Suggestions for Improving Squidoo

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve got a few lenses over on Squidoo, and although I’ve made less than $1 from them and haven’t gotten any meaningful traffic from them, I still think it’s too early in the development stages to give up on.

I subscribe to the Squidoo Blog and I’ve even had a lens make the ‘lens of the day’ a month or so ago. I don’t visit everyday but I do visit at least once a week. I have one suggestion on something I’d like to see improved. A little while ago they suggested the “Firefox & Greasemonkey Lens‘ as the ‘Lens of the Day’. This was by far the most useful lens I persoanlly have ever encountered, it showed me a few plugins I never saw before, and had some other suggestions on plugin consolidation and had a link to a page on problematic firefox extentions which helped me really fix up my firefox install and speed things up considerably (you can see a list of the firefox extentions I have installed).

Anyways I liked the lens so much I subscribed to it via RSS. Just like it’s supposed to when the author updates the lens it shows up in my feed reader. The problem is since it’s a big page it’s really hard for me to pick out what has changed. Wikipedia has history functions which allows you to go back and compare versions and highlights what’s changed, on the lens I’ve just gotta power through the whole thing and see what “feels new” to me, not the most efficient way of Getting Things Done.

My Second suggestion is more of a complaint. I have a lens I wrote for an eBook I sell. Shortly after Seth Godin published a link to the eyetracking study on squidoo, they moved the adsense to a more prominantly featured location. I have no doubt this increased revenue and click throughs for the adsense account. However what it also did is feature an ad for a competitors book on my lens. I’m not a big advocate of putting adwords on content sites, it just doesn’t convert well for me (I do however have a handfull of sites I’ve cherry picked with site targeting). However seeing a direct competitors ad in a very narrow niche field really annoyed me, so I’m trying to figure out what keywords she’s (yes I know it’s a she) using and where I have to bid to get my ad to appear. To date I have been unsuccsessfull at getting the right combination.

UPDATE
Check out Seth’s Comments Below or more detail on his Squidoo blog

Related Information

• Squidoo Homepage
• SquidBlog
• Firefox & Greasemonkey: Pimp Your Web on Squidoo
• 
  
• Problematic extensions - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
• Greasemonkey :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software
• Graywolf’s Firefox Install
• Seth’s Blog: What I learned from eye tracking

2 Responses to “Suggestions for Improving Squidoo”

1. seth godin Says:
   June 28th, 2006 at 6:52 am

   Thanks for the feedback.

   Actually, the moved adwords actually INCREASED clicks for the non-ad links. We’ll be posting more on this soon.

2. Michael Gray Says:
   June 29th, 2006 at 10:13 pm
   My lens was just recently finished so I don’t have reliable before and after data sets. More than anything I find it annoying, kind of like a PETA advocate slapping a “don’t eat meat” sticker on the door for McDonalds.

   Thanks for coming by and commenting.