In fact, one of my pages at Squidoo is number 6 on Google for it’s search term. Pretty good huh!

So there’s still some authority to be had by having a top notch Squidoo page if you can give it the care and attention it needs, but if it’s a good page, it will keep benefiting you long after you build it.

Here’s the page that helped me appreciate Squidoo: Angel Food Ministries

Anyway what I thought was awesome is how they’ve updated the pages… the tools for crafting lenses are awesome.

And when you’re logged in, you can see the the lifetime royalty earnings of your pages. That alone was worth the visit because isn’t it amazing to see what your page has returned for you since you made it?

It’s also instructive. If I can get a page that catches on wildly, maybe I can do that again.

In fact, maybe I can find my own formula that starts generating some serious cash.

And long after the Squidoo hype has ended, I’m still getting royalty checks while the internet gurus have gone on to pitch their next scam… Just food for thought.

It’s not making me rich – it wasn’t designed to – because it was just an experiment and something I wanted people to know about. It does throw out a few bucks now and again which is nice.

But I was checking some info on the ministry and it seems some bad apple there is being checked out by the Feds.

Having seen these people at work, who knows what this is? Once the stimulus money is received by the states and they see all the “strings” there will be lots of investigations like this. AFM did, after all, get a USDA loan to expand their distribution center. There has also been some question about exorbitant salaries of some executives there but it’s not about that at all.. or else they’d be raiding all major charities!

Despite this set back the ministry is up and running, fulfilling orders and taking orders. Hopefully it will emerge stronger after this, but the ministry really does need to tighten up on the executive salaries. Think “Mother Theresa” instead of “Bling”!

So many people are being helped, it would be a shame for this to tank now. Hopefully it’s an isolated issue. But nevertheless, I posted links to their announcements and a local news article that basically says “Not everybody likes the head guy here, but they employ 250 people in good jobs in this county and we’d hate to see them unemployed and the people they serve face life without their services.”

The links, if you want to see them, are at the bottom of the first section here at Angel Food Ministries.

You type in the URL of your Squidoo Lens and get ready for a fantastic tutorial on how to make your lens “hum” with the kind of internal consistency that gives it much more “SEO juice” than it would otherwise have.

Basically it helps you make your Page Title, Description, and Tags consistent among other things. I just made the lens last night.

But this is a wonderful tool to use on ALL your squidoo lenses!

If you’re using Squidoo at all, you MUST use this tool to help you get the optimization you want for the most traffic possible.

Could you help my by ranking a new lens I have called “Nashville Business“? I’d appreciate your visit and any ranking you could give the lens.

I guess all your visits and rave reviews (not really! Maybe some of you clicked through to help me in my hour of need but no rave reviews… it’s just a new lens after all) shot it out of the cesspool to 15,521 from it’s original doomsday number of 666,666. (Actually it was 661,000 something… but what’s a few thousand when you’re so close to a number that sparks the imagination?)

Anyway, at least that’s ONE bit of relief in an otherwise crazy day!

So I decided to build a lens for it that you can see at the previous link.

I didn’t write a Wikipedia entry, but I did at least try to put some significant content there and my aim was to come back later.

But for some reason (because it’s a commercial product?) I got the “We’re considering this a Work In Progress” message which means that people can see it, but Squidoo won’t mention it’s there to other readers or rank it. I guess it means the lens has “weird uncle/family embarassment” status.

I don’t even have an affiliate link for the product!

Oh well. Maybe this is their equivalent of the Google Sandbox… see if someone actually ever visits it.

So if you want to see what a W-I-P lens looks like, visit The MagicJack.

Here’s an interesting lens. I am posting some images from them about this woman’s earnings.

Here’s the lens

Here are the earnings she’s disclosed from the Squidoo royalty system.

Here are the earnings she received from Shareasale and Commission Junction…

Keep in mind that her goal is to earn $2,000 in a few years. Sounds reasonable.

I’ve never earned anywhere near this amount.

I’ve done pretty well from one or two lenses from affiliate sales mostly plus some of the Squidoo royalty dollars.

Megan Casey at Squidoo who sees the money they pay out monthly summarized the “secret” here….

What’s cool is the recipe for earning: lots of lenses + niche topics + personal recommendations and opinions. Quality and quantity, which is pretty hard to game or cheat.

Casey goes on to say that people with 50 lenses that go deeply into a given subject and offer personalized information are the kind that work best and make some money, not the spammy ones. That’s certainly been true about my Angel Food Ministries lens.

I commend the page as very down to earth and realistic.

My Angel Food Ministries lens was up to #176 on Thursday.

It was still at about 500 out of all the half million or so lenses Squidoo has!

But I did some updates in the last day or two and that jumped it up to #176 as of Thursday. I did some more work on the lens today so I expect it to pop up even more.

Lesson learned: Focus on lenses you LOVE that have a VIRAL quality if possible and update them frequently. They will stay on top!

Best of all – a church in South Carolina read my lens and then started to distribute food by participating with Angel Food Ministries!  I’m happy for that!

Nothing really.

It’s only hope is if it attracts search engine traffic which remains to be seen.

But a little attention and traffic goes a long way.

It’s overall Lens Rank is today 155, 602. That’s not a bad overnight jump in rankings.

I really enjoy the way a good Squidoo lens can make not only monthly paychecks via PayPal but also a nice little check thanks to affiliate sales.

My Angel Food Ministries lens has turned out some wonderful affiliate checks even though it’s primarily an informational site for a non profit organization.

But if every web page I ever worked on turned out commissions like that one has, I’d be pretty well off.

Let’s see how this new one does. It won’t have the appeal of the Angel Food Ministries site in some ways, but it may be a tighter key word niche that picks up some traffic for that reason.

The dog in this case is Squidoo.

Here’s a bone I’m playing with right now… lens rather.

Just for record keeping purposes, here’s the rank today 7/21/2008 when first published.

Let’s see how much, if any, it jumps. I don’t know why its not #594792 except I registered the name  a while  back and put some content but never published it until today.