A Squid Named SusanVillasLewis

Well, most of it. The costume section, at least. I’ve put the adult costumes over on Zujava, with a pretty detailed look at how to make your own Merida costume or Queen Elinor costume. Then one that has a bunch of stuff for adults to do their own Brave costume. Disney has released its Merida costumes for girls and I’m adding to that page over at Wizzley as well. Adding to the costume pages is one for Brave clothing like pjs and shirts.

Two other pages going. Realized that Minnie Mouse is getting even more of her own stuff, so I’ve added a page for Minnie Mouse calendars to that niche on Squidoo. And finally finished a page on Richard Castle books over on Zujava. And in two hours, it’s had 70 hits. Seriously? It’s the kind of page I got online to write, then realized didn’t make any money. Maybe now that I have a stable of money-makers, I can spend more time doing pages like this. Because it takes me days to get done.

My head is spinning. One good thing about only doing lenses at Squidoo and the odd blog is it was much easier to get things done. Only one place to do them, so boom.

Now, I have many publishing avenues and many new things to consider when publishing. I have sites that are solely adsense sharing, so I need good CPC keywords to be writing about there, not just thinking about traffic and competition numbers. Then others operate like Squidoo and pool revenues. So my weak stuff can benefit from others’ stuff that does well, but I might not benefit as much if I have something that does well. And then … . Well, you get the picture.

So, I’m trying to branch out more. Trying to figure out my best plan of attack. Trying to not over-think things too much.

Zujava

Locking gas caps – Idea came to me from an article I read and I just got it up quickly.

Brave costumes – Finally got to this piece of my Brave puzzle. Half-finished by my standards, but it’s up and running. Also have starts on ones for just Merida and Elinor.

Wizzley

Sticking with new additions to my kids bedroom niche.

Lego bedding

Smiley face bedroom decor

Xomba

Started to post something here, but then noticed we aren’t allowed to do affiliate links. I could have sworn I read something specifically opposite of that, but it’s in the content guidelines and the blog. Boo. Changes my thinking in terms of what to post here.

Squidoo

New York City wall decals

Snipsly

Testing waters here. I see a lot of spam, but great ad sharing and easy backlinks.

Big Time Rush – Nothing Even Matters

Smiley face clock – backlink for Wizzle above

One Direction website – Great keyword, but who knows what will happen given I do no promotion,.

Best Reviewer
Trying things out here although I’m not sure I see great things for the ad sharing. Guess that’s why we test, right?

Top portable air coolers under $200

Focus on the successes, right? Ignore all the things I didn’t get to as I brag about what I did get to. So, brag we will.

First – hooray because my lens finally got out of the penalty box. Whew. That was a pain and so hard to ignore as I went about writing more stuff in the series. Still, I have a nice collection of lenses related to the Disney Pixar movie Brave.

• Brave books – most of these are still just for pre-order and not even any pictures. Quite proud of how I worked around it. Going to be a bear if I decide to update with pictures of everything, though.
• Brave toys – Again, these aren’t even available for purchase yet, so happy with how I was able to work around that. Hoping this one proves to be a big one for me as products become available.
• Brave birthday party – Finally getting images at least. This one feels half-done really and the products aren’t even available so again, in a holding pattern.
• Brave soundtrack – This one is already getting good traffic even though it’s not available for pre-order and we don’t really know anything yet.
• Queen Elinor – All about the mom from the movie.

Looking at that list, I can see a lot of updating in my future. Need to make sure I stay on top of it so that I have things in the right rows as traffic comes in. I did a Xomba bookmark as well to the main page as part of a backlinking bit. Need a traffic strategy though, me thinks. Hmm.

Three other pages, one on Wizzley and two on Squidoo, around my kids bedroom stuff. Wizzley is killing me because of the content requirements. Just not used to that and I’m not sure about mixing them in over at Zujava. Thinking about using Zujava for more grown-up stuff. Sort of grown up, anyway. Still have about eight ideas left in this one as well as a related area that I think I’m going to put on Zujava.

• Monster High bedding – this one was kind of fun and already off to great traffic. Let’s go sales!
• Headboard wall decals – kind of a cool concept, although not really specifically for kids
• Chandelier wall decals – Again, cool deals

I came up with a whole plan to use my three places for writing together to capture everything around this one topic. And have made it through four of the 16 on the list (so far) and dang it.

My thoughts are that a lot of times Squidoo gets overly crowded with popular topics. And backlinking is tough, so how about just building it into the list of topics is a good plan. So I brainstormed a huge list of ideas around the Disney Pixar movie Brave, which I am terribly excited about and had created a lens on ages ago. Broke them down into three general categories – things just for kids, things more interesting to adults and general movie stuff. Since Squidoo had the main movie page, it got the general movie stuff, Wizzley the kids, Zujava the adults. Good plan, huh?

So I started out with a couple on Wizzley and that 400 word requirement to even publish is way harder than you would expect. Especially for someone like me who can just pour words out at a rapid pace without a lot of thought. And it’s made a little harder by the fact that the movie merchandise isn’t even out yet. But I got up a couple there on Brave toys and a Brave birthday party. Both topics already overdone a bit at Squidoo (although, I have to admit I did the toys far, far better than any of them. So modest.)

Then I turned my attention back to Squidoo to do a character page on the main character, Merida. And got my butt bit.

I stuck in the generic description of Merida to start with just to get it published and have something there with every intention of going back and doing that over with my own description. And it bit me. But I’ve now rewritten that text three times and the lens is still sitting there with the yellow. Not very motivating if you make the fix and still are in the doghouse. It’s not an original topic, but I did it a damned site better than anyone else on Squidoo so far and wrote every bit of it myself now. Bah. I’m afraid to move on to the next in the series because it might happen again. (Not for the same reason. I won’t publish it quickly this time. But feeling gun shy.)

I have several problems with the whole filter thing right now.

• Even if dupe content is properly sourced, the filter can’t tell that. So you get dinged until someone comes and lets you out of the yellow box. Demotivating at best. If I had included a link to the Disney character page, it still would have caught it. (And frankly, that wouldn’t have made it acceptable in the long run. I still needed to write my own stuff there. So this gibberish they’re talking about crediting things is baloney.)
• No way to get out of jail automatically. Given that the filter is automatic, why can’t getting out be automatic? The filter should still be able to run you through every time, so why doesn’t it see that you’ve changed things?
• No way of knowing just what the problem is so you can fix it. If you’ve written a huge lens and did everything yourself, there is no reason to think anything you wrote is duplicate content. And if someone else took your content, it’s just punishing you to be threatened with deletion.
• Generic use of the word “hefty”. Even before I fixed it, my use of the Disney description accounted for a whopping 4% of the content. Hardly hefty. Or high quantities. Or large portions. And all the other FUD words they’re using.
• Misdirected energy. The only ones who care about being hit by this are legitimate lensmasters who create original content. We’re the ones going in circles trying to fix this, not the people who really need to be dinged. So rather than create new lenses, we’re spending our time jumping through hoops. Not good use of time.

Of course, the entire thing takes me back to the idea that I need to be spending more of my time on my own properties and not on others. Argh.

Made 7 lenses, but also 9 pages on Zujava and Wizzley. Deleted one that was always falling into WIP and never had anything going for it. I hate seeing all that pink on the bottom of my screen. So ended March with 700 lenses and like 11 in other places. Not too bad but definitely slow.

March wasn’t as good as February money-wise, but still strong. Looks like I’m easily going to meet my goals on that score this year, especially my overall one of just being able to support myself doing this. And given that I’m trying to get a few more income streams going and develop more options that take advantage of Adsense, this should keep going. (Playing with AdSense more does make me nervous. They’re so unforgiving if something goes wonky and it would be a painful stream to lose.)

Not sure I have anything else to add this month.

Having one of those weeks where I haven’t been able to be at the computer much and when I am, I seem to be spinning my wheels.

Maintenance taking over extremely on the lens side, although I have come to an agreement with myself to only work on lenses worth working on. That means they have to be getting traffic or making sales or I don’t touch them. Killing me to be ignoring so many, but if they haven’t started pulling their weight by now, going in and playing with them is probably not going to improve things much.

So, what have I created lately?

• Big Time Rush on Zujava
• New driver gift ideas on Wizzley
• Twilight lenses to finish out a series started with Twilight wall decals and quotes – Twilight bedding sets and Twilight bedroom decor
• Easter coloring books on Squidoo (why? do I really need to be getting into the coloring book niche?)
• Super Mario wall decals on Squidoo – I could have sworn I already had one, but apparently not. And it’s already off and running so good for finally doing it.

Still sucking on the blog post writing. But doing great on the making lists of ideas I’ll never get too. Go me!!!

Diversity is always on my list of things to do. And yet, it never seems to get done. Argh!

Part of what’s kept me from branching out a bit is trying to figure out a plan for what to put where. And I still don’t really have a plan for that, dang it. But having done a few pages, I know that Wizzley expects a lot more text than I’m used to doing and is highly cumbersome to use (more like Hubpages than Squidoo in terms of content adding) so I think I shall try to stick to topics where I have more content to use. Zujava is a bit more like Squidoo in some ways, which leaves me trying to decide about doing new niches there or to do offshoots of current niches.

Basically – I think too much. Thrashing isn’t a bad thing as long as you don’t let the thinking process keep you from the doing part of things.

Factors I’m starting to consider as I come up with new ideas and try to decide where to put them – how many things already done in the niche on the site; how much content can you produce; how quickly do I want to get it up; how does it fit with my current niches.

So, just what have I gotten done in terms of diversity? I’ve done a couple of new pages on three different services: Wizzley, Zujava and Xomba. The first two were started by Squids, so there’s some familiarity there. So here’s what I’ve been up to:
Wizzley
Going for a new niche here with Rebecca Bonbon stuff. Hoping to catch that wave before it takes off. However, product pages not the easiest to do on Wizzley, so already have plans for branching out. (That said, rather proud of the work on the bedroom one.)
– Rebecca Bonbon pajamas
– Rebecca Bonbon bedroom ideas
Zujava
Fell into quick-ish leaves on TV shows we watch. Had been thinking about Burn Notice and it seemed a good place to start in getting to learn the service.
– Burn Notice
– Castle
– GCB
Xomba
Limited types of things you can post here, but the list format seems like an easy one for me to crank out. (Except for the fact that they give you a preset number to work with. Boo.) Think the lists are a good way to create links for other pages; both of these create backlinks for other pages on Zujava and Squidoo.

– GCB Dallas locations
– Top Sesame Street songs

Oh – and I did create a new lens, spurred on by the Rebecca Bonbon bedroom page. Already on my list, just needed it done so I could include a link to it on that Wizzley page – Paris wall decals.

Also – Too many blogs, too many directions. (Sound like a broken record, huh.) So picked yet another one to quit writing on since it’s never really been a money maker. Folding the topic over into my personal blog into the quilting and crafts category.

February was a crazy month, at least on the money side of things. I hit 7.5% at Amazon for fourth straight month, so it’s looking like I can count on that now, which is nice. One of my merchants had an incentive last month, which I never hit. This month – did more than twice the goal they had set for me. Crazy! (I said that already, didn’t I?) Money wise, I almost did as well as December, which is – again – crazy. Happy it’s doing unexpected things in an upwise direction, but still, the uncertainty of this is kind of crazy.

Lens count
Looking likely that I’m not going to not get to 1K lenses this year – if I can get my butt in gear to do some writing in other places. Got to wrap my head around there being no “best” about this, just smart. And that each individual piece doesn’t have to be a killer earner on its own, just a supporting piece of the whole. Sigh.

That said …

Diversity
So yea, me! I actually did two pages at some other sites. Not that it was as easy as it seems, given that the two others sites are similar to Squidoo a bit. I’m looking at starting a Rebecca Bonbon niche over at Wizzley, so I got one down on their pajamas, although I’m not entirely sure how this is going to fly. The line is from the Hello Kitty folks, but it hasn’t taken off much yet in the US. Not a lot of stuff to promote really. And Wizzley is proving to be difficult to use the same way I do Squidoo; they want more words! So, I’ve got to think over how I want to play things there.

I also got a good page going over at Zujava. One of the ideas I had going and finally did it. It’s on the show Burn Notice, which we got obsessed with lately. Quite proud of it, although there are a few things more I should do to it. And I’m trying to figure out how to work it into a niche. Hmm.

Initial impressions are that I’m going to like Zujava, need some work to decide how I’ll use Wizzley. It’s a little like Hubpages in the way the modules work. Good in some ways, bad in others.

Major overhauls to a couple of lenses here recently, the two in my main account just because it’s that time of year. Every spring, new motorcycle jackets come out, requiring me to poke around for the best ones and get rid of the ones no longer sold. Same thing with clothing styles, which requires me to start over every season shopping for clothes like those worn on iCarly.

Completed two long needed overhauls as well in the bedding area, one for animal print bedding and one for zebra bedding. Thank goodness. And probably still more to do with the animal print stuff. And consideration for breaking out some decor and other related lenses. Not major, but also got Little Miss Matched bedding updated with new designs.

New lenses feel like few but still, I’m almost up to 20 for the month, so kind of on track there. One of my goals for the past week was to get my first items up on a few other sites and I didn’t quite get there. Struggling to figure out the best way to divide up my content. And with the idea that there is a best way. Anyway, new lenses:
– Hello Kitty swimming
– Bert & Ernie shirts (last one of the broken out Sesame Street shirts lenses I’m planning for now)
– Care Bears bedroom
– Marvel Comics decor (broken out from the Marvel bedding one at last)

Busy week(s) of new lenses and major updates. Just tackling a few things that have been on the mental to-do list that I finally buckled down and got done.

One of the big things was splitting off specific Sesame Street characters from my Sesame Street shirt store (and the one for adults). This was one of the few I ever did with the page breaks and was a great one for it, so now I’m working toward doing lenses for each character. Or at least the ones that are worth it. I haven’t taken the shirts off the main lens, though. Can’t decide whether that’s the thing to do or not. (I have got to start being more decisive.) Anyway, so far I’ve got Elmo shirts, Cookie Monster shirts and Oscar shirts. I know I’m going to do Bert and Ernie as well.

I did more splitting and building out on a couple of themes. One led to star crib bedding, the other to a complete overhaul of a very old lens with safari bedding. Oh, and I built out other pieces for teddy bear bedroom.

Safari crib bedding
Safari kids decor
Safari kids furniture
Teddy bear furniture
Teddy bear decor
Teddy bear wall decals

One other new lens I made, which is likely to get me off on a run of Hello Kitty stuff, unfortunately – Hello Kitty socks. You could spend years just making lenses on all the Hello Kitty stuff out there.

Also did some major overhauls of some other lenses, some quite overdue. Added wall quotes and other decals for Harry Potter decals, new products and some rearranging to iCarly merchandise and the same for Kung Fu Panda. Those last two are just crying out to be split up, but I’m just not sure given the history those lenses have already built up.

Doing pretty well on keeping up with my blog posting schedule. That editorial calendar plug-in is really helping me keep to the schedule, at least for my WP blogs. Kind of sucking over in the Blogspot realm. Of course, I’m also pretty tempted to just drop one of those blogs because it’s never panned out as a money maker for me. But it’s something kind of personal, so do I keep it for those reasons? Argh.