The Tier One Challenge

Would you like to have another lens in tier one? Wouldn't we all?

There's a Tier One Challenge happening in SquidU - the thread started less than a week ago and already has more than 200 postings. Don't worry about reading every post in the thread (unless you'd like to know about all the cool things we're doing to promote our lenses). Feel free to jump in anywhere - the water is just fine!

This morning we had our first WINNER! Lynn, a homeschool mom whose screen name is eclecticeducation, reached tier one with a lensrank of #1,835 for her challenge lens: File Folder Math!

The rules are simple. Pick any of your lenses that has never been as high as tier two (10,000 lensrank). Then post it in the thread: The Tier One Challenge, stating the current lensrank and the highest-ever lensrank.

The goal is to do everything you can to make that lensrank rise higher than ever before - to get your lens into tier one!

Lynn did it! YOU can do it!

My lens, which I've been working hard to promote all week, is Top Ten Horse Movies - Perfect Christmas Gifts. I tacked on the Christmas gifts in hopes that I'd sell a few movies between now and December 25. After that I'm reducing the title back to "Horse Movies" or something like that. I've been posting in the thread about places I promoted the lens, articles I've been writing, and everything I did to change the lens (on-page SEO factors) since the challenge began on 10-10-10. The lensrank has risen dramatically - from 20,477 to 4,172 today. Getting up there!

So, come on by... even if you read this posting a year from now - you're still welcome to participate in the tier one challenge. Let's have some fun and make our lenses the best they can be!

CCGAL made a lens for our project - The Tier One Challenge... how cool is that?

These Pancakes Will Be A Hit With Your Kids

Do you want to spoil your kids? What parent or grandparent doesn't? Are you trying to get your kids to eat? We are. Our little guy is a super picky eater.

If you fall into one of the two groups above check out Jims Pancakes. You will be amazed by the level of creativity that Jim has come up with. Jim can turn a pancake into a fairy tale dream that would make Walt Disney proud.

Also, Jim is smart enough to use his "cute as a bug's ear" daughter as model for many of his pancakes. So, Jim's website combines creativity with a sweetness that will warm the heart of any parent. (My little guy is equally as adorable, but unfortunately his dad is not quite as creative as Jim).

The Death Of Yahoo Email and Hotmail? Google Coversation View Is Now Optional!

I have been struggling with Yahoo premium email service for about 10 years now. Why? The alternatives were pretty bad. AOL and Hotmail are, in my opinion, poor quality. That left yahoo and gmail.

So, I have been struggling with the poor quality that Yahoo offers. I use my email several hours everyday and I constantly have problems logging onto Yahoo email. I have had many conversations with technicians at Yahoo. In a nutshell it has been bad. Why did I use Yahoo over Gmail? I could not get used to "Coversation View" that gmail offered.

Today I realized that I can now switch off the coversation view and my emails are now listed in chronological order.

How do you switch off conversation mode? Simply click "settings" and there in the middle of the page you will see "switch off coversation mode". It could not be simpler.

I predict that now that you can switch off conversation mode, many holdouts like me will switch over go Gmail. I will test both over the next year and if it is as good as I hope it will be, I will slowly phase out of Yahoo and into Gmail.

Best Reviewer: Easy Backlinks & Plenty of Potential

A lot of Squidoo lensmasters are using a new site, Best Reviewer, for quick backlinks to their lenses. Right now, Poddys is the top referrer, and Jimmie the homeschool mom is the top publisher. I'm the top commenter.

The user interface is simple so you can write quickly and easily... not a whole lot of complex thought is needed to create a page there. All the pages are "Top Ten" type lists though you can range from "Top Three" up to "Top Twenty".

To write the article, you compose the title, a short intro, and then your listed items. Each listed item has room for a link. Like I said, a lot of Squidoo lensmasters are linking back to their lenses. I made three pages with affiliate links to Amazon. Use your imagination and business sense here! An example: "Top Three Best-in-Niche Lenses".

Squidoo lensmastering is more than just making lenses. We also must let people know about them.

Eating vegetables and fruit to fortify your bones!

I heard a great show about stronger bones through nutrition on the People's Pharmacy; the guests were saying calcium supplements and our mothers' insistence on drinking milk don't really supply what we need to keep our bone density up as we get older. Fruits and vegetables are better for you than milk and cheese! You can read about it in my bone vitality through diet lens...

Triond 4 - Infobarrel 0

I posted sometime ago that I was experimenting with some alternatives to Squidoo. Not because I want to replace Squidoo. Squidoo is, for me, my best money earner. But I would like to supplement my Squidoo activities with some other sites.

Two sites I have experimented with are Triond and Infobarrel. Which do I think is better? No competition, Triond is much better than Infobarrel.

I have an equal number of five articles posted on both Triond and Infobarrel. Although I have had my account at Infobarrel much longer, to this day I have yet to earn anything! That is a big ZERO. Not a penny. Nada. On the otherhand, I have had my account much shorter with Triond, just about a month and so far I have earned $4.

Ok, $4 is not much to write home about, but for 5 articles in under a month that is about $1/article per month. Actually not too bad.

The amazing thing is that Infobarrel advertises that you earn 100% of the income from your article. Problem is that 100% of zero, is zero.

So, which site will I be submitting more articles to? Certainly not Infobarrel.

HOT TIP: Blog Network Offers Multiple Backlinks FREE

As online publishers we are always on the lookout for free links to our websites and Squidoo lenses. As we all know, search engines love links. The more the better. I have found a way to get several quality links for free. It is called PubRocket.

PubRocket is a network of blogs. There are over 200 blogs in the network divided amongst various topics including Beauty, Business, Dating, Domestic, Fashion, Financial, Fitness, Health, Home Improvement, News, Pets, Pregnancy, Shopping, Technology.

You only have to write a 200 word article and you can get it published FREE on any three of those blogs. In each article you may include 3 backlinks for free.

It is simple to use, you just add your article to your dashboard, select the 3 blogs from a list of 200 and click on publish. You are then asked to submit different titles for each of the 3 articles. Although I am not sure if changing only the title is enough for the search engines to not consider them duplicate content, it seems like a good idea.

The 200 blogs have google PR which range between PR0 to PR3. So you will quickly have backlinks from 3 different quality blogs. Sound great? It is great, with one little catch. I published my first article yesterday and today had the thought to check the IP address of the 3 blogs I selected. Unfortunately, all three of the blogs I selected had the same IP address.

Some believe that links from the same IP address may be seen by search engines as coming from the same website. That is, that the search engines understand that there is a relationship between websites hosted at the same IP address and may treat all three blogs as though they are the same blog. So, it is possible that you are not actually getting links from 3 different blogs, but as though all three links come from the same blog. Who knows for sure? Only Google.

I love the idea of PubRocket and will be testing it in the future. If anyone has suggestions for other blog networks like PubRocket, please let me know.