Is There Anything Better Than Squidoo?

Calling all Squids, I would like to get your input on this question: Is there anything better than Squidoo? Or even: Is there anything nearly as good as Squidoo? If there is, I have not found it.

As I reported earlier on this blog, I have a website about footed pajamas. I am trying to get my footed pajamas website to rank high on Google for important keywords like Adult footed pajamas, children's footed pajamas, etc. I am making progress, but I am not there yet.

So, I am trying to find a site which offers all of the wonderful things that Squidoo is able to offer and I can not find it. Squidoo is great. Squidoo offers me the ability to add Dofollow links from my lens to my website, send traffic to my website AND earn some money at the same time. I am not earning a fortune from Squidoo, but there is some money coming in and it is interesting. Further with Squidoo, I am not rigidly moderated, I can publish when I want and there is a very helpful and friendly community to boot. Squidoo is great.

I am pleased with Squidoo and if I can find something similar at another site, it would be even better. However, experiments with sites like Hubpages and Infobarrel have been disappointing. In my experience, neither site generates any income to speak of nor traffic and Hubpages' links become Nofollow if your Hubrank drops below a certain level. I have written 4 high quality articles for Infobarrel and I get zero traffic to my websites and have not earned a dime. I can not figure out how to be successful at either of those sites nor do I really want to invest a great deal more time trying. Frankly, I have all but given up on both of them.

Ezine and GoArticles are good about generating links and traffic, but not money. Other article sites such as Searchwarp and article base actually give you NOfollow links (Uh, why would I submit an article there?).

Today, I spent sometime investigating Qondio, a website which "allows you" to post a blog and earn 100% of your income. Right. The downside, they forget to tell you that there is a hidden $5 activation fee. I say "hidden", because you read their FAQ, no mention of it there. Read their registration page, again no mention. Only after you submit your registration details WHOOPS!! Please pay $5. Now, that is not alot of money. I just hate it when a website does not reveal the games that they are playing upfront. So, I looked on the internet to what other people are saying. Apparently you can give a link to your website at the bottom of your blog, but it is not an anchor text link, it is just a raw link. Also, I read that there is some kind of automated softwear approval mechanism of your post and some writers complain about having their posts rejected for no stated reason. All of that was a turn off for me. I just do not want to spend time writing for a website that proudly states all of the advantages and hides some of the less attractive things. It makes me wonder what else they have up their sleeves.

I looked into Helium articles and while you can earn money, you can not give a link to your site! However, Helium does now have something called Zones that are something like a Squidoo lens and I recently created a new zone. I will be watching to see how that develops.

I am reading strange things from disgruntled EHow authors. Many people are unhappy there and anyway their links are Nofollow....again a no go.

So, fellow Squids, can anyone tell me a site that even comes close to Squidoo in terms of those three criteria? Where can I find a site which will offer:

* Dofollow links to my website
* Traffic to my website
* Interesting earning potential

Or is Squidoo simply a "one of a kind"?

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.

If sitting makes you fat... then get off your rear and start walking

I've been wanting a treadmill desk for months, every since a friend sent an email with pictures of hers. There was a recent article in the New York Times:

If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

The last straw for me: I painted my ceiling beams and after stepping up and down off a kitchen chair more times than I can tell you, I jammed my knee and could hardly walk. I got mostly better, then got on my elliptical trainer and the knee got terrible again.

So in a fury I went out and bought an inexpensive home treadmill from Walmart, set it up, and - since I'm a make-your-own type - built my own "work station" for free. Since then I've spent quite a lot of happy time on the treadmill, mostly reading books I've wanted to "get around to" for quite a while, but also working on my laptop, which fits securely on the treadmill desk.

Want to read how I made this simple cheap DIY laptop treadmill desk and see pictures of my workstation and my friend's too? Visit Make your own treadmill desk for free! (BTW, It's only free if you have woodscraps lying around or can scrounge some.)

Look How Easy It Can Be To Break Into A Hotel Guest Room

We travel and stay in hotels or motels all of the time. Most of the time we feel safe. Much of the time that we think we are safe, we are actually fooling ourselves. Have a look at this video showing how surprisingly EASY it is to break into a hotel with the card type lock. Of course the video also shows us a simple technique to stop it with a towel. But not all hotel rooms use the same type of locking system, and many are just as easy to break into:

I have created a lens with some suggestions about how to optimize hotel security. In addition, here are some suggestions about hotel / motel safety from a Kansas police website.

Valentines Day Ideas

A couple of years ago, I made a lens with Valentines Day ideas about how to make Valentines Day very special. It remains one of my best lenses. I have recently refreshed if for this Valentines Day. There are alot of great ideas there and I am very proud of it. I always wanted this lens to be a lens of the day. Maybe one year it will be.

Use Squidoo to research and advertise an event

I'm thrilled with the way I've been able to use my page, Complaints Choirs, as a hub of information for people who might want to join the Complaints Choir I'm starting here in Durham - Chapel Hill NC. On this lens, I've assembled a brief history of the movement (which started in Finland and is going strong across the globe!) and some of my favorite Complaint Choir segments from YouTube.

I built a website for our soon-to-begin group (Complaints Choir, Durham - Chapel Hill headquarters) and on it put a link to my squidoo lens, which has more information than I wanted to put on the local website.

If you've never heard of them, here's an example: