some of the beautiful pieces I found. I haven't worked with this type of tourmaline yet, but guess what I'll be next hunting at Ebay when I find a good price for it...

Just look at this beauty here for example...

On Recycling, Reusing And Helping The Ecological System

Recycling, helping the eco-system is one of the things I'm actively trying to be engaged with. I've applauded the green point (Der Grune Punk as the Germans say) movement of recycling and I've adhered to it ever since.

Also I've learned lots in the process by researching and I've put some of the things I've learned in a few lenses dealing with this subject.

The history of recycling is a very interesting one that I wrote about because knowing the history and where it all started goes a long way towards better understanding how to help protect our environment.

Also when it comes to knowing how to reuse plastic bags, I've learned a thing or two. Plastic is a rather difficult material to recycle, and usually it ends up thrown away anyway by most people, so knowing that we can at least reuse it a couple of times before getting rid of it should help, even if only a little.

Finally, I also wrote a lens on knowing where to get moving boxes. This is not directly related to saving the environment, however I feel that it can contribute as well because it ties again into the issue of reusing things rather than just throwing them away after a single use.

I might write more on the subject of recycling and reusing time permitting because I think we all need to do our part - even if just to make other people aware of the fact that we CAN do something to contribute.

Why Writing At Squidoo

One of the things people ask me when I tell them that I write at Squidoo for fun and profit is ... why writing at Squidoo. Why not writing for my own sites.

Well here is why.

If you know me, you know that I have many hobbies (sometimes too many to count) and interests. From making jewelry to greeting cards, from spirituality to all aspects of the occult and esoteric (and supernatural of course), I have a lot to talk about because over the years I've learned a lot.

I have a few websites as well, however an actual website is usually on a particular topic. So basically each article on that blog or site is evolving around that topic (let's say making jewelry).

Thus on a website that is focused as such, you can't tackle several different topics because Google will be confused as to what on earth is the site actually about, and won't rank me anywhere (so people won't find my site in Google search at all).

And in all honestly, I might not want to spend all my time writing only on jewelry (I do have a blog on jewelry actually) but it would take all my time to just write and write all day if I had to create a blog or a site on every single topic that I'm interested in.

And this is why Squidoo is the perfect platform to write (I love writing!). Each Squidoo lens is like a blog post on Squidoo (I think of Squidoo as a big open blog where everyone can write their own posts).

I can write on any topic I want, and if I want to expand on that topic, I simply create a few other lenses on the same and interlink them so that visitors can find all my related articles on a subject.

Once I've exhausted the topic (or I moved on with my interests - which tends to happen quite often), then I create a new lens on whatever I'm learning about at the time, without feeling guilty that I'm neglecting my website.

You see, it's the perfect platform indeed.

For example the very first lenses that I created back in 2008 were on the subject of panic attacks and anxiety.
I create a sort of mini-hub (niche) on this topic because that was my interest at the time.

Here are the lenses on this very topic:

Panic Attack While Driving
Treating Anxiety Naturally
How To Overcome Anxiety Without Medication
Anxiety Panic Attack Symptoms

Looking back over these initial lenses, well let's just say that I've learned much since then how to properly use Squidoo and write better quality lenses. However they do earn me a coin or two so I am tweaking them and making them better as time permits.

Over time I added a few more lenses loosely related to the subject:

Instant Stress Relief Techniques
and
Wake Up Fresh In The Morning

I won't write too much anymore on the subject of panic attacks, but maybe I will touch more on stress relief as it is something I need to tackle in my own life pretty much all the time.

As you can see these lenses are closely related to each other (I have also interlinked them at Squidoo) so my visitors can hop over to another lens if they so choose. They are a mini-hub related to a topic. It wouldn't have been worth to create a full blown website only for a handful of articles because in the meantime I moved on to other topics that caught my interest more.

Welcome to my Squidoo adventures

My journal here will be all about Squidoo, my lenses at Squidoo and how well I'm doing over time.

I've started with Squidoo a little over 3 years, back in 2008, but I never gave it a serious look. This years, however, I've decided to work more towards getting out many lenses and also start making some money at Squidoo.

If I remember correctly my very first lens was on Panic attacks while driving, and currently this is my top lens. I guess age does matter as well.

I've just applied to become a Giant Squid so I"m waiting now to see if I get accepted. For it you need 25 good, high quality lenses. I currently have 57 lenses so I'm hoping that at least 25 out of them are good enough to qualify.