Launched: How to Make a Halloween Chandelier

Halloween chandelier at night.

Well, it finally happened… 5 years after being tossed overboard from Squidoo and landing on HubPages, I built my first hub. Not just any old hub, it’s a Halloween how-to hub! Now you can discover how to turn an old light fixture into a Halloween chandelier.

This was inspired by a fun project that I did to give our old dining room chandelier new life as a cool prop for my Halloween graveyard. Fortunately, I thought ahead about publishing this and took pictures throughout the process. It covers all you’ll need to know including where to find an old light fixture, tips for painting and where to get the right flicker bulbs.

I hope you enjoy it and please let me know how your Halloween chandelier turned out!

Launched: Tackle Fantasy Football

The latest group of lenses/hubs I’ve moved off of HubPages are my prized fantasy football lenses. These now have a home on my new blog, Tackle Fantasy Football.

This is the second step in my strategy to move lenses to their own sites. It’s also the biggest move affecting eight of my fantasy football related lenses. That’s nearly 8% of my active lenses when Squidoo ran aground and includes my only “Lens of the Day” winner. In addition to the old stuff, I’ve also written several new articles for the blog.

The main reason for moving this content off of HP was freedom. Freedom to write and format as I want; link to other sites and products that I want to; and not be concerned that a minor update will result in the content being unfeatured by HP. No concerns about an unexpected sale or shuttering of the site, either.

There are a few other lenses such as Fantasy Team Name Ideas that apply to most fantasy sports and a couple football ones that will remain as hubs for now. My hubs about other fantasy sports will also stay as hubs.

This project took longer than planned. I way underestimated the time involved to convert each hub into a blog post. Plus the time spent on logistical and technical issues with managing my own site.

The effort is worth it because my content is now fully under my control and the old lenses provide a solid foundation to expand and grow in the future. So please check out the new site when you’re looking for some good fantasy football advice!

Image Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nashville District, used under Creative Commons.

Charting A New Course

It’s been three years since Squidoo ran aground and our lenses were transferred to HubPages. While I don’t miss the frequent rearranging of deck chairs that SquidHQ required of lensmasters in its last two years, I do miss the revenue and freedom to publish curated lists.

My annual earnings on HubPages have been less than what my typical monthly earnings were on Squidoo, even in its final months. This is mainly because my hubs don’t get anywhere near the amount of traffic they did as lenses and HubPages tightly limits the number of Amazon and other affiliate links.

To make matters worse, you never know when editing a hub will cause that hub to become unfeatured (meaning it won’t be crawled by search engines or featured on other hubs). That’s because editing a hub sends it through the arbitrary quality assurance process where it may get dinged because of a new interpretation of what makes a quality hub, even if it’s been featured for over three years with no issues. This can effectively discourage authors from maintaining their hubs by fixing broken links, adding content, etc…the opposite of what HP staff should want.

So I’m finally doing what a lot of other former lensmasters had been recommending, moving some of my content to my own sites. Not all, only those pages which don’t fit HubPages’ rules, particularly on number of Amazon links, or content that can justify and support being on its own site. Particularly content that I want freedom to format and update how I want without wondering if an edit will cause it to lose featured status.

My first launch of redeployed lenses is the Lost Books List featuring much of the content from my lenses on the TV show Lost. Being a book list, the pages had more shopping links than HP permits and had been unfeatured for a while. I’m a fan of the show that enjoyed watching for new books and researching them for the list so I wanted this to have a new home.

Many of my other hubs will remain on HP. The hubs that are on HP’s niche sites generally do a little better than those on the main site. I may even add new ones there since HP is still a platform to publish stand alone articles on a topic and I tend to get writing ideas on a variety of subjects.

I’m moving another group of lenses/hubs to a new site of my own that I expect to announce soon. And I have a few ideas for other moves.

Unfortunately, several of my hubs will be left to rot in unfeatured or unpublished status. They don’t fit HP’s model and aren’t worth the effort of moving to a stand alone single topic site.

My new course is set and the journey continues…