I’ve recently set up a second squidoo account and in this post I’ll share the advantages and disadvantages.
But why would you want a second squidoo account in the first place? I found that managing 300 lenses in one account became an administrative problem. Even using labels on the dashboard, it was just getting hard to make sure each lens had the proper backlinks, was updated when it needed to be etc. From a user perspective too, a list of 300 lenses on an account page is just not very good. From a search engine perspective 300 lenses about all kinds of topics is not very targeted ‘niche’.
So splitting off an account for my largest niche, calendars, made sense from the perspective of audience, search engines and administration.
For those of you reading this who think they should be making separate accounts for every niche. Do not.
The advantages of being a giant squid are such, that there is no good reason to set up a second squidoo account if you can’t make it reach giant squid too.
- Giant squids get redemption from the 9 link per domain per lens limit. For commercial niche lenses this 9 link limit is a severe limitation. Given that image links are automatically divorced from their images, you can only sell 4 products that include a text link AND an image link to that product. Since many people will try and click on images, not having the image link is a waste. For search engines on the other hand linked text is a signal about the topic of the page the link is on, so deleting the link from the text is also not a good idea.
While the 9 link limit isn’t yet enforced, it does show up as a warning splash each time a lens gets published that has too many links. Very annoying. - Templates: For me personally, the availability of templates for giants is also a good reason to want to have giant privileges on all my accounts. For now I’m temporizing by making my lenses in my giants account and then transferring them to my calendars account.
This has the added advantage of making it easier to give that new lens all the backlinks it deserves: on my new lenses lensography, on the new lenses plexo and on whatever lensographies it fits. In time this advantage will be less, because my calendars lensographies (yes, plural) will be transferred to my calendars account as well.
Advantages to having several squidoo accounts
- SEO: having related lenses in one account is a clear signal about topic for the search engines: this is a group of pages about calendars. When people link to the account, they will automatically include the niche topic in the link text, which is also a sign for the search engines.
- Social: my original account will be more focused because of this as well. This means more chance of ratings and blessings on each lens that is left in. It means more chance at a purple star, at lensrolls, etc. My spiritual audience will be less distracted by non-spiritual lenses.
- RSS: Each account has it’s own RSS feed. The RSS feed for this new account will be focused, enabling me to enter it as such in online RSS sites like zimbio.
- Profile: On squidoo the profile information shows up on all lenses where you don’t write a custom profile. That works best if you have niche accounts: affiliate banners, special season deals related to your niche: they can be posted on all lenses at once if your account is niche. Banners generally work much less well than specific product recommendations, but you never know. Similarly: you can include a link, or several, to your niche blog on the topic that gets posted on all niche lenses at once.
- Oh, and the ability to rate your own lenses, in the original account, is nice too. Creating new account with the specific purpose of rating and favoriting your lenses is against the squidoo TOS, aside from a waste of time, but I’m not ashamed to admit to having made sure all lenses on my spirituality account now have ratings. (see comments for details)
Disadvantages to having two or more squidoo accounts
- Administration: while one of my reasons for starting the account was administration, I find that splitting it up is also an administrative burden. Now I have two accounts to check new comments on. Two accounts to promote. Two accounts to get indexed. Two accounts to check statistics on. I find myself switching between logged in accounts, which is a hasle.
- Money: more accounts means that the money doesn’t automatically reach the squidoo payout threshold. Instead of each dime adding up, the new account has to have enough high ranking lenses to reach payout. This is not a very big deal, but it’s still an issue to take into account.
- Email addresses: Each account needs a unique email address on creation. You can only have as many accounts as you have email addresses. Since warnings and such are sent to this email address, it needs to be an account you actually keep track of.
- SEO: the advantage of having a niche account is largely long term. Short term moving lenses to a new account means they loose a link from a page google trusts (my squidoo profile page) to a page google hardly knows about, let alone trusts. The new account has to gain trust. This is the reason I moved my low income, low traffic calendar lenses to the new account first: they had least to loose. In the meantime in the calendar high season I’m not moving my high sales, high traffic lenses over: this is not the time to take risks.
- Social: online networking is largely a social business. My new account will not take my 800+ fans with it. When I squidcast there, only 5 people (so far) see it. New lenses there are not as likely to be blessed, rated and favorited. This may mean less income on those lenses.
- Audience: To make my new account have enough lenses to reach giant squid, it will have to include my lenses devoted to spiritual and religious calendars. This means that some of my most successful spiritual lenses will be less visible to my spiritual audience. This may mean less sales.
All in all I don’t advise creating many niche accounts for squidoo if you’re interested in having quality content and taking advantage of the social aspects of the website. Interlinking niche lenses does not depend on having an account for each niche. Only move into having a niche account if you have enough lenses in that niche to have the account reach giant squid status quickly.
For psychological reasons some people choose to move their non-successful lenses into a separate account. If that’s the only way you can avoid obsessing over them, by all means go ahead. But personally I’d rather you just didn’t obsess. Low ranking lenses are as much part of life as blogposts that don’t get traffic. The only difference is that you don’t know they don’t get traffic. You, nor your lenses, don’t have to be successful to be worthwhile. But that’s a whole other post.
[Edit March 1st] I’ve since added a third squidoo account: for all my squidoo help lenses. [/edit]
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I have a couple extra accounts for niches and online handles where I’m known by a particular alias among a certain fandom.
However, I thought it was strongly against Squidoo’s TOS to rate your lenses using secondary accounts, and could get you banned from the site.
I did it once early on with one lens… and later was so mortified I “reported” myself to Squidoo asking the star to be taken away.
Correction: it’s in the Policy FAQ, a link at the bottom of every Squidoo page:
“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…. If a lensmaster is found abusing the rating system… the Squid Staff reserves the right to remove all of their content, lock their lenses, and/or delete their account without warning.”
I would therefore not recommend the practice. You could lose all your hard work!
Greekgeek: You’re absolutely right. I’ve now received an e-mail from squidoo to the email address I’m using for my new account and it says:
This is only a warning so far, but obviously if I continue using this account to rate my own lenses on my ‘normal’ account, I may loose the account.
I guess this rates as a disadvantage
I personally don’t have moral issues with rating my own lenses, as I’ve rated over 8000 lenses at present. I don’t see why rating a few hundred of my own lenses would be a problem. I do draw the line at favoriting them all though.
Anyhow, it’s clear that this is squidoo HQ policy, so I’ll abide by it. Not that big a deal: ratings matter a bit in rankings, but long term not significantly.
I have been having a debate with myself for many months over multi-accounts. I can see why they may be necessary – particularly in my case as I would like to write some lenses about where I live (hubby and I have discovered a so far untapped niche) but it is important I retain anonimity due to a couple of my best performing lenses. A new account would resolve the problem, but I am still unsure about taking the step.
But more recently I have ended up as part of a new team of 10 Lensmasters with an ID on Squidoo, called Tenfinity and very early on we realised that this could lead to questions about our ethics. Many of us were also Angels, which also could have caused “whispers” elsewhere.
The solution? We all agreed that we would not rate, fav or bless any lenses published under that ID.
Your method of setting up a template in your Giant account and then transferring the lens to the niche account is a great idea. I really must get around to setting up some templates myself!
My personal solution to most such ethical questions is simply to be as open as possible, without flaunting. But I can see that for you this is not an option, with kids and bullies in the middle. Being a single woman without kids, I’m only responsible to myself.
What a great idea to create a joint squidoo account
I would definitely think it a good idea to have a separate account for stuff where you do NOT want to be anonymous. And then make sure your squidoo friends know about it by sending us an email once you’ve got a few lenses up. I would certainly not see that as spam.
I don’t think avoiding a niche is a good idea. But if it’s local, the topic might be best handled on a UK domain (buy one).
Interesting post, Katinka. The question in my mind is, are you happy with your decision to open the second account? Would you do it again?
Good point about ratings wearing off anyway for lensrank. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on the ratings front.
AJ — I think that if you are careful and honest in your multiple accounts, you shouldn’t have to worry. In fact, people like you getting multiple accounts may help reassure the SquidTeam about letting us have multiple accounts. I suspect they have had some debates about it.
I created niche accounts matched to two online handles/profiles I have on the web, one among video gamers and one in a particular fandom. I don’t necessarily want a colleague or grandma reading my video game walkthroughs or fanfiction, so I split them off.
Niche accounts never get the full benefit of Squidoo because they’re not allowed to have Giant status, but sometimes, the advantages of having an account with closely-related lenses, and the need for partitioning off different parts of your online presence, make it worthwhile.
Brenda: am I happy opening a second account? It’s way too early to tell. First impression: yahoo seems to love it! This is weird since yahoo can’t even see the links from the profile page to the lenses. Apparently it likes that there is a bio, with link, that’s on topic.
My sense so far is that the link limit thing is a definite drawback to opening a virgin account. But for SEO reasons it still seems a good idea and it will probably long term be a good thing for administrative reasons too, though for now, with calendar lenses on both accounts, it adds to the hassle.
I do love that opening a new account gives me a new RSS feed (through squidutils) that’s on topic – which is a new promotion opportunity. Anything that’s niche is easier to promote than what’s generic.
In general I’m with Greekgeek: small niche accounts are not worth it. This one will be big though, and has a chance at giant status if I make 10 more quality lenses about calendars, so I’m taking my chance.
Greekgeek: they’re not ALLOWED to have giant status? I sure hope that’s not true. It might well change my mind about mine.
I just reread the giant squid lens by Megan Casey and I think it’s simply that there have to be 50 great lenses to an account. You can’t have 10 on this account and 45 on that account and get giant status on either. You need 50 great lenses on each account that has or wants giant status.
In fact: my calendars account was already nominated for giant status, though of course that doesn’t mean it will be accepted. I’ll go ask in the forums.
[edit]Found in the forums that this is a real issue. Brenda: now I AM regretting making it. I will have to leave this to simmer for a bit to see what I’ll do. I can of course transfer all the lenses back to the old account and leave the new one up for the backlinks. [/edit]
Apparently, as we were discussing this, the giant squid team decided to change the rules. See: http://www.giantsquidshowcase.com/2010/01/08/multiple-giant-squid-accounts/
That first rules still isn’t how I’d like it, but I’m happy to hear there’s movement on this front.
I was really surprised to see you had a second account, but I can totally understand why too because you have so many helpful lens. Did you just transfer the lens over to your new account? It would drive me insane to try and handle two squidoo accounts. So for me I will just keep adding labels and hope for the best.
Can I ask you another question off subject (really) I found you this morning by visiting one of your “low rating lens” as you called it, have you noticed an increase on those lens since doing that?
One of the reasons for doing this was to decrease the energy going into off-niche lenses. So it’s actually a way to save time.
As for traffic – no, that’s not off topic – I have not noticed a decrease in traffic, nor an increase. It seems pretty stable, within the general upward trend of traffic to my lenses.
I totally understand your reasons for wanting several Squidoo accounts to separate niche lenses. What you say makes a lot of sense. I find it difficult to handle my almost 60 lenses myself. I think the best policy is to be up front with everything – just like you are doing now. Maybe at a later point in time things will work out so that everyone will be happy. Good luck with all your efforts.
Actually Laniann,
I’m pretty happy the way things are. I have three squidoo accounts, two of which have giant status, and together they make me regular additional income. What more could I ask for?