Horoscope and Zodiac Jewelry - a lens turning into a blog

One of the advantages of having a hostgator webhosting account is that you can set up as many blogs as you want without having to switch to a more expensive plan. That is: you do of course have to buy the domain name, but the various sites (blogs in my case) are all hosted under one account.

One of the least intuitive things you can do with that system is set up a blog ONLY to promote a lens. I know, weird isn't it? But that's what I just did. I spent two days setting up a blog, creating content, building links on something that I expect will only make me money through the promotion of a squidoo lens or two.
Here's the lens: Astrology Horoscope Jewelry 

It does OK selling zodiac jewelry and it gets decent traffic, but I want it to move up a notch in both search engine traffic and sales. And since I'd already bought the domain, I've set up a blog. It's called, not unsurprisingly:  Horoscope Astrology Jewelry. 

Normally I'd have turned the lens around at this point: linking it to the blog wherever reasonably and perhaps toning down on the content on there. Instead I've done the opposite: linked to the lens and used this as part of my link wheel around that lens.

Why? It has to do with being an international publisher. Amazon makes it real hard to get to their money, because they only pay out by check internationally. And guess what: it's expensive as hell the change them into actual money. So one of the reasons I'm active on squidoo is that for me it pays to have a middle man that pays out through paypal.

Of course, if ever Amazon starts paying out directly to my Dutch bank account, or in some other way where I can get to the money without having to jump through hoops, I can always turn the blog around too: link to the blog from the lens and turn the blog into an online 'hub' or the center of my 'link wheel'.

In the mean time though, that blog is going to get older - and therefore more trusted by Google as well. So it makes sense to host and own it myself, not put it on some free account. All thanks to hostgator.

Alternatives to Amazon - Part 2

As mentioned in my previous post, Amazon is far from perfect. I wish Squidoo would find alternative retail partners. There is little competition to Amazon and so Amazon is unlikely to improve anytime soon. Or is there?

One of my pet peeves about Amazon is that it is not global. Amazon will not ship most products outside of its region. Amazon USA ships almost excluisvely to the USA, Amazon UK, ships most to the UK, etc.

But did you know that there are many companies which not only ship products worldwide, they offer FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING?

Products such as books, electronics and other gadgets, beauty products can now be bought from reputable websites, such as DealExtreme, Book Depository and Cosmetic Times. These websites are not scammy, spammy, counterfeit websites. They are very highly recognized sites which are are competiting with mega-Giants like Amazon.

I have created a new Squidoo Lens about Websites which offer Cheap Prices AND Free Shipping.