Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

Boy I’ve been busy this month. It’s as if a lot of pent up energy from having to do other things just came rushing out of me. I’ve made ton of new lenses…

Interfaith Jewelry – letting all religions coexist

Hamsa home decor and wall decoration

Albert Low zen quotes, books and biography

Thich Nhat Hanh Books

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows birthday party supplies

Het beste CSS boek

Economische puzzels: Rente, inflatie en deflatie

Dollar Crisis

Linda Nelson Stocks Folk Art

Folk Art calendars 2011

FINE art or FOLK art?

Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks (born 1937) is an American poet. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is nonetheless renowned as an interpreter of Rumi and other mystic poets of Persia.
Barks is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended the Universi…

Best Justin Bieber Party Supplies

Girls are going wild for Justin Bieber right now. What better way to celebrate their birthday than by throwing them a Justin Bieber Birthday Party? I’ve found you all the supplies you might need.

Justin Bieber Gifts

Justin Drew Bieber (born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian pop-R&B singer. He’s been singing and playing instruments since the age of five. Soon after his mother uploaded video’s of his performances on youtube – for friends and family – he became an onlin…

Search for the Soul in Everyday Living, The Mother

Inspiring and thought provoking view on the spiritual path. A bit dated in places, but not less fascinating for it.
There are real gems here though – things you’ll find rarely anywhere else. Though in places this book is evidently rooted in a time b…

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Together they built Auroville, an ashram in Southern India (south of Madras). He was the reclusive yogi, she his outward manifestation or shakti. That is: she taught, she organized, she was there for people to related to. He sat in his room and kept…

Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching & Method of Practice

This is a fascinating book. I’m constantly finding things that are different or the same as Blavatsky’s theosophy. Her teachings are my spiritual home base, which doesn’t mean I’m not open to other paths – or blind to Blavatsky’s defects. The reason…

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo

Reviewed in the West as the only decent biography of Sri Aurobindo Goshe, from politician, to poet and guru. This guy lived a fascinating life and Peter Heehs describes as many aspects of it as the Sri Aurobindo archives can help enlighten us on. In…

How to keep your ipad clean with a screen protector

The ipad is just fabulous, but you want it to stay that way. If you aren’t going to carry it around in a sleeve, at least put a screen protector on, to avoid scratches and thumbprints on that beautiful screen. And no, they will not prevent the touch…

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Movie Posters

Oh, they know how to keep us exited, don’t they? They’ve split up the last volume of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books into two. The fight with Voldemort is going to take up two movies. Part one is coming out in 2010 – right at the end. The movie post…

Stunning Islamic Jewelry for Women

Don’t you love wearing a bit of silver and gold -that also expresses your faith? I’ve found you hamsa pendants, star and crescent rings and everything in between.

Museum level fine art calendars 

Museum Fine Arts Calendars and Planners 2011

I’ve found you calendars and planners with museum quality fine art – including Van Gogh, Chagal and modern design. Most of these were brought out by art museums, who of course have the expertise to make a very special calendar.

Shown here is the Van…

July 27th 2010 – Pets calendars 

2011 cute pets calendar and planners

Cats and dogs, canaries and fish, rats and other small rodents: those are some of the pets people keep at their home. I’ve found you calendars featuring your favorite pets.
Pets are animals kept in a home, for the enjoyment of the owners. There is n…

Cute Stuff Is The Prettiest Stuff Ever!

Cute stuff is pretty, because that’s just what it is.

Buddhist Goddesses Art by Romio Shrestha

I got ‘Goddesses of the celestial gallery’ for my birthday (2010). It was quite a chore to take it home: it’s almost as tall as this desk! (aka Poster size)

Romio Shrestha portrays the main Tibetan Buddhist Goddesses (and a few Hindu ones) in dazzli…

India kookboek

De spijzen uit India zijn al eeuwen een verrijking voor de Nederlandse keuken. De laatste decennia zijn ook de recepten uit landen als India, Indonesie en China populair. Ik heb drie kookboeken geselecteerd die je helpen de Indiase keuken in huis te…

Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon) (April 23, 1879 – August 5, 1940) was an English writer. He also wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt.

Born in London, at age 16 he ran away from home and began an odyssey in India, Africa, and other pa…

Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein

Real science is always hard to summarize. This book by Ioan Couliano is a book like that. I read the whole thing, but to be honest the most fascinating parts were the introduction and the conclusion. The rest helped flesh it out, but it did get a bit…

The Wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Ravi Ravindra

The yoga sutras are two thousand year old spiritual classic. In India every spiritual teacher of any note has written a commentary on it. Ravi Ravindra is the latest of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s students to do the same. For that reason alone this book wil…

Unfinished Autobiography by Alice A. Bailey

I’m not really into Alice Bailey’s work, nor into that of ‘The Tibetan’, but this autobiography is great. Funny, full of self knowledge and simply fascinating from the point of view of esoteric history.

Alice Bailey was born and raised in England in…

Buddhism and Buddha bags

Cute and beautiful bags inspired by the wisdom of the Buddha and Buddhism. Like the Buddha bag on the left, which refers to the doctrine of karma as it says ‘What we think we become’.

The lotus shown is a symbol of spiritual attainment as it grows o…

Cute netbook sleeves and ipad cases

Laptop sleeves are beautiful, cool or pretty ways to protect that precious piece of equipment. Whether your netbook is mostly used for work, gaming or staying in touch with friends, you really need a way to protect it against your life. For small lap…

My Lenses Module on squidoo

My new favorite module is the My Lenses Module. No, I should not exaggerate: the text/write module and the amazon spotlight module are probably my most used modules. Still, the My Lenses module does make my life SO MUCH EASIER.

I’m not talking ordin…

I was one of the people, last week, who told squidoo HQ to get rid of rel-nofollow on a few often used (or tempting) modules. They took very fast action, so that now the modules you’d expect to have nofollowed links – do (amazon, RSS etc), and those that you’d expect to have followed links also do (My lenses, Big picture module etc.). See my overview of Squidoo modules and SEO.

The main result is that we can now use the My Lenses (new lens) and About Me modules to automatically interlink our lenses. This is very good news. After all, if you have many lenses, keeping them interlinked well is major work. The My lenses module makes it easy to automatically interlink up to 25 lenses in a category (or using a tag). It makes it easy to automatically promote your newest lenses – for people and Google. It’s sort of like CMS-ing your squidoo account.

I advise anybody with many lenses who just can’t manage to keep their topical lensographies updated to use the My Lenses module to do so. Seriously. At the very least, if you’re a giant, add some pages to your lensography and populate them with the My Lenses module. But let me also note that niche lensographies, if properly promoted and interlinked, can rank very well in the serps. See for instance my Buddhism lensography. They can even make sales, see my Buddhist Gifts lens(ography).

More new on Marketing Spiritual:

• Affiliate marketing and getting google traffic.
• Wordpress as a CMS: showing only child pages of page in menu
• Google blogger/blogspot SEO: title, blog organization & interlinking

Since last time I blogged here I’ve been busy with other things than squidoo, however I have managed to make a few new squidoo lenses. I decided it was also time to share some of my top earning second and third tier lenses…

First up: my newest lenses:

The new why veg group inspired me to make a lens on How I became a vegetarian.

I reviewed one of the best spiritual books I’ve read in a long time: The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff.

On almost the same topic, but for a strictly theosophical audience, Reflections on an Ageless Wisdom: A Commentary on The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett.

Getting another purple star inspired me to make a lens about my squidoo honours: Who is Katinka on squidoo?

Then in my calendar niche I made two new lenses: One about calendar reminder stickers and the other about Celtic Calendars.

Last but not least, sharing the Top Zen Buddhism Books.

My most successful second tier lenses:
1) Islamic Muslim Jewelry
2) Best books on Buddhism

My most successful third tier lenses:
1) Lightweight 13 inch laptop
2) Student Flute – select a flute for a beginner player

I started a new blog recently, about horoscope jewelry to be exact. I mailed RMS about it, and she featured it on her Giant Squid Community Showcase

New spiritual Lenses

As my project is starting to get up to speed, I’m spending less time online. So my list of new lenses since my last update is rather short (and bound to be getting shorter next month)

Help with Kundalini – books

I have a feeling many of you haven’t switched over to my Marketing Spiritual Blog yet, to keep up with my squidoo help tips So I thought I’d do an update here. Note that I’ve set it up so it’s easy to subscribe by email on there.

So here are my most recent help posts. There are several about the blogging platform WordPress, as that’s what I’m busy working with this month. But there are a few about squidoo promotion and SEO as well:

Should I have a seperate blog of each squidoo lens?

Pagerank sculpting: putting rel-nofollow in your own links- DON’T. This was in response to something Alex told AJ to do. She decided not to take my word on this one. Pity, though understandable.

Link wheels – getting yourself links & blogging for profit

Thematic or Thesis – choosing a WordPress Theme, about my new design for my Marketing Spiritual blog, and several of my other blogs as well.

Reciprocal linking devils…

And last but not least: Menu item only on one category page and posts in that category in WordPress, using widgets.

It’s time for my monthly update on the new lenses I made… As those of you who follow squidu know, I’ve landed a big webdesign account, so I won’t be as active here. Still, I’ve managed to build quite a few lenses in the past month:

One of the most influential Zen Buddhist teachers of our day is Steve Hagen. So I finally made him a lens…

Calendar lenses:

2010 Real Leather Planners, Date Books, Calendar books
Owl Calendars 2010
and Fun trivia facts desk calendars 2010
Farm animals 2010 Calendars

Then three lenses that have to do with calendars, yet aren’t built to sell… Two of them were made as part of the giant squid challenge. One was made because I felt that my calendars blog account should not hold ONLY sales lenses. So here goes, in chronological order:
A calendars quiz
Calendars Blog: How I stay organized
Digital Calendar or Pen to Paper?

I did three book reviews this month:
A World Full Of Gods: about the early history of Christianity, The Miracles Of Exodus and Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin D. Yalom.

In my new mini-niche I made three lenses about laptops and their bags:
First about my new Lightweight 13 inch laptop, then about rolling bags to carry it, and then for good measure a lens about cute wheeled bags in general.

Sometimes, not often, I make lenses simply because a reader suggests it. This month the result isn’t yet that good. But they’re a start on gathering anti religious and anti Christian quotes.

We had a rare white winter, with not just snow but natural ice to skate on as well. For the Dutch this is common enough for us to know what to do, but rare enough to make it a special occasion. So, of course, I made a lens about skating on natural ice.

My last niche this month was a dive into Marjolein Bastin. Marjolein Bastin is a Dutch lady who makes water color art, that is turned into all kinds of stuff by Hallmark. Some of it is rare by now, because the line sold out fast. I started with Marjolein Bastin calendars, and expanded to Marjolein Bastin Checkbook Covers, Vera the mouse, Marjolein Bastin Christmas and Marjolein Bastin Collectibles.

I’d already wished you all a Happy New Year, but I’d forgotten to mention the blogposts I’ve recently written on my Marketing Spiritual blog. Since today I’ve added a third, I thought I’d share them with you here:

1. Clean up after the holidays: page speed and more
   Christmas is gone and online marketing is getting back to normal. Time to start thinking about some maintenance issues.
2. How to get your page / lens / blog indexed in google
   I did an experiment…
3. Advantages and disadvantages of having several squidoo accounts
   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.