Review – Squick by Britt Malka

I got an e-mail the other day from Britt Malka. The subject line read “[New Post] [Case Study] – Five Days – Five Squidoo Lenses Per Day”.

Before going further, let me give you a little bit of background about how I know Britt. I “met” Britt over at Tiffany Dow’s blog. Like me, she’s an avid Tiff follower. She also comments and participates regularly on Tiffany’s blog. In November, she joined Tiffany’s vlogging challenge. That gave me a chance to get to know her even better. And between the comments I’ve seen her make and the posts I’ve read on her own blog, she’s become someone that I trust… I like her (I like her husband too, but you have to go to her blog to understand that). 🙂

Needless to say, when I got her e-mail telling me she was planning on doing five lenses per day, I was so impressed by that large a goal that I headed over to her blog to read it. That’s how I found out about her new Squick Kindle book. I read her post and, without hesitation, bought the book.

Understand, it’s not like I don’t already have great information about Squidoo and how to build lenses. That’s how I found out about Tiffany years ago. She became an expert on Squidoo back when people were laughing about the name. In fact, her 52 on Squidoo is still an invaluable resource for those learning Squidoo on a zero budget (it’s free in case you don’t have it yet). And her Squidoo Quick Commission Guide (which I also own and love) provides a ton of valuable information and steps to speed up the whole Squidoo process.

I also own Erica Stone’s Squid Pro Quo program and the SquidCrafter plug-in that she just worked with Chris Anderson on to speed up the whole SPQ proces! But even with all that, I was sure that there was something else I can learn from Britt. I already had a VA buildings lenses for me using SPQ and the plug-in. And even though it was moving faster than it had been when I was building them my own way, I had NO idea how she was going to get five lenses done every single day of the week. That was just crazy!

So, here’s my review of Squick:

After I ordered the book, I got two e-mails from Britt. The first one was a confirmation e-mail and, once I confirmed, I got a thank you e-mail with information about how to reach her support desk along with a bulleted list of what she would be contacting me about it I stayed subscribed.

The one e-mail I couldn’t find was how to get my download. So I went to her support desk, opened a ticket and let her know that I hadn’t received it. In less than 24 hours, I had a response and a download link… Impressive, especially given the time difference (Britt’s in Israel, I’m in the US).

The book was an easy read. It’s 55 pages total from front to back. That includes the cover page, introduction, disclaimers, table of contents, etc.

Introduction – this explains how the book had come to be. Britt talks about having a friend who wanted to build an online business but works a lot of hours, isn’t great at writing in English, and who has very few computer skills. I immediately thought about my VA (the second one I’ve hired) who seemed to be having a tough time following the SPQ layout directions.

Create Your Squidoo Account – Britt explains, in very simple terms along with screen prints, how to set a Squidoo account. There are even arrows on the screen shots pointing exactly where to click. So cool…

Since I already have a Squidoo account, I moved on to the the next section.

Find Your Money-Making Topic – this always interests me because I’ve spent so much time doing keyword research and I’ve learned that different people use different criteria. This one is about as basic as it can get. There’s no fancy keyword tools to buy or learn how to use. It’s just a specific way of using Amazon. She shows you what to look for and how to decide whether or not it could be a good topic for a lens. And what’s nice is that they’re the exact same steps she’s been using to test whether or not this would work for her friend… Experience is always a good thing.

Make Your Lens – this is the Step 1, Step 2 “how to” for each step of set up. This one also includes screenshots so you don’t get lost. This part of setting up a Squidoo lens isn’t overly complicated but there are things, especially if you’re new to Squidoo, that you could miss that could cost you money. So I like that she included even the basic steps.

Preparing Your Squidoo Lens – this section goes over which modules to include and what order they should go in. What I really like best about this one, is that she also included Screen shots of setting it up so that it is even faster and easier to do once you have your first one set up. In fact, she even shows an optional step. It’s not something that will make or break your lens, but it’s cool that she took the extra time to include it for those entirely new to Squidoo. You only see that type of thing nowadays from marketers who care about their customers.

Add Content to Your Lens – in this section she walks you through each module that requires text. She includes how to add content, how much content to add, and where to add it. I love the fact that throughout the book she uses a few different colors so that the important stuff stands out. Nothing gaudy like fluorescent pink on top of fluorescent green… 🙂 But just enough to make sure that you don’t miss something vital.

This is really thorough! From the intro module that includes several sections plus an image to the different options that are available on modules like eBay, Amazon, or  YouTube, she tells you what to change, what to leave and how to do it. That rocks!

The Final Touch – this is just a few extra finishing touches that you can put on your lens to improve its ranking. Again, she explains how to do it and includes a screen print.

Action Steps (6 of them) – this is the third or fourth one of these that I’ve seen throughout the book. The others were only 2 or 3 steps. I like this one because it narrows down the last several pages (it’s on page 43) into a simple step-by-step guide that you can use once you’ve gotten the building part figured out well enough that you no longer have to have the pictures and every single step written out to build a lens. It’s good for making sure that you’re still not missing steps once you think you know what you’re doing. 🙂

Send Traffic to Your Lens – in 2011, all I ever heard about was back linking. You MUST have back links to your site and you should have hundreds if not thousands. Well, a lot of us have seen where that led. In this section Britt shows some really basic ways (and includes links) to places where you can go to immediately get the word out about your new lens, which will include back links by default. I already have most of  these setup (there were two that I didn’t know about…Cool!), but I made sure that I had all of them added to my list of where to post after each lens I published.

Action Steps… Only three on this one. But these shorter ones let you know whether or not you missed a concept in the previous pages!

Short and to the Point: Squick – this is my most favorite action step list. Since this is a step-by-step system that you’re going to do over and over, you eventually aren’t going to have to read through the entire book to build a lens. This is the checklist you can use at that point to make sure that you have still done all the steps. I already printed this part. 🙂

Advanced: My Keyword Research Tweak – this is where Britt offers the how to about some basic keyword and competition research. Simple, basic, and using free tools only. It’s something that, as you get faster in building these basic lenses, will take only an extra minute or two to do so you won’t mind adding them to the mix if they might improve your lens ranking faster. This one also includes four action steps at the end.

Advanced: Combine with Squid Pro Quo – Britt knows how to use Erica Stone’s Squid Pro Quo system because she owns it too. And like many of us, she’s Seen. It. Work. So in this section, she lets you know that if you already own the SPQ program, you can combine the keyword research suggestions from there with the Squick system content ideas and then, if the lens ranks well, you can go back and add content the way that SPQ suggests. It’s the best of both worlds… Build them fast and if they rank well, make them better.

5 Day Action Plan – I told you at the beginning that Britt has set a goal to build a five lenses per day. You don’t have to do that so breeeeeeeeathe. 🙂 She includes an action plan here showing you what steps to do using only 15 minutes per day, five days a week in order to start making money fast (and I dread saying it that way because people’s idea of “fast” is so different). She also offers suggestions of how to add more content to those lenses that start showing promise.

Conclusion – this is just a quick page that offers a couple more tips on improving your lenses further, along with print e-mail and how to contact her. She says she wants to hear about your progress. And from what I know about Britt, she means it!

Resources – this page lists all of the links to the places that were mentioned in the book as well as other really great Squidoo products that are available.

 

What I Got out of This Book

The whole point of Squick is to be able to put lenses together very quickly, get them published, and then figure out over the next week or two which ones are doing well so that you can then spend more time on your “winning” lenses to grow their traffic. It saves wasting time spending hours building a really cool lens about a group of Amazon products or even a single product, only to find out that no one’s buying it.

If you’re building lenses about topics and subjects that you’re passionate about and simply love to talk about, this may not be the way you want to build them, although it might be a good place to start the framework and then you could build in the content…or maybe do the content and use this guide as a quick way to add monetization to your lens.

But if your goal is to make money using Amazon or other affiliate programs, building them this way could build your income a lot faster. Just to give you an idea (and I’ll be blogging about my results in future posts), my first VA (who has built Squid Pro Quo lenses before) got 9 lenses built and 1 published over the past 10 weeks (I didn’t count Christmas week). I still have to find time to add content to the other 8 so that they’re ready to publish.

I gave very basic instructions to my second VA from the Squick book and told him to see what he could do. That was 3 days ago. Just over the past 2 days, I have 9 lenses built AND published. Now I’m just watching the numbers to see if they start moving up. Six of them I haven’t even done the “Send Traffic to Your Lens” steps yet because I just had to come write this first!

I’m going to keep track of my results and will be posting them periodically, along with the steps I take to increase traffic to the ones that start showing potential.

So far with what I’ve seen from this product, based on productivity increase alone, I’m giving Squick a definite thumbs up. I’ll withhold my thumbs on the profit side until I have more numbers. 🙂

Until then…