I'm still alive!

Wow I haven't visited my own blog in along time! That is because I stay very busy on my main website Squidbuilders.com!! My $5.00 squidoo lens sale has been very popular and I am staying very busy making new lenses for squidoo lensmasters to purchase and turn into money makers!

Just in case you are looking for fast and easy recipes, I have just the site for you! My latest project is with Squidoo lensmaster and cooking genius (I know cause I have ate her food!) TabbyCakes! Come visit our brand new recipe blog that features Fast and Easy Recipes! If you have any recipe squidoo lenses, then drop us an email and we might just feature your recipe squidoo lens on our site!

As always, if you need to have a custom Squidoo lens built for your website, or if you would like to purchase any of my $5.00 Squidoo lenses please send me an email at thomasc@squidbuilders.com!


I may still occasionally come back here and share a tip or two! For now my biggest tip is just don't give up and continue creating more squidoo lenses! There is strength in numbers!

Come see my @ Squidbuilders.com
Thanks
ThomasC

Personalised Baby Gifts

I would like to introduce you to a great company called Simply Wooden Gifts
At Simply Wooden Gifts website, you will find some great personalised gifts for young children. Gifts for children like Personalised Door Name Plates, Personalised Jigsaw Puzzles, and even some Personalised Pencils and Cases.
As you can see, Simply Wooden Gifts has a very unique selection of wooden personalised gifts for children. When you need a birthday or Christmas present for a child, stop by Simply Wooden Gifts and see their nice selection gifts for children!

Simply Wooden Gifts is a family run Scottish company established in 2006 to provide Personalised Gifts for Children.
Christening Gifts Pencils & Pencil Cases Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles Height Charts Name Jigsaws Phonic Jigsaws Door Name Plates Door Hangers Name In A Frame

Who wants low cost insurance?

My blog here was gathering some cobwebs and dustballs, so I figured what better way to clean the place up and add some fresh content than to tell you about my latest lens creation for FoxRater.com is all about low cost insurance! The lens goes into detail about the basics of insurance for your home, auto, and business. The folks at FoxRater.com has the means to help you save on your insurance needs and educate you at the same time about all types of insurance.
So if you have a minute, come check out the lens I am talking about, It is titled Low Cost Insurance!

This lens was built with tender loving care by SquidBuilders.com

Win a free squidoo lens

Brand Awareness We all have heard the term right! But how do you make your brand name more known? These are the days that social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are growing huge. If your brand is not on these sites, you are loosing valuable visitors and followers for your brand.
My brand is SquidBuilders.com and I am branching out to these social sites just like I am telling you to do! My latest is a new Twitter Account for SquidBuilders.com  I will be twittering about specials and discounted offers for my lens building service!

I am going to offer a Free Basic Squidoo lens to one of my followers after I hit my 100th follower.
Details:
After i get the 100th follower on twitter, I will pick one follower at random and build one custom built squidoo lens on the topic of your choice.

Twitter Follow Squidbuilders.com

Visit Squidbuilders.com

Do You Zazzle?

Do you ever think of using Zazzle.com when you are adding products to your lenses? You don't have to have products yourself. You can find Zazzle products from any gallery that fits the theme of your lens.
Zazzle.com is free to sign up. They pay up to 15% royalty on referral links. Squidoo has a Zazzle module, but it sometimes can give mixed results. Plus the module shows 3, 6 or 9 products, and I like to be specific with just one product that I really like and think fits the theme of the lens.

What can Squidoo do for you?

 How to you get visitors to your brand new website?
So you just put up your brand new website! It looks nice, got some cool or pretty banners, you have all your products showcased just the way you want them. Best sellers up front! Big grand opening! Watching your traffic stats all day, waiting, waiting. Hey what gives... why doesn't anyone like my website?
Ah yes! You got it, you have to advertise. That's where Squidoo comes in. You can build a lens around your topic and link to your website, your blog, your facebook, twitter account, even use your videos from youtube.com
A Squidoo lens, if built right, can rank very well in the search engines for your keyphrase and keywords. They can get listed fast with just a little promotion and start driving visitors right to the front door of your website!

Check this out... My Squidoo lens about a hashbrown casserole recipe that we love around my house is ranked at #4 on Google for Hashbrown Casserole Recipe

Not to bad! I got one better...
My Squash Casserole Recipe lens is ranked #3 for the search term Squash Casserole Recipe.

I can go on and on showing you where I rank in Squidoo. Or, I could help you get yourself ranked there to! I am rebuilding lenses and building new lenses for clients right now! If you have some stale lenses sitting in your account, check out my webspage @ SquidBuilders.com and I will be glad to re work those lenses for you!

Got a Todays Best Award!

Hard Rock Skulls with Grunge Guitars by Back_Stage
See other Hard Postage

Today I was checking Zazzle and happened to look at the Todays Best page and about choked when I noticed  my Rock n Roll Skull Postage Stamp being featured! Wow and it is sitting in a brand new gallery too called Back Stage T-shirts and Gifts for rock n roll music lovers!
The tip I want to share here is that if you keep adding designs and starting new shops with new themes, you keep growing! You get awards and then that product rises in the market place. So far today I have 5 votes on a brand new postage stamp at Zazzle. Maybe it will make a sale soon!

Whats your 3 word keyphrase?

Squidoo Lens Help and Tips
The very first thing I think of before I begin any squidoo lens is "What will my 3 word keyphrase be?". When you build a lens, you need to focus on your chosen 3 word keyphrase. a 2 word keyphrase or a 4 word keyphrase are ok too, but 3 word keyphrase is optimal!
Then you approach your 3 word keyphrase every way possible. "3 word keyphrase" Videos, "3 word keyphrase" images, "3 word keyphrase" how to, "3 word keyphrase" ingredients(for recipe lenses), "3 word keyphrase" directions, and so forth! If you have chosen the right 3 word keyphrase, then you might just get lucky and nail that #1 spot on google for your "3 word keyphrase". Then the traffic Gods might shine down on your lens and send you many visitors!
There are many keyword tools sites to help you make a decision about what "3 word keyphrase" to use!
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Search Based Keyword Tool

Those are two good ones to try out.

So next lens you start to build, ask yourself what your "3 word keyphrase" is going to be. Can you guess what my "3 word keyphrase" is for this post? Leave a comment and tell me what it is!

Get ready for the Holidays!

It won't be long until the Christmas shoppers start getting out their shopping lists! Are you gonna have your Squidoo lens ready for them? The time is right now to be making those brand new Christmas lenses. Whether it's a Best Christmas Presents for Dad lens, or Car Toys for Guys Christmas lens, you need to get it built, or update your lenses from last year if you have any. Christmas on Squidoo can bring tons of related traffic to your lenses all looking for the exact products you are showcasing. So don't wait until it is too late.... Build some shopping lenses, focus on one particular product and keyword the heck out it! Then go promote it to your favorite social networks, or suggest it to friends to pass along. Just get it noticed!

Healthy Lifestyle Alternatives

Living a healthy lifestyle s not that complicated. Just buy the right foods, prepare them the right way, exercise often, get plenty of outdoors time. If you are one of those people that just needs the right information to get started living a healthy life style, then check out this squidoo lens...

Healthy Lifestyle Alternatives

Michelle will teach you about the superfoods you should include in your diet. Foods like Blueberries. tomatoes, and green tea. Michelle also teaches you a simple breathing exercise that can help reduce stress.

There is a great Blueberry Buzz Smoothie Recipe featured that you will love!

Squidoo Lens Tip of the Week!

I bet you wonder sometimes about what you can do to freshen up your lens. You know, google and yahoo search engines loves fresh content. So if you can give your lenses fresh content about once a week, your gonna rank a lot better on the search results for your search terms.
So, what are you gonna add to a lens that is already pretty full? Well, go back and look at your lens. Did you fill in the description area for those youtube videos? How about on the Amazon spotlight module? Do you fill in all your sub titles for each module? If you have any areas for text you haven't used yet, then there is your chance for some fresh content.
It doesn't have to be much! Just a sentence, maybe a paragraph of text will be enough to give the search engines some fresh content!

More fresh content ideas!

• Add a new youtube video
• Change out an amazon product
• Add an eBay product
• Add a link list module
• Add a Featured Lens module
• Add a Featured Lensmaster Module
• Add a Blackbox Module
• Add Bold tags to your main keywords
• Add title tags to your links
• Add alt tags to your images

The main thing is, just make some changes. Changes of any kind and a fresh publish can help your visitors stats change over night!
A good example of this is my State Quarters Collectors Lens. This lens is one of my favorites, because I love to collect the state quarters. I have several state quarter coin folders full right now! With this lens, I had somehow managed to kill all traffic to it earlier in the year. But I added the lens to my weekly edit list and it has slowly came back to life! After several weeks of edits, it has finally got some visitors again!

So add a label to your dashboard. Label it weekly edits, then add your best lenses to that label. Keep them with fresh content, then come back here and comment with your results!

Endangered Animal Species

When the Critters in a Jam company contacted me about building their website a squidoo lens, I was very excited to get started. You see Critters in a Jam is a very unique gift idea for animal lovers.

Here is how Critters in a Jam describes their product...

We take a plush toy animal, currently listed on The Endangered Species List, and place it into a plastic replica of a typical jelly jar. The animal is slightly larger than the jar, causing the animal to be "squashed" into the jar giving the appearance of being a
"CRITTER IN A JAM".

What these are is a stuffed animal that is on the endangered animal species list is stuffed inside a Jam jar. The label gives information about each endangered animal. The coolest part is each time Critters in Jam gets a sale, they give $1.00 to the National Wildlife Federation to help support endangered animals.

Purple Star for CrueFest 2009 Lens

I had the privileged of getting an email from Squidoo today telling me they have awarded my CrueFest 2009 Motley Crue lens a purple star award! Squidoo officials hand out purple stars on a randow basis to lensmasters who have built an exceptional squidoo lens. Well somehow one of those squidoo official peoples wandered onto my Motley Crue Cruefest 2009 lens and decided it was good enough to be awarded a purple star!
Oh it feels good to have another purple star! This one makes my 4th purple star awarded to my lenses.
The others are...
Bruce Lee The Little Dragon
1968 Chevy Camaro
2010 Chevy Camaro

If you are interested, I can build a high quality squidoo lens as well as any of these purple star lenses for you and your website, or blog! If you need to get better visitors to your website, then you should visit mine first! Check out SquidBuilders.com and let me help you!

Stun Guns, Mace, Pepper Spray and Squidoo

What does Stun Guns, Policeman's Mace, Pepper Spray Defense and Squidoo all have in common? They are all the newest topics of lenses I have created this week! Chuck from safetyenforcement.com wanted to get the word out about all the Self Defense Products he has for sale. So he has been hooked up with some great looking squidoo lenses now!

Don't become a victim! Protect yourself now!

Self Defense Products for Women

Featured on Frontpage of Cafepress.com

Today it was pretty cool to hear from a friend of mine that one of my truck driver t-shirts designs was being featured on the frontpage of Cafepress.com! This design features a grungy floral scroll background with an Eagle, The Route 66 roadsign, and an 18 wheeler. A great looking t-shirt or gift for any one who drives trucks for a living!
Truck Driving T-shirts

Time for Halloween Lenses

Many of you know to be ahead of holidays by at least two months when you build your squidoo lenses. So that means you need to be thinking about making Halloween Squidoo lenses right now! I have resurrected my KISS Halloween Costumes lens up from the dead! Dusted it off, added some new products and am starting to promote the lens now. People will be shopping for Halloween Costumes by the beginning of October, so you need to be ready.
I also built a dear friend of mine a Squidoo lens about Wizard of Oz Halloween Costumes.

For new Squidoo lensmasters who may not be aware of the squidoo template for halloween squidoo lenses, take a peak at Squidboo!

Make your lenses now, or dig out your halloween lenses from last year and freshen them up with new products and add more keywords. Halloween can be a big time on Squidoo for selling products off of your lenses. But your gonna need the visitors first! So go ahead, get them ready for Halloween now!

Space Shuttles and Space Station

The other day, a friend and me was chatting about the NASA Space Program. We were talking about the Space Shuttles and their role in building the International Space Station. We were trying to find out certain information about the space program. I decided to search Squidoo to see what my fellow lensmasters had built about the topic. I was pretty shocked to see so few lenses on the subject.
So you know what my first thought was.... that's right, time to get building! So without further ado... I would like to present to you... a lens about the

The International Space Station got it's first nuts and bolts in 1998. Over 11 years later, the International Space Station has become a floating truck stop in space for astronauts from many countries. All taking a part in the construction of this massive International Space Station

and a lens about.....

The Space Shuttle Enterprise never saw orbital space flight as it was originally built to do. Instead NASA used the Space Shuttle Enterprise for many test throughout the years. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was finally retired and turned over to the Smithsonian Institution in 1985, where it became a museum exhibit! Space Shuttle Enterprise

Keep the squidoo lens fresh!

My blog here is a perfect example of letting your content get stale! I haven't posted a new blog here since May 10th! Google has came and goon several times and walked away unhappy because the google bots didn't find anything new to chew on.
So my Squidoo Help Topic will be Freshness!

Ok so you built that squidoo lens about 2 months ago, you haven't edited since the first time you published it, and now your wondering why google hasnt shown it any love and send you thousands of visitors, right?
It's because you havent done any more work on it! Google loves fresh content! Relevent fresh content is even better! So go ahead, open up your favorite lens in edit mode and let's make some changes, or add some new content.

There is always more you can include on your squidoo lens.
Did you add a link list module? Having links for your visitor to click on will help your lens rank better. Each time a visitor clicks a link you have on your lens, it counts as a click out. How about adding another Video Module? I'm sure your visitors will love to see another video on your topic. The main thing is, add some more content. Make the content relevent to your topic. So the next time google stops by to rank your site, you have some fresh content for the google bot to chew on!

Fast Fact about Squidoo Lens:
Did you know the google bot will come by more often if you make regular updates to your squidoo lens!

Now if I could just practice what I am preaching with my blog here, I would get all kinds of traffic!

As always, if you need any help, I am at our service!
http://www.squidbuilders.com
Thanks
ThomasC

Spread out your income resources

Squidoo is a great resource to earn a little money. But lets face it, not too many lensmasters are making a full time income just yet. You have to think outside the box! Plus you have to work outside of Squidoo! I use different sites for writing content and publishing articles.
One site I ventured into late last year is Bukisa. It is a article writing site that lets you publish articles and you earn a little income from ads, just about like Squidoo. But there isn't a ton of modules there, you just write an article! They do allow backlinking to your squidoo lenses as well! What I like to do is write up an article on the same topic as some of my lenses and link to them!
So far I have only written 3 articles there. The first one I wrote back in November and forgot all about it! Went back and checked on it the other day and it had earned 1.05
I know, that isn't a lot at all, but imagine if you had 20-30 articles earning even one dollar a month! You could be getting another 20-30 bucks a month! Hey that is enough to cover a water bill or maybe even a phone bill!
Check out my articles...
Arkansas Hillbilly What is a Hillbilly?
Bruce Lee wins a Purple Star!
Tips on making great homemade biscuits

Cash Cow and Cash Flow!

My newest client is promoting a system that allows you to develop a Cash Flow System.Plug into the system and reap the benefits! Join a team of marketing professionals who will help you make some serious money thru their Turn Key opportunity! Want to make a 6 figure income? Check out these lenses and plug into their Cash Cow System! While you are checking out Mike's brand spanking new lenses, leave him a message and say hello!