Lenses and Blogs

I became interested in lenses and blogs in January 2010. Started with a Squidoo.com lens on Vizio TVs. I was going to make money with it from Amazon.com. Of course, I did not become one of Amazon.com’s fine affiliates nor did I use one of Squidoo’s Amazon.com modules. Yup, I’m bright.

I Move On

After a the Squidoo lenses, I built a site on mortgages. This one made me extra cash regularly, but little. I built it with SiteRubix, which is a bitch. So I looked for an easier way. Blogger.com is what I found. It’s easy to build a site, easy to monetize (with Google Adsense or Amazon.com ads, otherwise it’s just like Squidoo lenses).

Easy to monetize, turns out, doesn’t help my pocket all that much. The trick’s in getting traffic. And not just any traffic. Traffic from a hungry crowd. (Go west, young man, and find yourself a hungry crowd, are words I’ve heard a lot lately. Wise words too. The internet is full, nay, chuck-full, of wise words.

Well, maybe the trick is getting traffic and how you monetize.

Anyhow, I moved to the next phase: find hungry crowd, coral hungry crowd… somewhere. You do that, it turns out, by creating heaps, loads, tons and numerous lenses and blogs and hubpages. Oops. I forgot to tell you, I also found hubpages.com. Easier to set up than a squidoo lens, but with a few limitations. On the other hand, mortgages is not a banned topic.

Squidoo’s got a lot of banned topics on account that Google slapped it silly in 2009 for having crappy content. Long story, so

Back to locating hungry crowds and converting them in traffic to my blogs and lenses and such. The trick is not to create them, the blogs and lenses and such, that is, but to optimized them. Or is it in choosing the domain name? Nah, turns out a domain name that's a keyword with little competition is gold but gold alone is not good enough; you need keywords and to know what to do with them.

So, the new trick. Keywords have to have a decent amount of traffic. And not be competitive. The ones with lots of traffic are too competitive. Some of those with puny amounts of traffic are also very competitive.

Problem, the wise people on the internet can’t agree on what’s decent or competitive. Another problem, analyzing keyword’s is a bitch. Takes forever and is boring as hell. My eyes actually rolled back in my head, so disgusted were they with keywords.

So I got help. I got me an SEO analyzing tool. It's done wonders for me. Which I, then, compounded by ignoring the internet wise men. Very empowering. Whooey!

About the same time I discovered wordpress blogs. I love 'em. Both the .com and .org ones.

I Keep Moving On

So now I have some wordpress blogs that are built around keywords for which I'm number 1 in Google. I am a happy camper, right?

Not really. I'm ambitious. Or is it greedy? Doesn’t matter. Thing is, I’m something.

I kept looking and found more ways of pushing my sites up in the Google ranking games. I found me some other blogging platforms and created blogs there too. That kind of activity takes some getting used to and some time. Some of the blogging platform/sites let you create for free, some want money. Some have odd fee arrangements. Because ‘It takes all kinds’ is a saying that must always be taken into account. Even if you’re a blogging platform.

Anyway, some have restrictions on how you can monetize. I.e., they want money to let you do it at all. If you’ve mastered the finding-hungry-crowds and the building-a-landing-page-that-converts-trick and the keyword-picking trick, and the get-them-hungry-crowds-to-your-site, no problem, you’re in business. Otherwise, you got yourself yet another hobby your significant other’s gonna be pissed at you for.

There’s an even better way to cajole the hungry crowds to visit your sites: article marketing. Yep, you write an article, publish it in Ezinearticles.com & Co. (with an artfully crafted bio at the end, a bio that has links to your site(s) and you get easy-as-pie-internet-marketing. Except for the easy as pie part.

See, you have to learn how to write so they click on your article, so they read all the way to your bio, so they click on your links. Which, it turns out, they don’t teach you in high-school. Or, for that matter, in college or grad school.

Having mastered, if I say so myself, all the above tricks, I find myself still with not so much money coming in from my efforts. I must revisit the monetization part of this internet life. What you promote’s quite another bag of tricks. For, you see, $1000 a month from 2 sales is the same as $1,000 a month from 1,000 sales. However, 2 sales you can find just walking around one internet block, a thousand takes many blocks.

But allow me to digress:

Here's some of my wonders (all on the same topic and with the same article on them, for, after all, I'm a lazy bum):
my webs.com blog
my my.opera.com blog
my blog.com blog
my tumblr.com blog
my other tumblr.com blog. Don't know how I got to have 2.
my wordpress.com blog
my blogger.com blog

Lenses and Blogs

I find lenses to be harder to put up than they should be. A bit more effort and you get a small blog going. And blogs let you add pages or posts. Which means you don’t have to index every single one of them. Some internal linking will do that trick.

Besides, if you pay for hosting you make the rules, not Squidoo.com et al. So, I'm not nuts about lenses. I have about a bit more than a dozen. Which in my world makes me an expert on what I think about them. And I think they annoy the hell out of me.

That said, they do have a place in my marketing strategy. And they’re still a bitch to make compared to the rest of the things I’ve tried.

There’s more to this story but, you know, you can’t tell big stories in half-hour episodes. And, did I mention that I’m but a lazy bum?

By the way, you can read the very same thing you've been reading at  http://www.squidoo.com/lenses-and-blogs.
Why would you do that?
You're a masochist, of course. At this point, you should be here, to see my impish smile and fully understand the import of my fine, wise words.