New Lenses Launched
Another slow quarter with only two new lenses published. Back in my younger days, I used to knock out that many in a month! Uphill and in a blizzard even.

Part of the reason for the low productivity was I started playing Thorns of War, a free online role playing game. What’s unique about this game is that there’s no script or set of lame quests for your character to follow. And nearly everything in the game is built by players. That gives you a lot of freedom in how you play the game…which I’ve been doing a lot of. Somehow I carved out enough time to build a lens for it.

Halloween’s coming up soon so I’m thinking about my Halloween graveyard. That prompted me to research and build a list of good Halloween graveyard decorations. These will help transform your yard into the scary, creepy place you always knew it could be.

Payouts
Payouts were up 30% over Q2 of last year. Not as sharp an increase as last quarter but still healthy growth considering my new lens production has dropped off. I’ll need to crank up my productivity before the revenue trend flattens (or worse).

Enjoy your summer and have a great Q3!

Here’s the Squidoo stuff that did get accomplished this quarter…

New Lenses – Only two new lenses published in three months. The first is on girls’ colonial costumes and its sibling lens is colonial costumes for boys. These are both complements to my existing Colonial Williamsburg and Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg lenses. I figure if your family’s going to visit Colonial Williamsburg, it might be fun (and educational) for the kids to dress up in Colonial attire.

Money – Good news here. Payments were up nearly 72% over Q1 of 2010! And January was my largest monthly payment ever. Not too shabby.

Other – Along with many other Giant Squids, I became a Squid Angel in Q1. There’s now an angel in the Fantasy Sports neighborhood. I also celebrated my 5th Squidiversary in February!

Hope everyone has a prosperous Q2. Cheers!

I’m very happy to report that I exceeded my main goal of 2010 with Squidoo earnings nearly 2.5x what I earned in 2009! Let’s see if I can do it again in 2011.

Here’s a quick summary of the new lenses…

One of my family’s favorite places to eat is Chick-fil-A. Every time we’re in there and I experience their amazing customer service I think, “I’ve gotta build a lens about this place!” Well, I finally did. Here are my reasons why I love Chick-fil-A.

Next is my first SquidQuiz and is on a serious topic. It was inspired by several people I know who suffer from a debilitating mental illness that affects their lives and loved ones for much of the year. Diagnosis is tricky so I’m publishing a list of questions to hopefully help others recognize the symptoms and take preventive action early. Sometimes the toughest part is looking in the mirror and asking…Are you addicted to Fantasy Football?

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2011!

The first was for a SquidHQ challenge to build a lens on a vintage product and earn a raffle ticket. I don’t do many lens building challenges and it took a day or two to think of something but an idea finally hit me as I was falling asleep one night…

As a kid, I enjoyed playing with Star Wars action figures and one of the action figure play sets I had was the Hoth Imperial Attack Base. It’s from The Empire Strikes Back, was a lot of fun to play with and is 30 years old…I think that qualifies as vintage.

Christmas is almost here and carolers will soon be hitting the streets. Maybe they’ll be dressed up in Victorian Christmas Caroling costumes. This new lens is a twofer…it’s a nice complement to How To Host A Christmas Caroling Party and it adds to my small convoy of costume lenses.

Here’s hoping you have a blessed Christmas, New Year and any other holidays you may celebrate!

Cheers!

October also included writing a blog post on my experience playing fantasy golf for the first time this year. That was in support of my fantasy golf guide and various other fantasy sports lenses.

As mentioned last month, I started tracking my time spent on Squidoo to compute my hourly wage. I enter the start and stop times in a simple spreadsheet and let Excel do the math. An unexpected benefit of doing this is that it’s helped me to stay focused on Squidoo tasks…which is one of my Squidoo goals for 2010. Tracking the time provides a sense of being on the clock so I’m less inclined to check email or some other distraction.

I’m not ready to publish results yet because October was an odd (but good) month so I want to get more data points…maybe for a whole quarter. My Squidoo time was lower than I expect it normally would be for an average month…due to a lot of other activities going on. And then the October payout was my highest ever (told you it was a good month). So October’s hourly wage was way out of my expected range.

We’ll see what November brings…hopefully the higher payouts keep coming!

In my last post I mentioned starting to experiment with Halloween costume lenses. The newest theme in that collection is Bartender and Barmaid Costumes. I like to explore off of the beaten path so I’m avoiding the latest movie costumes for now and focusing on other costume themes that interest me (and hopefully others).

It’s fantasy football season and this year one of my leagues switched to an auction draft format. The auction was fast paced and a lot of fun. That inspired a new duel lens asking, “Which fantasy football draft format is better…Auction or Snake draft?” It describes each draft format and summarizes their advantages. There are also tips for leagues planning to switch format and various ways for readers to share their opinion.

That brings me up to 83 published lenses. I’m targeting to get 2 or 3 new ones out in October. One will be a review of an excellent book I finally finished reading last night.

I’m doing something new in October…tracking the amount of time I spend working on Squidoo. I’ve always been curious what my “hourly wage” from Squidoo is. The monthly earnings are easy to get and by the end of the month I’ll have an idea of how much time I apply to Squidoo. I’ll only track my online time…updating & building lenses, reading and commenting on other lenses, reading SquidU, writing this blog post, etc. It would be very challenging to quantify the time I spend thinking about lens ideas while doing other things like driving, mowing the yard, etc. The results should be interesting.

The main goal for 2010 is to double last year’s average monthly Squidoo earnings. That’s a big goal and I’m on track to beat it. As of the August 2010 payout, my Squidoo earnings are 251% of last year’s earnings at this point! (This only covers earnings from Squidoo, not outside affiliate programs…still have a lot to learn there.)

How did this happen? Danged if I know. A large chunk of it’s due to the ad pool payouts for each tier increasing so much this year…something that’s totally out of my control. Including Chitika and Infolinks earnings, the Tier 1 payout for August is more than double what it was for August of 2009. That’s awesome news for all lensmasters.

More lenses climbing into Tier 1 also helped big time. I credit that to a mix of having lenses with original content on good topics, some promotion, luck, and, possibly, lens age (most of my lenses in Tier 1 are over 2 years old). I focused on maintaining lenses that are on the edge of going from one tier to another. Basic stuff like making sure content is still relevant, keeping an eye out for new content to add and periodically checking lens stats to make adjustments if needed.

What about the other goals? Writing ideas down and better focusing my time online were my two other goals. These are subjective and tough to measure. I’m making a little progress on them. Free time has been sparse lately so that’s forced me to focus my computer activities more. Writing down ideas hasn’t gone as well, I still have a lot floating around in my head that should be jotted down. But there’s 4 months left in the year to improve that.

Not all my Squidoo time this year was spent counting pennies, I also built a few new lenses since my Squidiversary:

A couple new fantasy sports lenses…One is a beginners’ guide to fantasy golf and the other offers tips and ideas for hosting a fantasy baseball draft party.

Gardening is a rediscovered hobby of mine and it’s begun to inspire my lens ideas. Here’s my review of The Vegetable Gardeners Bible. The oregano in my garden went bonkers this year…I can’t harvest and use it fast enough. That inspired a spur of the moment lens on growing oregano.

Halloween costume lenses seem popular so I’m experimenting with them. So far I built ones on kids’ astronaut costumes and Top Gun fighter pilot costumes.

Having a new baby this year gave me the chance to try out some new baby gear and sparked the question, “Are baby wipe warmers overrated?”

My newest lens is a review of Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes which I just finished reading.

Hopefully some of these will help keep the Squid earnings growth going!

I thought that maybe I’d come up with topics for 5-10 lenses total. Ha! I’m up to 73 published lenses with ideas for dozens more. The real challenge isn’t ideas, it’s balancing time between my family, full time job and other interests to turn those ideas into good lenses.

A lot’s happened on Squidoo since I joined. Mostly good (strong community, new modules & designs, improved stats, bigger pay outs) with some hurdles along the way (spam, one star bandits, one star vigilantes, rating exchanges). I’m excited about Squidoo’s future and the opportunities for lens masters…especially after yesterday’s payouts!

Creating lenses on many topics helped me figure out where my lens building interests and strengths are. I enjoy building “How To” and info consolidation lenses the most. My limited writing experience is mostly technical so these are a good fit for me. Whether it’s providing fantasy football tips or explaining how I get rid of hiccups, I like building lenses that are helpful to visitors.

Squid Achievements
It may be a short list but during my first 4 years I…

• Had one lens selected as LOTD
• Became a Giant Squid
• Received three Purple Stars
• Had one lens mentioned in a national weekly magazine (woohoo!)
• Received several blessings from Squid Angels (thank you!)
• Was interviewed and had a lens featured on Mimi’s excellent Squidoo Lens Review blog.
• Had a lens featured in a SquidU Review post
• Had a few lenses nominated for awards in different Squidoo contests
• Founded 3 groups

Possibly the best achievement is finding that someone’s posted a link to my lenses in a forum, blog, Facebook or Twitter as a reference. That’s when I know that my lenses are useful.

These modest achievements didn’t happen overnight. They required effort, learning and some good fortune. I’ve learned a lot from other lens masters via SquidU, lens master blogs, other lenses and some really helpful lenses on lens building. To everyone who’s ever rated, lens rolled, blessed, commented on or just visited one of my lenses…Thank You!

Goals for my 5th year (2010)
Enough rambling about the past, here are my goals for this year…

• Double Last Year’s Average Monthly Squidoo Earnings
  To justify the amount of time spent on Squidoo I need to focus on realizing my earning potential. This goal will drive the others for the year. I have some strategies in mind to reach it…doubling my number of lenses isn’t one of them. Adding a few new ones while improving the quality, cross linking and promotion of my existing lenses is. The increasing tier payouts are already helping towards this one.
• Write Things Down
  Ideas have been swimming around my head for years. Ideas for new lenses, improvements to existing lenses and blog posts to promote lenses. Time to get these out of my head, on paper, organized and into reality. I bought a notebook specifically for this goal and used it to draft this post.
• Make Better Use of My Online Time
  Yeah, this is a vague goal. I have limited time to spend online and I get distracted easily. Not a good combination. I’ll fire up the computer to work on a lens then get side tracked checking stats, email, watching funny YouTube videos or logging in to play an MMORPG “real quick”. The goal here is to have a purpose each time I log on and focus only on that.

So, what will I do to celebrate my Squidiversary? Well, I wrote a really long blog post. Tonight I’ll probably pop open a bottle of Yuengling and watch the season premiere of Survivor with my wife. During the commercials I might tell her about the cool use of the BlackBox module for displaying images I saw in a recent LOTD. That’ll get me a “You and your lenses” as she shakes her head. Eventually I might convince her to start building her own lenses…but that’s a goal for another year.

My favorite part was checking out the bridge with all the controls, switches, gauges and other instruments. After that was walking the deck and imagining life at sea as I looked over the water. It’s a wonder I didn’t pursue a career in the Navy.

Touring ships is still an experience I enjoy today and want to share with my kids. It’s fun, educational and builds an appreciation of the history these ships made and the sacrifices of those who sailed them.

When I first built my Master and Commander series lens, I added a module listing a couple tall ships from the period that readers could visit and tour. Researching those ships was fun and I discovered there weren’t many places to find such a listing online.

So Tour A Tall Ship was launched. It’s a directory of over 30 tall ships around the world that you can tour. There’s a brief description of each with a link to the ship’s official website for more details. It’s one of my early lenses and a favorite.

Over the last year I added lenses for other classes of museum ships. The format varies a little for each but their mission is the same…provide searchers a consolidated directory of museum ships in each class to explore.

First came Tour A Battleship, soon followed by Tour An Aircraft Carrier. Both include info for wrecks that you can scuba dive on, too.

The newest addition to the fleet, lurking somewhere beneath the waves, is Tour A Submarine. I’m still researching and adding links to this one but it already has nearly 20 subs on 4 continents listed.

An auxiliary member of the fleet is Sail A Tall Ship. While the ships featured there aren’t stationary exhibits, many are historic ships and make ports of call where they open up for tours.

You can find more tall ship lenses at the Tall Ship Fans Group. I’ve also built my first niche lensography featuring all my nautical lenses. I’m always looking for new ships to add to the museum ship lenses so please tell me if you know of one not listed.

Now comes all the planning and preparation. It’s time to start getting the nursery ready, dust off our favorite baby gear (including the onesie extenders) and agree on some names. Lots to do but it’s all worth it.