New Blogging Site

December 19th, 2008 by mlineker

Has anyone else tried posterous.com yet? All you have to do is send them an email and your blog is set up and the first post is made. I have created http://martyn.posterous.com, not very imaginative, but I will use it to publish information about my lenses and blogs, hopefully gaining back links along the way. It is also worth logging in and configuring the options available, posterous will automatically post to twitter, blogger and many other sites for you – very neat!

I have not tried it yet, but you can also send photos to update flickr and facebook, or any of your blogs. Best of all, you can use specific email addresses to control the sites you post to, so flickr@posterous.com only goes to flickr, but facebook+flickr@posterous.com goes to facebook and flickr, and post@posterous.com goes to all the sites you have configured.

It really is clever stuff – please give it a try and let me know what you think.

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Posted in Generate Traffic | 2 Comments »

Squidoo Adverts

October 16th, 2008 by mlineker

Whilst updating some of my lenses today I noticed that a couple of them where showing glossy adverts with audio. Now I have no complaint about ads on Squidoo generally, obviously that is what pays for everything and the revenue is also shared with lensmasters and charities. What I did find a bit annoying was the way that the UK chef Gary Rhodes kept repeating how he could show me how to cook with Flora every few seconds. I could not see any way of stopping or muting the audio, so if I had been a surfing visitor, I think I would have very quickly moved on somewhere else to get away from the noise (unless I really wanted some cooking with Flora instructions, of course).

My view is that automatically repeating audio of this nature is more likely to prevent people reading my lens than encourage them. I am not suggesting that these type of adverts should be stopped, but I think it would be much more user friendly to have a simple way of muting the sound within the lens, if that is technically possible.

I would be interested to know if any fellow lensmasters share my views on this topic.

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Posted in Squidoo | 3 Comments »

How To Get Traffic From StumbleUpon

September 1st, 2008 by mlineker

We are all advised to submit our Lenses to social sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon to help generate traffic. But bookmarking without getting involved in the social community is unlikely to generate a great deal of traffic. StumbleUpon in particular is unlikely to be of any benefit to you if it is not used properly. If you would like to use Stumble to generate a rush of traffic, have a look at my latest Lens: How To Drive A Traffic Rush From StumbleUpon, I am sure it will help.

On a different subject, the new look to Squidtop is very good. I like it much better than the old one and the navigation seems to have improved, too. Good work by the management!

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Posted in Generate Traffic | Comments Off

Update: RSS Feeds Are The Best

July 29th, 2008 by mlineker

I thought it might be time to provide an update on the progress of my lens Seven Of The Best Uses For RSS Feeds. The lens was initially created on June 26th 2008, although it took me a few days to build so the first publication was probably over a week later. Once published I added it to a few directories, bookmarking sites and blogged, with the title RSS Feeds Are The Best, on July 15th 2008 here at Squidtop.

The results are not staggering, but they are interesting. So far there have been 43 visits to Seven Of The Best Uses For RSS Feeds, 10 of them from Google (which means it must be indexed), 10 from Squidoo, 7 from Squidtop and 5 from Digg. The Digg results do seem a bit strange though, according to Digg the lens has been “Dugg” 23 times. I presume that means that people are digging without visiting the lens, how does that work?

One other point worth noting is my experience with Propeller. The admin at Propeller appear to have taken a dislike to Squidoo, their submission page would not allow my Squidoo URL to be entered and came up with some kind of “spam” warning message. To get round this problem I submitted my previous Squidtop posting, which seemed a good idea at the time. When I next tried to log in to Propeller a day or two later my account had been deleted! Seems a bit extreme, but it is their site and I guess they are entitled to do as they like.

Has anybody else had experiences of this nature?

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Posted in Squidoo, rss feeds | 4 Comments »

RSS Feeds Are The Best

July 15th, 2008 by mlineker

This would seem to be the ideal location to blog about my latest Squidoo Lens: Seven of the Best Uses for RSS Feeds. I have been using RSS Feeds for quite a while now and at first I just used them to keep up to date with me favourite blogs and news sites, or to integrate blogs with my lenses. In recent times I have discovered more uses for them, so that is why I thought my new lens was worth creating. I have attempted to provide some “how to use RSS Feeds” type instruction for seven usage methods. I know there are other uses of RSS Feeds, but I decided to stick at seven for this lens, otherwise it would probably be too long. If this lens proves to be popular I will probably produce more on the same subject later.

I hope you will have time to have a look at Seven of the Best Uses for RSS Feeds and, as usual, your social commentry will be much appreciated.

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Posted in Squidoo, rss feeds | 4 Comments »

Hello world!

July 14th, 2008 by mlineker

Welcome to Squidtop.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »