New Hobby On Collecting Coins

A friend of mine got recently interested in collecting coins. I didn't know much about it until he's started hammering it all in my head - I guess he is too excited and has to share everything he's learning along the way.

So without actually going into a new hobby, I've been 'forced' to learn a bit about collecting coins. I've seen first hand what one needs to get started and how to best go about it (well second-hand, really, through my friend).

This gave me the idea to use that new-found knowledge in a few lenses that I created yesterday on coin collections.

I've written about the most useful coin collection books that one needs to get started, and about the basic numismatic supplies that is best to have (my friend has all of these). I tied these nicely together with a Wizzley article on how to start your own coin collection. I hope my knowledge of numismatics will come in handy to somebody who is thinking of picking up a new hobby in 2012!

Second Purple Star

Shortly after becoming a Giant Squid, I got my second purple star ever. Yesterday afternoon while working on adding a new lens I got some nice 'monsters' falling down on my Dashboard. Curious to see what that was, I headed over to my stats and saw the message that I got a Purple Star on my Things To Buy After Christmas lens.

Woohoo, it is my second Purple Star. Things start happening at Squidoo, got both my purple stars and my Giant Squid status in December, and sales have started increasing a bit too. Hoping the positive trend will follow in 2012 as well!

Became A Giant Squid!

Finally, after being rejected once in October, I woke up this morning to an email that I'm a Super Squid, which is the first level of Giant with 25 awesome lenses. Next I can go on and apply for 50, 100 and then 250. Further than that my mind doesn't even try to think, lol!

I'm doing my happy dance, I'm a Giant Squid! This was one of my goals for this year at Squidoo and I've made it (along with making at least 100 lenses, which I did as well, and with making more money than before). So I can safely say that I've accomplished my 3 goals at Squidoo for 2011. Now on to 2012 and what it will bring me (hopefully only goodies!)

Here are the two little trophies I got for becoming a Giant:

Scrooge Quest Finished

Yesterday I made my third lens for the Scrooge quest, with the title: Jewelry for new moms. A few hours later I got my 200 points and my little Scrooge badge (image on the left). I know these are just for fun, I don't really get much out of them in terms of anything else but the satisfaction of a job well done.

And let's face it, it pushed me to create 3 new lenses, which hopefully will start earning at some point.

And speaking of earnings, this month has been the best in Amazon earnings (lots of them made by my Squidoo lenses). My sites have been hit by Panda, so I've lost a big chunk of my earnings. Now thanks to Squidoo and Christmas, I got back to 7.5% commission at Amazon. It's middle of the month and I already made over $500 in Amazon commission (through my own affiliate links).

I have 100 Squidoo Lenses

Just added my 100th lens called Kindle DX Covers And Cases. I almost didn't realize I'm already there. Wow how the time passes...Just a few months ago I was struggling with a couple of awful looking lenses, trying to make them better and to create new ones, hopefully better ones this time.

Now let's see when I'll get to the shiny 200.

The Scrooge Quest

Every now and then I decide to participate in one of Squidoo's quests. The latest ones is called: 2011 You're No Scrooge - or how I call it: The Scrooge Quest.

Here is what the Scrooge quest is all about:

"Help Santa Squid by creating 3 NEW Gift Guide cobrand lenses before midnight [EST] on December 23, 2011 and he'll repay you with +200 SquidPoints AND award you the 2011 "You're No Scrooge" Trophy Badge on your dashboard".

I don't really care about the points and the badge, but since it's almost Christmas anyway, I've decided to join it. Even if I won't sell a thing this winter, there's always next Christmas...

So far I've made two lenses, the second one just finished a few minutes ago. One more to go...

1 - Best Origami Books For Paper Folders

2. - Holiday Gift Ideas For Employees

Let's see what will be the third one about...

My First Purple Star

I'm tickled pink! I've just woke up this morning to my first ever Purple Star at Squidoo! The lens that received the purple star is Curing Procrastination. But what does purple star mean in the first place?

Well, if you click on the '\Won Purple Star' link next to the little purple star on the right side of the lens, you'll see this little text pop up:

(click on the image to see it larger)

So either someone nominated as such, or Squidoo HQ found it and liked it enough to assign to it a purple star.

This lens is a T3 currently at 14,708 lens rank. Hope it will improve over time as well.

Got A Nice Comment From A Book Author

This morning I woke up to the nicest email coming through from Squidoo. It said:

""Hi Marcia,  Beauty and brains are a great combo . Thanks for the kind words about my book . Best, Jeff Keene"
Jeff Keane is a wonderful author of a book called Someone Else's Yesterday. I reviewed the book in my Books on Reincarnation lens. I've been interested in reincarnation and past lives for many years now and I've read countless books on the subject (I have I think 50 books at home only on the subject of reincarnation, past lives and living 'on the other side' so to speak.

So when I created this lens, putting together a useful resource and reviewing the books was quite easy since I've actually read them all. I guess Jeff Keane liked what he read, hence he took the troubles of going to my Bio page and leaving me the comment.




Thanks Jeff!

Web 2 Blogs To Post To

I've been asked if I know of other web 2 sites that allow creating free blogs, similar to Wordpress or here, Blogger.

Basically these free sites let you create a blog and simply keep a journal on whatever topic you want to write on. However these blogs are also great for promoting our Squidoo lenses. Let's face it, without a bit of promotion, there is no way other people will find our lenses in the first place.

I am using a few of these platforms so here are some of the more popular free ones where I have started a blog similar to this one, where I write about some of my hobbies, about Squidoo and life in general:

- Blogger (like this blog here) - PR 9
- Wordpress - PR 9
- Page.tl - PR 7
- Blog.com - PR 6
- Typepad - PR 8
- Livejournal - PR 8 (nofollow links)

Except Lifejournal which changes it's settings to nofollow backlinks (which makes it almost useless for getting backlinks from that blog - if that's the purpose of using it), every other platform is dofollow. Of course, the more blogs you're on, the more time you will spend writing, and the more Squidoo lenses you have, the more you have to backlink to them.

This is why at some point, you have to decide just how many of these blogs you can safely maintain on a regular basis. Because let's not forget, these are blogs, not some article directories, and as personal blogs, if you want to have followers and readers and authority, you need to post regularly, at least a couple of times a week.

Lens Reworking Experiment

Following my previous post on getting some of my bad lenses to gain some traction, here is my very first experiment.

Lens: Learning to Counsel
Stats: last one in my list, right at the bottom with rank 234,425, which is a clear lens T4
Got this lens as a gift from somebody in the Squidu forum who didn't need it anymore.

What I did: 
- Changed the title from Learn to Counsel to Learning to Counsel
- Added the changed keyword sprinkled throughout the lens
- Added a few related keywords
- Changed 'counsellor' to 'counselor' since I targed the US segment
- Added several modules, a poll module, an extra text list module, 2 social bookmarking modules, a lens like module, and a few Amazon product feature modules, and moved the Amazon ones towards the top. Also added a link list of online sources dealing with counseling and learning to counsel.
- Featured it in the squidu forum in the proper thread for an innocent little backlink and hopefully a visit or two

Let's see if any of these help the lens go up in rankings.

Interesting Statistics on Tiered Lenses

Just before yesterday somebody started a thread at the Squidu forum on the breakdown of our lenses by tier. Basically we took our total number of lenses and calculated the percentage of lenses by T1, T2, T3 and T4. 

This is my lens distribution across tiers:

95 lenses total 2 lenses
- T1 2% 5 lenses
- T2 5% 41 lenses
- T3 43.1% 47 lenses
- T4 49.5%

Sadly I have way too many in T4 which doesn't earn me anything. This is why I've decided that as soon as I hit 100 lenses (almost there), I'll start reworking and trying to get some backlinks to some of my T4 lenses.

While the T3 lenses only get around 46 cents or so, still when you have 47 lenses in T3 as opposed to T4, that little money also adds up to around $20, which would just about pay my Hostgator reseller account.