mosaic + squidoo

Lens Intro: John Granger - Hogwarts Professor

mosaic — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:55:50 +0000

I recently finished a up a new lens. Actually, it’s very low key, and I got the idea when I was randomly surfing the web on Harry Potter. I came across the Hogwarts Professor, who turns out has written many books about the deeper meaning of the Harry Potter stories. More specifically, many Christians had objections to the wizards and witches portrayed in the books and felt there was a lot of anti-Christian imagery and notions. John Granger was at first skeptical about the books, too. However, after reading them, he discovered quite the opposite: there are actually Christian messages in the books!

I am not Christian, and my interest in John Granger is really in trying to understand a different perspective of Harry Potter. It’s really more like what Harry Potter can be beyond just a children’s book. John Granger now lectures all over and also maintains his own blog. You can find all this and a few of his recently published books on my lens about John Granger.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Very, very late payday report

mosaic — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:33:06 +0000

Yipers. I’ve procrastinated and procrastinated. Here are the deets.

$20.79 = (1 x $11.52) + (3 x $1.92) + (19 x $0.08) + $0.47[royalties]

In terms of LensRank, I’ve gone from [1, 4, 15] to [1, 3, 19].

Nominated for Best Gaming Lens!

mosaic — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:36:50 +0000

I just found out that one of my lenses has been nominated for a 2008 Giant Squid Award! It’s actually one of my best performing lenses, bringing in strong traffic and lots of click-outs for many, many weeks now. It also happens to be one of my first lenses! Wait, it just might be my very first lens. That means my other lenses have not been able to beat my first lens. Hmm…. It’s Plant Tycoon! Come check out the lens. Not only that, don’t forget to check out the 2008 Giant Squid Award lens. Everyone can vote and there’s tons of good stuff there!

A Little Maintenance

mosaic — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:54:49 +0000

Inspired by some of the threads in the forum about updating lenses, I started updating my lenses from the bottom of the list a couple of weeks ago. Since I have a whole bunch of old lenses that had dropped below the 200k mark (not counting WIPs), I decided that it was time to do a little updating. Actually, I didn’t have that much more to say about them. It was more that I made those lenses before I knew anything about SEO. So, I went in and rewrote some things and tried to make it more optimized. When your lens in down below 200k, just making it fresh can boost the lensrank a lot. After I updated these lenses, there was a little bit of traffic trickling in (~1-3 in the past 7 days) and the lensrank has gone up past the mid 150ks. I’m happy with that. Plus, doing these little optimization updates don’t take that much time, and I’ve been sneaking them in at work during short breaks…. Still have a few more to go!

Has this been a long month?

mosaic — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:34:31 +0000

It’s sure been a long month for me. And it’s not even over! On the positive side, I just wanted to report that I hit my goal of 1 PepperJam click per day (on average)! I’ve gotten 32 clicks this month!

Well, there are no commissions reported. Hahaha. But I’m working on SEO and adding more original content (and links to relevant content) on my PJ pages, so hopefully I will slowly climb the ranks. It’s kind of therapeutic to have things move slowly, sometimes. I know that most of the changes I make to my lenses won’t get picked up by Google for a week or so afterwards. This actually keeps me from fretting and distracting myself from other work by constantly making tweaks. I still constantly check the stats though.

With the number of lenses I have, I currently get 1300+ visitors a week. Whew! Not bad for me! I’m quite happy with that.

Lens Intro: Diner Dash Themed Games

mosaic — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:26:28 +0000

It’s been no secret that some of my best performing lenses are computer game related lenses. Well, I’ve just finished putting together another lens on some of my favorite downloadable games. Everyone’s played Diner Dash right? Well, now you can explore more Diner Dash-like Games! Flo, our favorite waitress, can be found in a whole bunch of these games because, as it turns out, her friends are entrepreneurs too in Dinertown.

Are you confused because you’ve never heard of Diner Dash? Well, it’s a downloadable game that is considered a Time Management game. Basically, when you play the game, there’s a lot of active clicking. You have to help Flo, the main character, run her restaurant by seating new customers and giving them menus, taking their order, delivering the food, cleaning the tables, and collecting the money. All the while, you don’t want to keep the customers waiting too long at any step or they will dock your tips. The beginning levels help you get into the flow of things, and it’s quite impressive to watch yourself tackle the super hard levels. And it’s so fun! There is a 1 hour FREE trial. Try it out below!

Payday Report

mosaic — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:14:25 +0000

This month, I got paid a total of $32.51. I’m not getting that excited though because part of it was from last month. For the first time ever, my stats page is finally showing payouts for all the lenses of a single month. Not sure why I couldn’t see these reports before; it always just said I earned nothing. So, on to the nitty-gritty!

Last month: $8.87 + one time bonus this month $3.26 = $12.13

$20.38 = (1 x $10.75) + (4 x $1.81) + (15 x $0.08) + $1.19[royalties]

In terms of LensRank, I’ve gone from [0, 3, 26] to [1, 4, 15]. Hmm. Wow. Looks like a whole bunch of lenses totally dropped out!

I’m a Giant!

mosaic — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:18:41 +0000

Oh boy am I excited! I’ve officially become a Giant! So excited, so excited! La la la la la la! :) :)

Well, I think I need some sleep now. Today was payday, too! I’ll be posting on that in a day or two.

Lens Intro: Chocolatier 2 Recipes

mosaic — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:03:07 +0000

I’ve created another computer game lens! This one is for Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients. This game is a PC download game where you are given control over a small chocolate company, and it’s your job to find and develop chocolate recipes, search out rare ingredients, manufacture chocolates, and sell them for lots of profits! With the money, you can buy out other factories and make your way to CEO and chocolate tycoon. The coolest part of the game, in my opinion, is figuring out the recipes. It’s not too hard, but it can take some time. I noticed that on the web, there wasn’t much in revealing the recipes, so I made this Chocolatier 2 Recipes lens just to spill the beans on the recipes. I hope it picks up some traffic! Although, keyword tools indicate that not many people search for it but game download sites indicate Chocolatier 2 is a very popular game. We’ll see how my lens does!

Also, side note, I noticed on my blog that there’s this About section to the right of the entries. I can’t figure out how to change the text. It’s still on the default. Any suggestions?

Brenda also notified me that some people’s comments got eaten by the spam filter. I restored 4 comments from a while ago. I hope the Spam Karma thing learns from that. I hope I haven’t lost any other comments. Thanks for commenting, everyone!

How’s everyone doing?

mosaic — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:53:01 +0000

Well, September is over and now October is here. I hope I will be granted Giant Squid status this month. I finished my minimum number of lenses in late August but struggled to make just a couple extra ones in September just in case. Actually, September has been very busy for me IRL, so Squidoo had been put on the back burner more than once. I have a couple of lenses that still need some work. Also, I really want to make some brand new lenses, too. Except both ideas and time are scarce! Did everyone else have a pretty good September?

September was my first full month with PepperJam. My stats were small but pretty encouraging for me. I had a grand total of… 24 clicks! That’s almost (almost!) one click a day! Hahaha! I’m hoping to beat that this month. I did, however, make one sale in September. It probably came through organic traffic; I’m pretty sure that page only got 20 visitors all month. Not bad. I’m happy.

Looking forward to October!