For the past 14 months Tiffany Dow and I have been building beautiful lenses for customers of BuildMyLens.com – our custom Squidoo lens building service.

We have earned thousands and thousands of dollars doing something we enjoy for people who appreciate it. Does it get much better?

Actually, yes

We have been fortunate enough to not really have to promote the service ourselves. We have MANY people who have confidence in what we’re doing who do our promotion for us. They recommend us, and they don’t get paid a dime for doing so.

So we have decided to start rewarding everyone who sends customers our way.

We have launched the BuildMyLens Affiliate Program!

You can see more here: www.buildmylens.com/affiliates

You can now claim 15% of OUR money, just by linking to BuildMyLens.com on your blog, lens, knol, website, etc.

If you post an affiliate link to BuildMyLens.com somewhere, we will pay you 15% of any orders that occur as a result. As much as $119 per sale. NOT small change at all!

The great news about this is that as BuildMyLens.com is a SERVICE and not a GUIDEBOOK it sells like crazy – to people who don’t care HOW it’s done… they just want it done! Busy people who are happy to pay the higher price to get someone who really knows what they’re doing.

We have put together a ton of banners and tools to help you promote BuildMyLens, and even a free 10 page mini-ebook you can give away with your links inside.

You can join the affiliate program here: www.buildmylens.com/affiliates

So if you have any lenses about blogging, making money online, promoting your business on the internet, internet marketing, then a banner or link to BuildMyLens.com could give you one heck of a chunk of cash each month!

If you want to refresh your memory about what the whole BuildMyLens package includes, head to BuildMyLens.com and do some revision.

You’ll be impressed, and we’ll be happy to pay you for it

Lewis

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to figure out how to do something on Squidoo, but you have trouble finding answers to all of your questions? Squidoo has created The Answer Deck to come to your rescue.

The Answer Deck is designed to help the people who need answers meet up with the people giving the answers. With the answer deck, all of the help lenses that have been built on Squidoo are compiled in one convenient place for you. At last!

The Answer Deck doesn’t contain help lenses from just anyone though.  Only Giant Squids, who have the experience and performance under their belts, are allowed to list their lenses for the world to see.  This is good because it means you’re not getting misinformation.

http://www.squidoo.com/theanswerdeck/hq
What else can you find in The Answer Deck?  Well, there are two free e-books there to help you master lens crafting.  These two free e-books were written by the Squidoo staff including its founder, Seth Godin.

The first e-book is called Calamari: the Official Squidoo How-To.  It walks you through lens making from conception to publication and beyond. The second e-book is called The Joy of Squidoo: the Official Recipe Guide.  This e-book deals more with what your target audience is looking for.
It would be wise for you to make a visit to The Answer Deck today, tomorrow, and in the future – to stay in tune with what other lensmasters are doing and learn some clever tricks of the trade!

Now I just have to figure out how to subscribe to all new lenses added to the Answer Deck. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

Lewis

Hey guys!

If you have been reading this blog for a while you will know of my past few posts about the power of blogging.

And I had a whole bunch of people email me asking for help setting up their blogs. So, I did something about it!

I have just launched a new blog service, with an absolute TON piled in.

Your blog posts will bookmark themselves, post themselves to twitter, ping themselves, and even TRANSLATE themselves. Plus a ton more stuff.

To read more, check out www.YourNicheBlog.com

Lewis

Hello dear reader. You look lovely today.

Question: Are you a member of HubPages?

You will surely by now have heard of HubPages.

Surely.

If not, get on over to JoinHubPages.com and sign up! HubPages is a site very much like Squidoo. But with enough differences to be able to tell they are not trying to be or copy Squidoo. There are as many differences as there are similarities, and this will be a short guide of what you need to know to get your first hub off the ground.

If you are a Squidoo fanatic, you may not like HubPages. Like a football team. You support Squidoo, and HubPages is a rival. BUT. You are on Squidoo to get visitors, fans, and money. And HubPages can help with each of those things. The big orange Squido doesn’t mind if you play in another playground, so don’t feel bad..

So…

Lenses and Hubs…

So. A page on Squidoo is called a lens. And a page on HubPages is called a hub. Simple.

Modules and Capsules…

A module on Squidoo…. is called a capsule on HubPages.

There aren’t as many capsules on HubPages as there modules on Squidoo, but enough to make a good page. They could REALLY do with making more, but I guess they will at some point.

AdSense…

The Google Ads on Squidoo lenses belong to Squidoo. And then that money is divided up a few different ways. They first cover expenses, then split the money between almost all lenses, based on lensrank.

The Google Ads on HubPages belong to you 60% of the time, and HubPages HQ 40% of the time. Basically. It then gets a bit more complex with referring people to hubs, etc. But I’m coming onto that…

Referrals…

If you refer someone to Squidoo (meaning they sign up because of you) you will get $5 when that person earns their first $15. As an bonus, that person will also receive an extra $5 just like you. This is ok, but HubPages offers a WAY more lucrative option!

If you refer someone to HubPages, you will get 10% of all the Google ads displayed on all their hubs… until the end of time! Amazing! The 10% that you get is taken out of the HubPages 40% ad share (so your referral is not worse off because of this 10%). So let’s say you put your link on your blog or website or lens or hub, someone joined because of you and made 100 hubs. And let’s say those 100 hubs were visited 10 times each a week. (I’m just making up numbers here.) That would be 1000 page loads. And YOUR Google Ads would be displayed in front of 100 of those visitors. So if you sign up a few people, it could turn into something very significant indeed. There is slightly more to it than that, such as how you can refer a visitor to ANY hub and get 10% of the ads there too, but nothing to worry about if you’re just getting started.

That’s all for now. I’m going to go and eat a yummy cookie.

If you haven’t joined HubPages yet, head to www.JoinHubPages.com and get your first hub off the ground!

Lewis

P.S. Make a GOOD hub. Contribute. Don’t just go there to sell stuff. If your hubs are TOO promotional, they will get disabled.

I’ve had a couple of emails and comments from people asking what the difference is between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org, and where they should start their blog.

So here we go….

Wordpress For Dummies

Wordpress is a platform. A big whole pile of code that, when all put together, forms a blog. Wordpress is NOT a website. It is a platform. So if you want to start a wordpress blog you have 2 choices.

#1. Go to wordpress.com, and they will host that big pile of code for you.

#2. Go to wordpress.org and download that big pile of code, install it on your own web host, and run the blog yourself.

So what’s the advantage of #1? 

You don’t need to be paying for a web host each month.
You don’t need to worry about any wordpress updates (updates to that big pile of code).

And what’s the advantage of #2?

You don’t have to abide by the wordpress.com Terms of Service, which prohibits ‘commercial’ blogs.
You can add javascript to the sidebars (including google adsense), and have the ability to customise the look and feel of each theme.
You can install any theme that has been made for the wordpress platform, whereas wordpress.com has a limited number of themes (although enough to get started).
You can install plugins, which make your blog to different things – from post to twitter automatically, to optimising the blog for search engines.

If you have never had a blog before and you don’t have your own web hosting package (to host your own website, etc), I would recommend going with Wordpress.com for now.

But don’t forget to do regular ‘exports’ of your blog. This creates a complete backup, posts, comments, tags, categories, the lot, for you to upload to another wordpress blog. So if at a later date you decide to move to a wordpress.org self-hosted blog, it will be fairly pain-free and seamless.

Hope this helps!

Lewis