Changing One Webpage To Appear More Businesslike: How I Did It

I published a webpage about books on Squidoo called Current Bestselling Books. It is a new page, just created this September 13th, so the traffic is very slow. This has given me time to re-define the webpage to be a more pleasant experience for any visitor. It's not the prettiest of pages but I think it will do for now. One good aspect of making pages on Squidoo is that you have so many options as to the layout of your webpage you can make your page almost to any design you can think of. But within the module system Squidoo has set up.

I have chosen to highlight a number of books available on Amazon.com. The page itself is more like a bookshelf that I place books for sale and either people buy that book or another or they move on to other websites. A very simplistic view, but you should try to look at it from that perspective. On your Squidoo webpages you provide visitors with the same options - stay and buy or go ("thanks for stopping by! Tell your friends about my website" I yell as you leave.

My plan is to have a note about each book which will give the page a bit more stickiness rather than just having the books themselves all lined up. Having short reviews should help get the page indexed by the search engines and by updating frequently, there will be some positive movement in the PageRank. This obviously won't happen overnight because this is a very competitive niche. I have no illusions of this page making a ton of money over night. It doesn't work that way - you have to put in some work beyond just putting your page on the Internet.

You have to look at what any visitor to your webpage is looking for. Hopefully if someone has come to my page I am hoping they are looking for a book to purchase and or just to brouse the selection. You can have your selection remain static, or you can go in and change things up. New items, move some that are not getting any clicks out or demote them to a different area of the page. You haven't removed the item, but simply placed it in a less conspicuous place - thereby freeing up room for other items to be shown. Just your basic retail.

That's what I'm doing and the updates help bring in more people to check out the page. Currently it is mostly fellow Squidoo people and the occasional person from search engine traffic. Obviously if I am going to make this page any kind of success, I need to increase the number of visitors. One of the things I am doing is writing this blog post showing how I am actually working to make this page succeed. Another is having my webpage's address in my signature when I leave messages in the forum at Squidoo. It's called the Squidu Forum and you will learn a lot about making a great lens on Squidoo by going and reading as much as you can. The go back again.

Also I posted in the "Critque My Lens" section of the forum and some people gave it the thumbs up that they liked it. Those were from people already on Squidoo. Those not on Squidoo can't say they like the webpage except in the comments section at the bottom, which are always appreciated. If you think I'm missing something let me know so I can address it.
Finally I am looking for backlinks that will help the page rank a little. This means moving a little closer to the top of the heap when the search engines which means - more traffic, more sales, more success - which is why we're here. I will be reporting on how this little project progresses.

It's Almost Time To Start Thinking About A New Wall Calendar - Sexy Options?

Fall is actually just days away and Halloween and then Christmas will be upon us before we know what hit us, so to get a jump on the end of the year, you might want to take a break to look at some of the 2011 sexy wall calendars that are already available. The latest calendars always feature hot women in various states of undress (do I sound like I'm complainin'?) and the new ones are pretty good.

There's Megan Fox calendars featuring the beautiful star of the Transformers movies, some with shots from the film. Fox just peers out at you all year long with a new photo of gorgeous actress with that come hither look she's patented. She had several calendars last year and offers several more for the coming year.

Also, there's the Maxim calendar 2011 with bikini-clad models to keep you warm during the cold winter months. Another Favorite is the Penthouse Magazine 2011 lingerie wall calendar which is according to Amazon - the big seller so far this year and judging by the cover, I'd have to agree that it looks like a winner. Penthouse has another hot wall calendar in their  Penthouse Girl + Girl 2011 Calendar which appeals to any red-blooded male and not just your average Howard Stern fan. Not just one pretty girl each month but two for the price of one? Um, thank you lol.

The picture at the top of this post is of legendary pin-up model Bettie Page and every year she has a new calendar and she's featured on the Squidoo page as well. To see more just click the link to the page at the top. There are about three dozen different wall calendars all featuring beautiful women. Like I said, it might be a good idea to get a 2011 now rather than wait til the last minute - they do sell out quickly. As an added bonus, you get a few minutes staring at beautiful, sexy women (in calendar form, but still...).

Completed A Monster Quest On Squidoo & Added Aly Michalka To The Mix

If you are not already on Squidoo, then my talk about "monster quests" and the new Leaderboard may throw you off a bit. On the website Squidoo, you can build webpages about just about anything and make some money online as well. The people who have pages on Squidoo are called "lensmasters" and the pages are called "lenses" that you can add links to make money usually through ebay or Amazon, but you are definitely not limited to those choices.

They added a new series of features to the website that award prizes of sorts for completing new pages, checking out the work of others and generally improve the quality of the webpages appearing on the site. One of these "quests" that I was given as a level 28 Squid, was to review 15 different webpages (not mine) and publish a new wepage preferably in the category of "Pop Culture & Celebs", "Movies & TV" or "Entertainment". I chose to do mine about Alyson Michalka, who stars in the new television series Hellcats. The show is about a law student forced to become a cheerleader due to problems with her scholarship.

Michalka herself is quite pretty and multi-talented (she's released songs with her sister Amanda) and sang in the movie Bandslam that came out last year. The webpage was created just the other day and is already generating traffic. Plus, I received 1200 points for completing this quest which pushed me further up the list as far as levels go.

Helping To Keep Up With The Current Bestselling Books

Yes, another new Squidoo webpage by yours truly. This one is about the Bestselling Books being sold by Amazon. I think that this page ties in with the one I did awhile back about Graphic Novels as well as the about Books For Children. The children's book webpage actually ties together a bunch of individual pages about Encyclopedia Brown, The Boxcar Children and several other webpages that needs to be updated again soon.

The new page is more adult oriented with books currently on the various bestselling lists as well as some others that have slipped off the list but are still good sellers.

Just Received 1,000 Votes Of Approval From Facebook Visitors On My Squidoo Page

I'm kinda shocked that I've received so much love from people visiting my webpage from Facebook! The webpage is Top 25 Punk Rock Songs Of All Time and I just published the page in August 2010. For the first week it had next to no traffic then all of a sudden I looked and it had over 500 visits in one day and the number just kept rising!

The traffic tapered off but the webpage still gets a fair number of visits and leapt into the top tier at Squidoo, but is now slipping back into Tier 2 which is still much better than I had expected the page to be doing at this point.

I actually had over 2,600 visits on one day and they all seemed to be coming from Facebook and many were giving the page their approval my clicking the blue Facebook "like" button. I know there are some other pages that get traffic like that all the time, but it was surprising to have one of my pages sort of go viral on Facebook.

The nice thing is that now other people at Squidoo are finding the page and leaving comments and giving it the thumbs up. It's basically a webpage with a number of videos showing various punk bands from the 1970s-90s and people can vote for whichever songs they like - they don't have to choose just one, they can vote for all of them if they want or just vote for whichever band's songs they like best.

Also a lot of people left messages pointing out that certain songs were missing so I added those songs to the list which now is over 200 videos. It's almost like a massive playlist of songs and videos for all the great punk songs and bands and you can take the list for free as a widget and add it to your website or blog if you want.

Still surprising that the webpage had so much success at drawing traffic so quickly.

Just Added Another Webpage ~ All About Halloween Bobble Heads

As it is getting closer to Halloween (let alone Christmas!), I decided to add another Halloween webpage. Mostly because I found some interesting bobbleheads online and thought that might be an interesting topic. I don't collect them myself, but I do have a couple that were given to me over the years. I have one of The Black Knight from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail that my nephew gave me that I think is cool. Basically it is a knight in black armor missing a leg and arm with blood splurting out from it's severed limb. That is humoring because I am a HUGE Monty Python fan and insisted on seeing the movie when it came out in the 1970s.

I just checked on Amazon to see if they had any listed, but no Black Knight, although they had one of the Knights of Ni (they ones who say Ni and are soooo terrifying and in desperate need of a shrubbery).

But back to my bobblehead webpage. It's called Halloween Bobble Heads and one of the bobbleheads is the Linda Blair from The Exorcist in the picture. Pretty creepy right? There's a ton of others that are all good fun and many folks do collect them, but I don't think I could have that freaky Linda Blair one in my house - I'd feel like it was staring at me lol. Here's some others that you can check out:

Witch Bobble Head | Jack-O-Lantern Bobble Head
Skeleton Bobble Head | Vampire Bobble Head

I don't know if these "head knockers" are good sellers or not, but they are fun and should give me at least a tier 3 ranking and maybe a 2nd tier rating for October if I'm lucky. But the ranking isn't what I'm totally interested in. What I'm thinking is Halloween in 2011, 2012 and so on. As this page ages, and gets more links it will gain more credibility with the search engines and just Halloween enthusiasts in general. The bobbleheads are just a fun item and the page won't need a lot of work and ties in with the post I did about the Santa Bobble Heads webpage I put together.

I'll report back when I see how the page does. Now I have to get back to work! Enough of this "blogging" business. I have webpages to build!

List Your Favorite Squidoo Pages In Slinkset Directory

Yeah, I'm the guy who is always adding links to funny videos or to my latest Squidoo creation. Sorry if I'm annoying any of my friends with them, but I like sharing what I've found on the Internet. That's what I'm doing right now - trying to share a source for some back links that might help your websites and more importantly, your Squidoo pages. It would also work for Hubpages, Facebook and the like.

You can list your page on Slinkset.com and give your webpage a little bit of backlink juice. Sure, it won't automatically push your work onto page one of Google with this one little link, but it is free and takes a short amount of time to put your page in the directory.

You can add your Squidoo pages to the Squidoo Lenses (you have to join the site which is free) and then click the "Submit" button and input your pages information. And there it is - instant backlink. I did it for some of my Squidoo pages (like my Jellycat and my Calendar Frames and Holders pages). Because visitors to the site can vote for those links they like, I've been lucky enough to get a couple of votes for my Jellycat page.

One other cool thing is that you can also create your own group. You can have an open group - where others can submit links they like or just a closed group where you have just your own page choices.

Here's an example of a closed group I created:

The Best Music Sites On The Internet

It is just a group of links to various music sites that I happen to think are the best on the Internet. No one else can add to the list, but they can vote if they want.

The Squidoo group is an example of an open group. Two open groups I have created are Christmas and The Best Calendars. The Christmas group is for all things Christmas-related and the calendar group is just where I put some of my calendar webpages. You can add to them or vote for them or start a new group all your own.

As I said, this won't immediately give you page one of Google, but if you have little or no traffic to your webpages on Squidoo or on Hubpages or elsewhere, it could be because the mighty Google or Yahoo don't think your pages are relevent. Finding more backlinks is one step to getting more love from the search engines and this is one way to do it. Just don't try to flood all your webpages with a ga-zillion backlinks all from directories like Slinkset or it will look like spam and that can be worse than no links at all.

If you know of any other good directories where you can get backlinks from, leave a note in the comments section below.

I Finally, Grudgingly, Made A Harry Potter Webpage

I think I am probably the last person to have made a Squidoo page about J.K. Rowling's infamous series of books about the boy wizard Harry Potter. Don't get me wrong - I have actually read all the books in the series (except for the last one so don't tell me what happens) and I've watched all the movies. It just seemed that everyone and their mom had been cranking out Harry Potter this and that lenses on Squidoo and elsewhere that it seemed kinda pointless to join in. There are still 2 films to go in the series with one out this November as the first half of The Half-Blood Prince with the last Potter epic coming in 2012.

The reason I think that it is a good idea to do a webage about the Harry Potter books is that the series has legs and will likely continue to sell for decades to come. I don't know if I'll be around for that but maybe my webpage will be and I'll get a sale here or there lol.

I'm still avoiding the topic of the Twilight series, which I don't believe has as much meat on it's bones as the Potter books. I haven't bothered reading any of the Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer (yes, that's a link to the Twilight series) and I haven't bothered to watch any of the movies. They are reputedly just really bad, but I won't comment further as some 12-year-old Team Edward stalker may flame me.

The Potter webpage is a pretty bare bones affair but if you want to take a look, it's Harry Potter Books In Order. And I just noticed that the page is my 200th at Squidoo. How illustrious to make a page unlikely to be found by the most rabid Harry Potter fan or probably even Google. Still I can always add to it and make it that little bit more enticing.

How To Make A Million Dollars & No I Don't Have An eBook To Sell You

To me, there are two basic ways to make one million dollars:

1. Have one person give you one million dollars.

2. Have one million people give you one dollar.

Two simple choices, but both have their good points and both have some drawbacks. First of all, with choice number one, you have to find a person who has one million dollars and who is willing to let you walk away with that one million dollars. There are a lot of rich people in the world but finding one who will part with their cash no strings attached is highly unlikely. If by chance you do find some of these people, send them my way.

The second choice is actually just as difficult. Just walk up to a stranger and ask them to give you a dollar. Most likely you will get a snide comment for your trouble and be told to move along and stop bothering people. You will get the odd kind soul who will give you a dollar because they will want to help you out. That's the interesting part. A single dollar is obviously not held as tightly by people as a million dollars would be.

That's why I am in online marketing. You can provide a simple service to hundreds, even millions of people every single day and some will provide you with a dollar - or a nickel or a penny - for your trouble. It is difficult to be found on the Internet and elsewhere, but if you increase your online presence one step at a time, by providing solutions to people you will see some money start to trickle in.

Basically with affiliate marketing, you are a bridge helping people find what they are looking for and you can collect a toll for guiding people across to the place they want to go.

Right now it is early September and many people are online, looking for information about this or that celebrity, or wondering what they will wear for Halloween. Some are already shopping like crazy for Christmas, while others are relaxing and considering a trip. There are a million different people all searching online for a million different reasons. That's why you need to concentrate on building up your online presence.

You can try 2 different methods to make money online - you can try to dominate a niche or sector of the online world, like Amazon does with books, or Google does with online advertising, or you can do more of a hit and run kind of operation. By that I don't mean doing anything illegal or unethical, I just mean having a small or tiny operation that generates a small amount every day or so.

To begin, you won't likely be able to stand astride the Internet like a collossus because there are a lot of very big companies and individuals already in place. Trying to immediate dominate any money-making portion of the Internet right off the bat is like asking one person for a million dollars - it's not going to happen for you, unless you are extremely lucky or innovative or both.

What you need to do is to work on a daily basis to generate some income from your online marketing and affilate work. It may be just pennies a day or you may see nothing at all. You will think this is not worth your time and you may want to give up and try something else. You need to picture your goal of one million dollars or whatever your your goal is and take small steps to reach that goal. You will fail at times and you will have some successes, and you need to press on.

From personal experience I have had both successes and failures, but last month I made enough to cover my monthly mortgage payment. That took a lot of work and I think of it as a high water mark, but it is just one step to achieving financial independence.

I was in the position of just starting out and making zilch for a long time but I kept at it and preservered. Some may laugh thinking that all I have made is mere pocket change, but to others, that pocket change would be a small fortune. That goal of one million dollars is now a little bit clearer, a little bit nearer. It is still out of reach, but I am heading in the right direction and sooner or later our paths will cross.

Like I said - I don't have a system to sell you or any eBook. I guess the only system I can promote is that you work every day, try to improve, keep growing, take any failure as a temporary pause and keep moving forward. Every day you will have small rewards and setbacks, but if you continue to work at it, you will see your own goals drawing nearer.

Two New Webpages: Santa Bobbleheads & Lego Bionicle Toys

I finished a couple more webpages that are available for you to take a look at if you are interested. One is about Lego Bionicle toys, and the other is called Santa Bobble Head, but it is actually a page full of bobble heads related to the Christmas show "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer".

The Bionicle webpage is interesting because it covers a fair bit of territory in the Lego Bionicle franchise. Lego has been making bionicles since around 2001 and recently announced a temporary end to production of the popular toy line.

It has been a somewhat profitably series for Lego as they produced dozens of different editions of the robotic toys every year and three movies were made about the series. There's even a burgeoning graphic novel industry surrounding the line which will continue for the foreseeable future.

The Santa bobblehead itself is really kind of cute and it's the type of thing my mom and sisters would probably snap up just as a Christmas decoration. The webpage also features some others from the animated Christmas special including Rudolph of course, the Bumble, and Herbie the Dentist elf - although for some reason they've named him "Hermey". I'm pretty sure it should be Herbie because that's what we've always called him around our house. Plus there's a nice Frosty The Snowman bobblehead to round things out. Unfortunately they don't have one for Yukon Cornelias or for the Burl Ives snowman narrator, but perhaps that's in the books for next Christmas.

Surprising Surge Of Traffic To My Webpage For Jodie Sweetin Baby News

One of my webpages is about the actress Lori Loughlin, who currently is on the television series 90210 as Debbie Wilson the mother of Annie Wilson (Shenae Grimes) and Dixon Wilson (Tristan Wilds) but who was also on the 90s hit series Full House, as Becky Katsopolis. This morning I checked and the webpage hat almost 2,000 visitors last night and another 200 more this morning. I of course thought there must be some kind of an error, but checked Lori Loughlin in Google news and nothing seemed to warrant a spike in interest. Hmmm...

So I checked my stats and found that most had come to my webpage under the term "Jodie Sweetin Lori Loughlin" and that's when I clued in that people were swarming to my Lori Loughlin page looking for information about Jodie Sweetin having just given birth to her child, a baby girl named Beatrix Carlin Sweetin Coyle or "Bea" as her father has called her (mom & baby doing nicely I hear). Sweetin was also on Full House playing Stephanie Tanner for the 8 year run of the series. The little girl has an older sister

On the webpage there was just the briefest mention of Sweetin, but somehow all these people stopped by to check it out. It does go to show you that you can get traffic at Squidoo and elsewhere from very unexpected sources and just about anything can trigger a wave of Internet interest. The traffic will likely give the page a bump in popularity at Squidoo for a short period and then it will probably settle back into it's usual ranking.

But it does make me want to add more info about Sweetin on the webpage. I'm pretty sure there is a Squidoo page or two about her and I'm hoping whomever wrote those pages gets a similar bump in traffic.