Just the FAQ
Hi! Thanks for dropping by. We try to answer the big questions about Squidoo here. But first, here's how you can get the most help, the fastest.
- Read up on the FAQ below.
- Or, skip straight to The Squidoo Answer Deck and browse around or search on your topic or issue.
- Then, if you can't find your answer, SquidU (our learning center) is packed with more resources, a lensmaster forum, and is a great place for a Q and A session with people who know their stuff.
- Finally, if you're still flummoxed, send in your questions or feedback or bugs here. Thanks!
I. GETTING STARTED...
A lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to her. It's an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, your eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and oh so much more. That way, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets him started and sends him off in the right direction. Hooray for you!
Build one lens, build a hundred. It's fast, fun, and free. (And you could earn a royalty from each one--for you or for charity). What are you waiting for!
Great question! Here are just a few reasons to get you creative muses flowing:
• Share the knowledge: When you know a lot about something, it feels good to share. Help other people discover what you found out the hard way.
• Increase your profile: A popular lens gives credibility to the Lensmaster. A popular lens reinforces your role as an "everyday expert." And a popular lens makes you the go-to authority for those looking for help.
• Increase your traffic: Your lens points (if you want it to) to your blog and to your website. Lenses have huge credibility with search engines, so your lens can help your other sites rise to the top of Google searches.
• Earn a royalty for you, your organization, or your favorite charity. Think of the royalty as a bonus--and don't quit your dayjob yet! A single lens might not earn a lot, but if you imagine hundreds of lenses working to your favor, or fundraising for a charity, it can really start to add up.
No, no and no! (Did we mention no?) We guarantee that building lenses will always be free--that's a cornerstone of why we're here.
Click on "Create A Lens" or "Build My Own Lens" or "Make a lens" anywhere in the site. This will take you to our Lens Wizard. It takes about 5 minutes to set up a lens. Once you've created it, you can come back and work on it bit by bit to make it really great. Frequently updated lenses with great content that is promoted smartly get handsomely rewarded in our LensRank formula. (Read more about LensRank below).
Squidoo's goal was to create an easy-to-use, clean, non-techy lensbuilding process. Friendly enough for casual users, but powerful enough for the most advanced brainiac lensmasters!
You should, if you...
1. ...have a Web site and want more ways for people to discover it. A lens is another signpost online that can point people your way.
2. ...have a blog, a lens is a great way to highlight your best posts, to feature a commented version of your blogroll, and to point to the products and services that you write about, read about, enjoy, or want to see succeed. A lens will allow you and your blog to have a bigger share of the commentary and influence on your topic of choice.
3. ...are a yo-yo expert, your lens could be nothing but links to tricks. You'd rank your favorite 100 tricks and point, one by one, to the best examples of those tricks on the Web. And maybe you'd point to Infinite Illusions, the online yo-yo store.
4. ...are a nonprofit or charity (say, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) you could invite all 45,000 of your most important donors to build sites on their favorite topics. The invitation would set the default royalty cash flow to "Donate my royalties to JDRF." If each lens generated as little as $2 a day, that'd be a whole bunch of money earned for the charity. You'd also earn a bounty on every successful lensmaster you brought in.
5. ...are a newshound, a lens allows you to highlight important mainstream and non-mainstream stories for your readers. And if you go on vacation, RSS feeds can automatically update your lens with select news stories.
6. ...are a podcaster, you should definitely have a lens. It would list the details of your podcasts, point to transcripts that some fan had posted, point to your six most recent podcasts, and include the RSS for subscribing to the podcast. The lens would also have a set of links for getting started with podcasting and getting a podcast reader
7. ...are a fan, a lens lets you share your personal take on the object of your affections—without the grind of manual updates. Automatic feeds could add current sports scores and headlines, music news and iTune releases and more.
8. ...are an author, your lens could include links to all your books on Amazon. You could include links to other authors you admire. And an RSS feed from a Technorati search, showing surfers the recent blogs that have mentioned you. And links to conferences where you're speaking, and perhaps a top-ten list of the best ways to understand your writing. You could even have a box pointing to your best (and worst?) reviews.
9. ...are an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate two or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sound like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full- or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses
10. ... are a person (and you are), you should have a lens about...you. A lens that lists your blog and recent posts and your bio and work history and your Amazon wish list and your Flickr account and whatever you want the public to know about you. Would you hire someone if she didn't have a lens?
Modules are the building blocks of lenses. A module makes it easy for a lensmaster to point to links, images, blogs or even things to buy. Some modules are curated (you enter all the links and content manually) and others are automatic (you configure the inputs and then the lens draws on RSS feeds to update your lens without any work from you). Similarly, some modules are commerce-oriented and others are just content based. We are constantly partnering with other sites and companies to bring you interesting new modules. Keep an eye out, and come back often!
Do different people have different opinions on the same President? :) Every person has his or her own unique view of the world and the web. There can easily be hundreds or thousands of different, successful lenses on the same topic without becoming redundant. (Note: Beware, this doesn't mean copying your lens contents over and over! Not that you'd do that, of course).
You bet you can. There's no limit to your interests, so there's no limit to the number of lenses you can have. But you should know that we don't reward squatters. So if we see that you have a ridiculous number (configurable by us) of empty lenses, or claimed but "unimproved" lenses (keep reading, we'll explain) we will be in touch and will likely ask you to either personalize them or we'll delete them.
It's simple. You make a lens. You recommend great stuff. Sometimes you might recommend a product from Amazon or eBay or CafePress or one of our hundreds of other commerce partners.
Since Squidoo is free to use, we have to run a few ads on your lens in order to keep paying the server bills. But, since you're the brains behind the lens, you should get a cut! And better than a cut: you get HALF. That's right. Any time someone stops by your lens and buys a product you recommended or clicks on a Google ad, you get 50% of the royalties. We keep 45% for the company and send 5% to charity.
P.S. Here's a bunch more info" about how we payout.
Squidoo has partnered with tons of incredible charities, who are leading the Org 2.0 revolution and know that YOU'RE their best chance at spreading awareness and passion.
When you create a lens, you'll be asked how you want to get paid. You can change your charity settings there. For existing lenses, go into that lens's workshop and edit your settings.
Yes, Squidoo is an old-fashioned corporation, with real employees real server fees and real PB&J lunches to be eaten. We divide up the money we receive in a very public, very simple way. Here's what we do with the cash we receive from advertisers, Amazon, eBay and others: We pay 50% to you, our lensmasters, or to the charities you select. We pay 5% to our charity fund and we keep 45% to cover our costs. We don't make any deductions or take any long-term reserves. In fact, we never have.
Our goal is to continue building a self-sustaining, profitable company that shares a large portion of our income with charities and with our backbone, the lensmasters who build our lenses (that's you). Here's how the money comes in, and how it gets paid out.
Squidoo makes money 2 ways: ads, and affiliate revenue. This means Google ads or other ads we contract to run, and affiliate income from Amazon, eBay, CafePress and more.
Ad revenue (Google and other ads). This money goes into a pool, so as to avoide clickfraud. Half of the pool distributes out to lensmasters, on a PayRank scale that is based on each lens's average LensRank and traffic, and the number and quality of lenses in the lensmaster's account.
Affiliate revenue (ie, referral income--like Amazon and eBay and CafePress). This is directly attributable to the lens that generated the revenue, and is not pooled with the whole co-op. The lensmaster gets a straight 50%.
We show your previous and estimated pending earnings on your Dashboard, so that you can keep track of your royalties.
It's important to note that if you go more than twelve months without reaching a payout, we'll assume you've abandoned your account and that money will be returned to our system and applied to our overhead and our charity fund. In January of 2009, for example, we'll zero out any funds earned prior to the end of 2008 but not paid out.
And you can read lots more about the payment process here.
SquidU.com is where lensmasters learn to make better lenses, and pick up tips for promoting their lenses to the public. Run and moderated by passionate Squidoo volunteers and lensmasters, it is an answerplace for our newest and our most advanced lensmasters alike. Whenever you can't find your answer in the Squidoo FAQ, SquidU is available for a Q&A session.
II. DETAILS FOR CURIOUS LENSMASTERS...
As you've noticed, we recently updated our max lens layouts with a new type of advertising, in addition to our usual Google ads. These "display" ads, or larger format visual ads, are coming from Glam Media, which serves up display content from cool companies like Nike, BCBG, Susan G. Komen Foundation and lots more.
The ads shown are determined by the category your lens is in, and based lightly on relevance to your content. Squidoo has opted to filter out ads from these Glam categories: Risque, Alcohol, Borderline (this is whatever the Glam editorial team thought was maybe NSFW), Dating LoveSeek, Horoscope, Medical Pharma, Weight Loss. We're working with Glam to constantly improve the relevance and filtering of these ads on your lenses.
Lots of people on Squidoo are here to tell a story with their lenses--to change minds, spread the word, grow a business, share a passion, point to a blog, celebrate a hero, educate classrooms, review favorite movies, or just get found more online. Other people are here making great pages because they're encouraged by the payout. Make a lens that people enjoy and take action on, and you earn a royalty. Could be $5 a month, could be $1,000 a month--it all depends on you. Still other lensmasters love the idea of recommending great stuff and supporting a nonprofit along the way. Squidoo lensmasters raise tens of thousands of dollars a month for charity!
With all these different motivations, we realize we should offer you a few additional choices for how you manage your revenue and the revenue-bearing units on your lenses.
If you don't like the Glam ads, or you don't think they're appropriate for your viewers, we want to give you the control to opt out. Since the ad revenue goes into a pool, it's not fair to your fellow lensmasters (or to us, the monkeys running the site) to opt out and get a free ride on the revenue. So, our compromise is this: if you're not doing it for the cash payout (if your revenue is set to charity) then sure, feel free to opt out of the glam ads on a lens by lens basis. Just look in your lens workshop for a checkbox called "Opt out of display ads." If your payment settings for that lens are going 100% to charity, you can click this box and we'll remove the Glam ads from your page. The Google ads, however, will remain on your page.
Of course, we'd rather work with you to raise as much for charity (and for you) as possible. So we hope you'll give the Glam ads a chance as our filtering tools and lens layouts get better. And thanks.
Lenses can be marked as G, R or X-rated. Accordingly, we have a variety of "Safe Search" settings for your Squidoo-surfing pleasure. Non-members stopping by Squidoo are automatically defaulted to safe search, which shows G-rated lenses only, and alerts them before they land on an R or X rated lens. New Squidoo accounts also default to this, until you decide to change it. So, if you don't want to see any R or X-rated lenses, just make sure your account is still set to G-rated only. And, if you want to see all our wonderful lenses--G, R and X alike--you can do that too! Stop by your Account page to take charge of your viewing experience.
Glad you asked! Our members are instrumental in keeping the Squidoo neighborhood a clean, well-lighted place. So we've made it easy for them to weigh in when they find a lens that's illegal, spam, grossly miscategorized, or mis-rated (like a lens with X-rated content showing up as G-rated). Of course, R- and X-rated lenses are welcome (hey, it's the Internet), but they need to be marked appropriately. Here's a quick definition of what these ratings mean:
G-rated: Any lens content that is safe for all ages and all eyeballs is considered G-rated. 99% of our lenses fall into this category. Please, no swearing, no nudity, no Adult content. It doesn't need to be Snow White and Spongebob, but it can't be four-letter or Playboy! P.S. We do our best to make sure that the Google ads and others that show up on your lens match the content and audience of your page. But imagine how hard it is to decide whether a woman in a swimsuit is considered G or R rated. (I'm sure we can all agree that if she's OUT of the swimsuit, it's X-rated!). So, we'll trust the professional ad systems we use to make their best guesses, and as always, we'll keep tweaking and experimenting for the best results for you.
R-rated: If it feels like an R-rated movie, it's probably R-rated. R-rated lenses can contain strong language and racier content, just no pornography please.
X-rated: Yep, explicit Adult content goes here. Nudity, graphic images and language, this is your spot.
X rated lenses don't earn revenue for lensmasters. If ads are run by Squidoo on X rated lenses, the revenue earned by us will go to our charity fund, to our overhead and, at our discretion, to a bonus pool for selected lenses.
SquidStaff will sometimes manually recategorize or re-rate your lens. We'll only do this in extreme cases, where we see that a lens is clearly running in the wrong category, or it's rated X and is showing in the G-rated search results. The first time we see this happen, we'll help you out. The second time, we'll lock your lens. And if it's happening on lots of lenses in your account, we might delete your account. But we really don't want to. So please be sure to try to pick a category that matches your lens, and that your lens is appropriately rated G-R-or X. Thanks!
We at Squidoo passionately believe that everyone deserves a voice online, and a free service for sharing and spreading recommendations, ideas, products and passions. Not just the gatekeepers. Not just paid editors. Not just A-listers and marketers. Everyone.
We also believe that to be featured in Squidoo search results, and to our community, and to the rest of the world, is a privilege. Authentic pages built by real people with good intentions are the future of the web, and we're more focused than ever before on making it easy for you to do that.
But, here's the catch: spammers aren't welcome.
And so we need your help keeping an eye on our community, your help making sure a few bullies don't ruin it for everyone. Squidoo has always relied on the community to weigh in on the lenses they like and don't like. As well as the lenses that smell spammy or uncurated or mis-categorized and more. Which is why we've invite our Squidoo Angels, Citizen Squids, some interns and a few experts in India to help us spamcop for a while. So we can keep the community a clean, friendly, quality place that we can all enjoy and be proud of. It's a bummer when 30 bad actors ruin the web for everyone. But we're kicking 'em to the curb.
What counts as Squidspam?
We have a pretty clear set of guidelines. And read about our Zero Tolerance Spam Policy, too: http://www.squidoo.com/pages/tos
What's NOT SquidSpam?
1. Lenses that are empty, and haven't acted badly. They may still be under construction. Rest assured that lenses that sit empty for long enough will be purged from our system anyway.
2. The difference between spam and junk.
One man's junk is another's treasure. No doubt, you've encountered junk in your world. Junk at the antique store, or on someone's lawn. Junk on a web page, too.
There's plenty of junk inside of Squidoo. Pages you don't like so much, or find a waste of time. But it's not up to us (or you) to ban these people. Sure, feel free to give them a low rating, but just as Amazon doesn't decide which books to sell, we don't decide if a lens is lame or not.
Spam, on the other hand, is an aggressive act. It's about tricking people, redirecting traffic, larding stuff with keywords just to deceive. Spam is about unsolicited email and stuffing pages into searches where they don't belong. We don't tolerate spam at Squidoo. If you find spam, please tell us! If you find a great lens, tell everyone. Sharing lots of positive stories can combat the bullies more than focusing on the bad ones.
Note: Other questionable content: Lensmasters are responsible for the content they put on their lenses. Not Squidoo the company. So, if something smells fishy, or plagiarized, or copyrighted, or hijacked, we suggest you contact the lensmaster in question. Thanks!
Squidoo was founded on recommendation. Real people making real, authentic recommendations about the best stuff online. The biggest part of this, of course, is the content you stick in your lens. The more curated, handbuilt and genuine the lens is, the better we've seen it perform.
Same goes for how you promote your lenses. When you create something worth talking about, and cultivate permission to market to people, and develop your content based on feedback, and dozens of other quality human interactions, your lens benefits. Why? Because people spread it for you.
If you aggressively promote a lens to someone who doesn't want to hear from you, though, well, that's spam. If you harass bloggers, that's spam. If you email lensmasters begging for lens ratings, that's spam too. These actions are no better than fool's gold--undiscerning lensmasters mistake it for the real thing.
In the past we've seen a lot of otherwise good lensmasters chasing after fool's gold, trying to promote their lenses via massive rating swaps or paid traffic exchanges. Squidoo does not endorse or recommend this kind of activity, and could even lock your lenses because of it. Not only because it's not in the spirit of the site, but also because it just doesn't work. It doesn't earn you loyal readers or customers, it doesn't help people find you in search engines, and it doesn't increase the quality of your content.
Remember: Squidoo reserves the right to change our LensRank algorithm at any time. We're currently working on (unannounced) changes that will end up impacting swappers without warning. We frequently ban paid traffic exchange sites, and now that you know that up front, you have no excuse to go lose money to them! Building a so-called business on ratings swaps or traffic exchanges could mean you did a whole lot of work for a whole lot of nothing. :(
Lensmasters choose to have multiple accounts for many reasons, and when used within our Terms of Service, we don't have a problem with it. But if you're using multiple accounts to boost your own LensRank through mass 5-star ratings, don't. The same goes for abusing 1-star ratings. Lensmasters must be logged in to their account to rate a lens, and all ratings are logged. Rating numerous lenses with 1 star automatically flags your account for review. If a lensmaster is found abusing the rating system with malicious intent, the Squid Staff reserves the right to remove all of their content, lock their lenses, and/or delete their account without warning. These are dealt with quickly, quietly, and irreversibly, so we can go back to focusing on our positive growth and success.
Due to significant levels of abuse, there are certain topics that Squidoo just doesn't permit lenses on. If we sniff out a new lens that might be on one of our SquidDon't topics, we'll ask you to either delete it, change it, or stake your reputation on it. (SquidDon't topics include lenses used to promote or sell prescription or illicit drugs online or by mail ... or to promote online gambling or the sale of information about gambling ...or to offer debt reduction or bankruptcy counseling online or by phone ... or used to sell sexual aids online, etc.) Find out more about SquidDon't.
If someone stakes her reputation that the lens is not actually spambait, and that it is not actually on one of our SquidDon't topics, then we agree to hand review the lens. That's when you see the Under Review alert when you visit that lens URL. The lens will be under review for no more than 72 hours, at which time it will either be approved and published to the world, or deleted.
99.99999% of our members don't even need to read this! It doesn't affect the good guys. Make great lenses on good topics, don't spam, and you'll be just fine.
Sorry. We hope it was a mistake! If you've read the Ratings and Spam policy on this page, and checked out The Top 5 Reasons Lenses Get Locked, and you're still sure why your lens was locked, please drop us a note here. Thanks.
Posting in Guestbooks on lenses is a privilege. If you abuse that privilege (by posting self-promotional links, spamming the guestbook, being rude, or posting otherwise irrelevant or offensive stuff), our lensmasters have the ability to flag your actions. If enough of them do that, you'll get banned from posting in more Guestbooks. You can still make your own lenses, of course. You just won't be able to add comments to other people's lenses. Sorry.
Oh, buggy! In the footer, at the bottom left of every page, is a "Give feedback" link. Click that and fill out the feedback form. Please tell us exactly what the problem is and where you encountered it. Or, you can get the feedback form here.
Every lens carries Google AdSense ads. Those are used to generate royalties for the whole co-op (ie, everyone gets a cut). If you want to increase your direct royalties, though, you should consider adding commercial modules that the visitors to your lenses will appreciate. Our top moneymaker modules include: Amazon, eBay, CafePress, and The SuperStore. Every single one of these modules generates directly attributable revenue for your lens, and we pay a royalty to you or to your chosen charity based on that income.
Build good lenses, feature great stuff, share your lenses as much as possible, and earn more royalties.
Toward the beginning of every month! We usually run payment in the first week of the month. If your lenses have earned cash or money for charity, keep an eye on your lensmaster dashboard...
Squidoo uses PayPal to send you cash. And if you've selected to send your royalties to charity, we make a donation to them in your name. (Find out more about our growing charity choices below). PayPal serves over 96 million customers in 55 countries and is a trusted eBay company.
Tip: If you're already using PayPal, PLEASE make sure you're using the same email address for both PayPal and Squidoo. You can add your existing PayPal email address to our system here. But don't worry. If your royalties are sent to an email address that's different from your already registered PayPal address, you can always go into PayPal, to your Profile settings, and "add" your other email address to that account.
If you don't have a PayPal account yet, the first payment email you get from them will include directions for how to claim your Squidoo money. It's fast and simple to sign up. Takes about 30 seconds.
Please note: If you go more than twelve months without reaching a payout, we'll assume you've abandoned your account and that money will be returned to our system and applied to our overhead and our charity fund. In January of 2009, for example, we'll zero out any funds earned prior to the end of 2008 but not paid out.
Find out which countries do and don't accept PayPal.
If you're from a country outside of PayPal's reach, here's what a few of our other lensmasters in the same situation have recommended: a) find someone in an "included" country to accept payment for you or b) send your royalties to the charity of your choice. We're hoping to extend our support over time and apologize for the inconvenience!
As promised, 100% of the money earned during our closed and public beta tests went to charity. Specifically, we divided it among 3 charities: The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Room to Read, and The Acumen Fund. And The Gil Hildebrand, Jr. Wants A Pony Fund. (Okay, not that one).
We thank all our incredible lensmasters for this charitable effort. We raised thousands of dollars for great causes, and couldn't have done it without them.
Wikipedia has a system with one entry per topic. We don't. Instead, we encourage multiple lenses on a topic. Then, we use an automated algorithm—LensRank—to rank the lenses. We look at community ratings, lensmaster reputation, clickthrough rates, frequency of updates, inbound and outbound links, revenue generated, and lots of other factors and give the lens a number.
A LensRank of #1 is considered the top lens on the site, whereas a LensRank of #4,500 is lower (but still GREAT!), and #429,000 is much much lower. However, LensRank is all relative. Your lens may be #9406 overall, but still be the top ranked lens in your category, and the best rated lens in your category. So if your lens is not #1 don't despair. LensRank is just a formula. It's a best guess from a computer. Merit, as we know, comes in many forms.
LensRank does a full sweep of all lenses in the Squidoo system and ranks them according to things like frequency of update, traffic, inbound and outbound links and more. We recalculate the rankings every day or so. So, if you just built a lens and are disheartened to see that it's at the bottom of the LensRank pile, don't worry. Give it a day or two and we bet you'll see the LensRank improve (ie: get smaller...remember, LensRank #1 is tops). LensRank is built to reward human-made, updated, curated lenses. You can learn more about improving your LensRank at SquidU.
LensRank calculations are done using data from the past two weeks, rather than looking strictly at a lens's lifetime of publication. This will ensure that the freshest, timeliest, and most actively updated lenses aren't trumped by the lenses that perform just because they've been around the longest. We're still rewarding the exact same qualities, but good lenses have to keep earning they way to the top, not just rest on their laurels.
So, heads up that you may see some interesting changes in ranking from time to time. The SquidStaff also makes small tweaks now and again to make sure our algorithm doesn't get gamed, and that it reflects the best spirit of Squidoo.
And yes, now that we have more than 200,000 lenses, the competition is a little stiffer!
Introducing the MAX system for lensmasters. Every day, the Squidoo team watches all our lenses, checking out what works and what doesn't. We're busy evolving the site, quietly testing new techniques, trying to figure out how to boost the right clicks (a.k.a., recommendations) from the right people. And we want to invite you along for the ride.
On the edit page for each of your lenses, you should see a check box in the Lens Stats section of the right column. When selected, this "maxes" your lens. When unchecked, your lens will display in "minimized" version. If you choose "Max", we'll take our learning and put it on your lens. Automatically and for free. We won't fiddle with your content--at all--but if you want in on more traffic, new lens layouts, and extra royalties for charity or for you, pick Max.
P.S. Don't fret: If you don't like changes, you're invited to un-Max from your lenses at any time.
When you un-Max (or "min") a lens, it will automatically revert back to the original "min" lens state. You don't have to do anything. And you can always Max it back next week.
Great question. These are signs of greatness on Squidoo. Read all about this stuff here.
Yes! You can transfer a lens to anyone you want. If your friend is not already a lensmaster, she will have to sign up in order to accept the lens.
Here's how the Lens Transfer System works: Start by clicking "Transfer A Lens" on your "My Lenses" dashboard page. You'll get to choose which of your lenses you want to transfer, and will be asked to enter your friend's email address. Your friend will then get email with a link to accept or deny the transfer. If he accepts, the lens will immediately be removed from your list of lenses and added to his. Once you've successfully transferred a lens, you will cease to have any authorial control--you won't be able to edit it, and you won't be seen as the original creator of the lens unless your friend chooses to add that information.
Our friends at Flickr recently expressed concern about the automated "Let Flickr Pick" option we offer in our Flickr module. In the spirit of curation, recommendation, and crediting photographers, we're changing our Flickr module to only display handpicked photos, or favorite photosets, instead of just pulling in random photos by tag.
What does this mean for you? If your lens currently shows photo thumbnails via "Let Flickr Pick" they will remain on your lens. But we won't be loading any new ones automatically via that tool. And, if you edit your Flickr module (recommended) you'll now be required to point to photos using the other 2 options instead: "Let Me Pick" and "Pick By Photoset."
We're sorry in advance for any hassle this may cause you guys, and we hope the other 2 photo-selection options will provide more than enough Flickry goodness for your lenses.
P.S. Some tips to help you Flickrize your lenses to their fullest potential:
1) Give credit where credit is due, of course. If you feature someone's Flickr pictures, thank him or her on your lens.
2) Pick by Photoset: Try picking your OWN photosets. Upload your pics to Flickr and create a "Squidoo" set, let's say. That way you can easily add your own pictures to your lens.
Right now, Squidoo is a very small, very transparent organization, and as a result, we're expecting that we'll do a pretty poor job of custom one-on-one tech support. Instead, our incredible lensmasters are on the front lines to help out with the majority of your questions.
RSS is a rapidly spreading technology that helps you keep up with websites that are constantly being updated. RSS is just a little peep, a signal, a flag that is set on a favorite blog or Web site, telling Squidoo or an RSS reader that it has been updated.
If you ask Squidoo to watch an RSS feed, then whenever a blog is updated (for example), the new post shows up in your lens and your readers can quickly see what's new. If there's nothing new on the site you're watching, it doesn't show up and your lens stays the same.
It's sort of like a friend IMing you whenever there's something interesting going on; but he only does it when you want him to.And at Squidoo, RSS puts the message directly onto your lens.
To use RSS with Squidoo, all you have to do is copy (not click, copy) the RSS feed code out of your favorite blog or other RSS-enabled page. On many machines, you do this by pointing to the button labeled RSS 
or ATOM or SUBSCRIBE while holding down the [CTRL] key on your keyboard. Then hit "copy link location" or whatever sounds similar.
Paste that link location into your Squidoo module editor and you're all set.
Since you own the copyright to your lens, feel free to assert a Creative Commons license in the lenses you create. For details, visit: creativecommons.org.
You sure can. Please do! Just visit your My Account page to set your Newsletter Preferences. You can opt-in for any (or all!) of our free new email letters, including:
The Squidoo Daily: features the Lens of the Day and other fun Squidoo squibs. (on brief hiatus while we work out some kinks)
The SquidU Weekly: insider tips on how to get more traffic and make your lens work better.
The Squidoo Charity Fund is for people who want to donate their royalties to charity, but can?t make a decision where to send them. This is the default payment setting on all new lenses. We choose a different charity (or charities) every few months month to receive these funds and announce where the money goes on the SquidU forum. Past Squidoo Charity Fund recipients have included the Acumen Fund, Donors Choose, The California Community Fund, JDRF, Room to Read, Tides Foundation, Veterans for America, Modest Needs, Kiva, Save the Children, The American Heart Association, A Day of Hope and many many more.
Featured lenses are the ones with little green check marks next to them on your Dashboard. Congrats! A featured lens has earned the privilege of being promoted within Squidoo at that moment. A featured lens gets 3 distinct benefits: It is included in Squidoo search results and any appropriate top 100 lists, you can send Squidcasts from that lens, and you can join new Groups with that lens. If your lens isn't featured right now, rest assured that of COURSE it is still discoverable via outside search engines like Google and Yahoo, and of COURSE people can still see it and of course your direct URL will still work. The idea of having featured and non-featured (we call them Work-in-Progress lenses, more on that below) is that it gives you a sense of what lenses are "working" and which are perhaps stale, or not getting a whole lot of traffic, or need a little touching up.
Work-in-Progress lenses have the little gray minus sign next to them on your Dashboard. A Work-in-Progress lens is something that our algorithm thinks isn't worth promoting in the site right now. Similar to how Google's algorithm is always changing and the pages that get "featured" on the first few pages of Google results change all the time.
WIP lenses are not "featured" in that they do not show up in Squidoo search results or our Top 100 lists, you cannot send Squidcasts from them, and you cannot submit them to new SquidooGroups. As mentioned above, please don't worry... this lens will still be live to the world, and easy to find via search engines outside of Squidoo. Your direct lens URL will always work just the way you want it to. Your WIP lens will also show up on your lensmaster bio page, and will continue to participate in any Groups you previously joined.
Okay, so what's the point of having WIP lenses? Well, sometimes lenses truly are Works-in-Progress, and aren't ready for primetime. I'm sure you all have lenses that are half-baked, waiting until you can find 10 more minutes to work on them. Everyone on the SquidTeam has them too! But other times, I know, lenses that are rather robust and good and well done can fall into WIP, and that's probably frustrating. But here's why. A lens might not be worth promoting in Squidoo if it's stale (ie, you haven't updated it in months) and if no one is visiting your lens right now, and if you haven't promoted your lens on blogs or to friends or in social networks lately. And so on. The good news is that it's not hard to get a lens featured again -- update it, talk about it, promote it.
Evergreen lenses vs. Seasonal lenses. Sometimes, seasonal lenses fall into WIP. That doesn't mean you should stop making them! Let's imagine a few examples of seasonal lenses, then talk about how these compare to evergreen lenses. A great lens on Funny Santa Costumes, for instance, might get featured in Squidoo and really spike around November and December. I bet it was a top moneymaker for you that season, too. But, come Summer, it probably goes WIP. Well, that's probably because no one on the web was looking for Santa stuff at that time, or because you weren't investing much time spreading it to the outside world (and why would you, in July?), or maybe because hadn't been updated in a while. It makes sense for that lens to take a back seat for a little while in favor of your lenses that people (and you) are more actively engaging with right now. But I bet it will be back in action and earning money for you when Christmas rolls around again! Seems like that lens was worth building, to me.
Evergreen lenses are also very much worth building. Lenses that don't fluctuate by season or target hot or ephemeral trends, but rather mirror YOU and your passions and topics, regardless of the environment around them. These lenses aren't guaranteed to be featured all the time either, and their status and LensRank probably matches your enthusiasm for the topic and lens, and the conversations you're running about that topic elsewhere on the web.
This can get a little confusing, we know. Basically, "unimproved" and "undeveloped" lenses are the same thing. They both describe lenses that have fewer than 3 modules (with content! not just empty modules). We've noticed that lenses like these aren't usually as great as they could be, and more often than not fall into spammer territory. We're sure that's not you, so if your lens doesn't have much on it, we encourage you to take a minute to go back and add your favorite links or photos or videos or thoughts on your topic. But, if you're in a hurry, you're welcome to publish the lens anyway, and it will go live. But it probably won't get a high LensRank, and it won't be included in Squidoo search results. (Yes, it will still be accessible via the direct URL and other search engines).
Of course, when you're ready to go back and add more content, and re-publish the lens, we won't call your lens "undeveloped" anymore, and you'll have as fair a shot as anyone to start climbing the rankings and getting found in Squidoo search results. Your choice!
Ouchie! If your lens is reporting a negative earnings balance, it's most likely due to a product that was purchased from your lens but later returned. Usually the return chargeback occurs a month or two after the original purchase, which is why the negative balance becomes more obvious right after our monthly payment.
Each of our affiliates is a little different, and they all report to us in different ways. While we're still working on a system for reporting product purchases from our CJ, any Amazon purchases that are returned will be listed in your "Amazon Orders" stats section.
Lens of the Day...
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Edinburgh Pub Guide: The Last Drop
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The Last Drop is a traditional Scottish pub in the very centre of Edinburgh's historical Old Town an...
