Using an Octopus to Drive Non-Members to Your Reviews
Nov 28 '00
This is a review of the "Octopus" Web service and how I use it to grab non-Epinions members in my tentacles and drag them to my Epinions pages.
Octopus is a free service that lets you build your own portal pages, but with more flexibility and customization features than you've ever seen in a portal before.
You start by registering, for free, at www.octopus.com. Then you can use the tools at the site to create your own personalized page. In fact, you can create as many personalized pages -- or "views," in Octopus terminology -- as you like.
You can use one of Octopus's supplied templates to start building your view or you can start with a blank page. Click on the Octopus "Edit" button and you will be presented with a large number of possible "sections" that you can drag and drop onto your page -- a stock quote section, a weather section, a top headlines section, etc. But that's not the coolest part ...
Did you know that there really is such a thing as an octopus's garden? Octopuses pile up rocks, shells, and shiny human artifacts around the entrances to their lairs. These collections are called octopus's gardens.
The coolest part of the Octopus service is that you can incorporate whole other Web pages into a single view. So if you have, say, ten favorite Web pages that you like to check every day, you can include all ten in a single Octopus view, allowing you to review them more-or-less all at once. Alternatively you can ask Octopus to "clip" only the parts of those Web pages that you're really interested in, omitting banner ads, extraneous graphics, etc.
This is a little hard to explain, so you really need to go to www.octopus.com and look at one of the sample views to see what I'm talking about. From a practical standpoint, what makes it possible to have multiple Web pages in a single view is that you can minimize the different page-containing sections to "tab" icons. Theoretically you could have 100 Web pages in a single view, represented by 100 little tabs. To see a particular Web page you just click on its tab, and voila! there's the page.
One of those people still trying to prove that Paul is dead claims that "octopus's garden" is British navy slang for a grave beneath the sea. In the Beatles song of that name, "this is obviously referring to Paul being dead in general," this person claims. (OK, whatever you say.)
The benefits of Octopus to managing your Web favorites/bookmarks are obvious. You could create one view just for local news and weather. If, like me, you are working on becoming a stock market millionaire, you could create another view with quotes and charts of your stocks, clips from your favorite parts of The Motley Fool site, etc. You could have yet another view containing Web pages and clips from sites dealing with a special hobby or personal interest of yours.
I have found only one drawback so far. When you launch a view, Octopus loads all of the Web pages that you have included in that view (even if they are minimized into a "tab" icon). This can really slow things down if very many of your "source" pages happen to be slow loaders.
Did you ever see the movie It Came from the Sea? It's about a giant octopus that attacks San Francisco. During a recent visit to S.F. I took pictures to upload to our family Web site, and in the middle of them I uploaded some movie stills I found of giant tentacles wrapped around the Ferry Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. Then I posted that we had decided to cut short our visit to the waterfront, for obvious reasons. (Well, I thought it was funny.)
Now how do you use Octopus to drive non-Epinions members to your Epinions pages? (Remember, that's how you earn "income share.")
After you create an Octopus view you can save it so it will always be available to you. The Octopus site has a "My Views" button; click it and you will be shown a pick list of all the views you have saved.
Here's the important point: When you save a view, you also have the option of saving it to an Octopus public directory. This is a categorized list of all the views that people have created to share with other users. For example, if you created a really great view of Web pages about, oh, I dunno ... octopuses, maybe ... you could publish it to the public directory for the benefit of other people who are interested in the same subject.
When I first read Moby Dick, I hated the way Melville kept stopping the story to tell me more than any sane person would want to know about the natural history of whales. If Melville were writing this opinion, he would probably interrupt the flow right now to inform you that octopuses are among the few invertebrates who can actually see images. Or that an octopus can change colors like a chameleon.
So here's what I did, and you could do it, too. I created a view in Octopus devoted exclusively to Epinions. I put in a brief explanation of what Epinions is, along with a link to my Epinions sign-up page. I added several sections containing links to different groupings of my reviews; for example, links to my humorous reviews, or links to my music reviews. I also put my picture on the page and a link to my Epinions profile.
Next, I titled this view the "'Make Money with Epinions' Super Page" and saved it to the Octopus public directory. Within a few hours it showed up in the listings with a big "New" icon drawing attention to it. Now everyone who uses Octopus has easy access to my page, which is designed to send people over here to Epinions (specifically, to my Epinions partner site). Feel free to check it out -- the URL, for your copying-and-pasting pleasure is:
http://www.octopus.com/view.oce?v=3A2553BCB6F911D4B7DC0050DA70B7B0
According to one Web site, experiments have shown that the octopus can learn to do unusual things, such as remove the cork from a jar to get to the food that is inside. Also, an octopus has three hearts. And there's such a thing as a tree octopus; it lives in the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State (all right, I found this one difficult to believe, too. But the Web site was quite convincing).
So, has my Octopus page driven non-Epinions members to Epinions by the droves? Well, by the half-dozens at least. After I created my special "view" and it appeared in the Octopus public directory, I did notice a slight pickup in non-member visits to my Epinions reviews. Not a huge rush by any means, but enough to make it worthwhile, I think. You could try it, too. Consider it one more tool out there to help you market Epinions to the masses and to gain an additional few cents in Epinions income.
Oh what joy for every girl and boy ...
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Epinions.com ID:
Steve_NC
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Member: Steve Smith
Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 28 members
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