Squidblog

Way to go, lensmasters. You’re rocking The New York Times yet again.

We’ve come a long way since our debut there!

Sounds like a reality show?

It’s not. (Hey Trumpy, wanna talk?)

I heard some pretty cool news recently from superlensmaster Loyalis, the self-styled Captain Squid.

He made $1,000 from just one Squidoo lens in one month.

No, it didn’t happen overnight.
No, you can’t get there by shortcutting or cheating or spamming.
No, piling on the affiliate links willynilly isn’t the solution. (Yes, I just wanted to say willynilly).

But…

YES! Clearly Squidoo is turning into a solid paying gig for people.
Yes, that’s cool because it’s totally free.
Yes, if you make great niche content pages, you’ve got a huge headstart.
Yes, once you’ve got a suite of worthwhile lenses up, they’ll just keep earning you royalties, little by little, month by month.
Yes, working through the dip pays off.
Yes, our community is even earning tens of thousands of dollars a month for charity.

Yes, we’re at a tipping point, guys.

Oh, and the best part. Yes, you can do it too.

Sorry about the outburst. Word.

I recently asked lensmasters to show me where they’re blogging about their lenses, and they did! Here are just a few that were submitted:

• Cabaret Squidoo - a yummy collection of food related lenses
• Life with my Pet Back - a personal niche blog about life with back pain
• Squidoo Challenge - a personal challenge to use Squidoo profitably
• Squidoography - a collection of stuff that’s all Squidoo related
• Topicability - a great example of how to promote lenses through articles
• Jaguar Julie : Blog On! - a fun-to-read personal blog
• I AM: Kimberly - a personal blog with occasional insider secrets. Shhh…
• Social Marketing 101 - tips, stats, and data about Squidoo
• Pop Goes Squidoo - the best of pop culture on Squidoo
• Does not blog well with others - but does talk about lenses well on blogs
• XP’s How to Squid - a guide to making great lenses on Squidoo
• Cowabunga! - a charged blog just on Hey Monkey Brain! lenses
• Musings from Ancient Greece - a niche blog with tons of info and links
• Little Debbie’s World - working at home, flower gardening, and Squidoo!
• The Eclectic WAHM - tips for using Squidoo to help you work from home
• The Best of All Worlds - great articles (and lenses!) on timely topics
• The Palindrome of Bolton - a personal blog about CFS
• The Days of Johann - even cute dogs love Squidoo!
• The Life of Lewister - fun and varied topics with great lenses to boot
• I Squidoo, do you? - tips for using modules, promoting lenses, and cashing in
• Captain Squid - big picture issues like SEO, linkbuilding, and marketing
• The Mall - a blog for a Squidoo group. How perfect!
• The Mindset - think outside the box to new promo and content ideas
• PotPieGirl - enhance the effectiveness of your lenses with SEO and eBay tips
• Random Neurons Firing - longtail ways to promote yourself and your lenses
• Squidoo Web Companions - tips from a pro on advanced lensmastery techniques
• Squidoo Lens Author - discover tips for going beyond the basic lens
• Squidoo Cool - advanced techniques for serious lensmasters

As you can see, most of these blogs are maintained by well known lensmasters. Coincidence? Or are they well known BECAUSE they blog? You’ll also regularly find these blogs in Google Alerts for Squidoo keywords. Bonus!

Starting a blog is free, and in just 20 minutes a day, you can easily build a history and readership. Why not give it a try?

Need a jump start? Learn how to promote your Squidoo lenses through your blog.

After a week on our new servers, we’ve identified a few places where our database can be optimized to run a bit faster. In order to make these tweaks, lens creating and editing will be disabled for one hour between 1am and 2am EST (5am-6am GMT) on Tuesday, April 15th.

We’ll update this post as soon as the maintenance period is complete.

1:32am EST: We’re back up!

Thanks,
Gil

You can break most online interactions into two groups: Catchers and Throwers.

Catching is what you do when you collect friends of friends on Facebook, when you follow Twitterers, when you subscribe to RSS feeds of blogs you like. Catching can be a great way to organize your favorite bits of the web.

Throwing is harder. Lots harder. It’s what you do when you post on your blog, and keep doing it a few times every week. It’s starting a petition on Care2.com and getting people to sign it. It’s what you do when you make lenses about the things, ideas and people that excite you.

Squidoo is a community full of throwers. Leaders, influentials, tastemakers, top dogs. But the temptation to throwers here and elsewhere, sometimes, is to just throw and throw and throw, indiscriminately, and hope that something sticks. Here’s the thing: that’s called spam.

The trick to both catching and throwing is to do it judiciously and respectfully. When you like someone’s blog and subscribe to it, drop the person a note and say thanks. When you disagree with a post, don’t bash the blogger, just… disagree. Similarly, when you write a blog post or a Squidoo lens and want people to read it, find networks on your topic, talk to people who want to hear from you, and make sure what you’re throwing is useful and relevant and polite.

Now, of course you should have a Twitter account, and of course you should talk about lenses there. Of course you should have a blog and review Squidoo pages on it. Of course you should strut your Squidstuff on Facebook. And, in fact, if you’re not doing those things, start now!

As Seth wrote today, “Publishing your ideas… in books, or on a blog, or in little twits on Twitter… and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.”

But if you do it dumbly, and en masse, and throw to people who haven’t decided to follow or friend or subscribe to you, you’re gonna lose a lot of fans old and new.

Throw a lot. Just respect your catchers.

And catchers, hey, no one’s twisting your arm. It’s up to you to follow only the best throwers out there.

Volatility is a measure of instability. And instability in the wrong places can be bad. You don’t want a volcano to be volatile. You don’t want volatile acidity (or vinegar taint) in your wine. You don’t want to be in a volatile relationship (I hope).

But through rosier glasses, volatility also means change, and change can be a good thing that allows you (or your product or site or friendship) to develop. That’s why the U.S. elects a president every 4 years. That’s why the Amazon bestseller list refreshes every hour. That’s why Squidoo LensRank changes every day. Change is a result of new opinions and updated data. Volatility, when done right, keeps your site or government or interests fresh and timely–and, most importantly, creates opportunities to do better.

For example, we’ve been testing and tweaking designs for Squidoo lenses, based on a synthesis of data and marketing and lensmaster feedback. Next week we’ll be releasing another wave of designs, a change that will generate new opportunities for lensmasters, for their readers, for the community.

You don’t get it right every time, but engaging in the process is half the battle. The key is to watch what, and who, takes advantage of the opportunities that each change creates, and to keep evolving from there.

Embrace volatility that gets you closer to your goals. Run very quickly away from volatility that makes things go boom.

The bad news: during the course of our recent server migration, our lensrank algorithm was thrown out of whack for a few days. It led to some very strange rankings, and unfortunately also led to some lost traffic for those whose lenses were knocked off the Top 100 lists.

The good news: We worked extra hard to trace down the problem, and lensrank is now running smoothly again. You can also look forward to new lenses which were stuck in WIP mode to now achieving Featured status.

Our search engine was down for about 30 minutes this afternoon while it caught up with the new lensrank results. If you ran into an Oops page, it should be gone now.

We’re putting on overtime to solve the last few lingering problems with our server migration, and from now on you can look forward to a faster and more stable Squidoo. For all those affected by the problems we ran into during our migration, thanks for hanging in there. You guys rock.

Sincerely,
Gil
Chief Engineer

We know: Squidoo has been buggy the last few days.

We know: There’ve been confirmation problems, security word errors (this one just got fixed as I type) and patchy access to lensmaking.

We know: It’s frustrating and inconvenient for you and you’ve had it up to your gills.

We know: That our community is full of rockstars. Your goodwill means a lot to us.

One other thing we know: 99.999999% of the issues were caused by some weird backend stuff that popped up during our recent server move. This means the bugginess is entirely temporary, like a quick cold, and is almost vanquished.

Finally, we know this: Squidoo will be back to normal (stable, reliable, easy to use) in no time. And better than ever. Thanks, gang.

When Twitter first came out, it was followed by a deluge of neat tools for promoting, automating, following, and maintaining a Twitter account.

Today, dozens of smart lensmasters are using Twitter to get more readers to their lenses and stay on top of important Squidoo updates.

Former Citizen Squid and Squidoo-tool-master thefluffanutta has some important tips for using Twitter effectively: http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=11011

You can receive special announcements about Squidoo throughout the day, along with random lens ideas for publisher’s block, fun things lensmasters are doing, and random Squidoo related things found online, from yours truly at http://www.twitter.com/squidoonews.

You can also get SquidCasts through Twitter (or just click on your My Favorites tab from your dashboard): http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12690

Join the craze!

Gil is migrating Squidoo to our new servers tonight, sometime between 8:00 and 8:30pm EST.

Here’s how it’s gonna work. We’ll be disabling the lens wizard and workshop 30 minutes before the start of the move, just to make sure no one’s work is interrupted. Then the entire site will go dark for approximately 5-10 minutes while the changeover takes place.

Your lenses, of course, will be totally fine.

Servers = scale, speed, stability… what a nice trifecta.

Update: We’re back everyone! Thanks for hanging in there. -Gil

Update (Thursday, 9:00am EST): The server move went well, and the site (and your lenses!) is safe and live for viewing. We’ve disabled the workshop and lens wizard again, however, as it was throwing off a few bugs. This means you won’t be able to edit lenses or make new ones until we’ve worked out the kinks. But Gil’s hard at work, so it’s shouldn’t be long. Thanks! — Megan

Update (Saturday, 4:45pm EST): Here’s an update on the major bugs encountered during our migration. Thanks for your support and patience! -Gil