My Squid Life

In the past week I learned about several new Mixx.com communities and just yesterday evening when I got back home I found out about the Rock the Squid forum. I’ve submitted by Cameras for Kids and Fiero lenses and visited several others that were posted.  For any Squidoo lensmasters who haven’t seen it, I suggest paying the site a visit and signing up immediately.

Promoting or creating, that is the question. It’s the end of the month and I feel compelled to try to boost lensrank but I’m not sure I can do much this late in the game. I’ve decided my time in the next couple of days will be dedicated to doing some tweaking with tags, updating, and submitting some things to Mixx which is new to me in addition to my regular blogging. New lenses will have to wait until the end of the week. 

I’m never sure which lenses to target in my efforts.  Do I focus at the top where there seems to be hope, at the bottom where almost anything could be an improvement, or on topics that are personal favorites?  Right now I’m leaning toward ones that seem to be popular topics in the forums I frequent and thus I believe should be performing better; bringing in affiliate sales.  My International Cell Phones lens is an example.  I can’t count how many questions I get about this stuff but it only has 3 clickouts and a  couple of visits a week.  Can we say invisible?

Another target is my International Text Messaging lens. It gets a reasonable 250 or so visitors per week but I have a whopping 3 cents worth of sales.  Maybe I need to look into seeing if some of the online services I link to have affiliate programs and other ways to monetize. I don’t give up on a lens easily, they require a lot of time to create and my reasoning for doing them still seems solid.

I’ve been a little distracted by the idea of doing some Knols on Google but right now I struggle enough with focus I guess it will have to wait a few weeks at least.

Even as someone with limited SEO knowledge, I’ve long known that Google showers down more love on sites and pages that have fewer affiliate links. Luckily, the Squidoo community is filled with many bright and experienced lensmasters and they often provide the tips I need to get me moving in a better direction.  Even in cases like this, where I know in the back of my mind there is a better way to do things but in the crush of things to do I haven’t yet acted, they step in and provide tips that make it seem so easy.

Today, I’m going to be doing some lens tweaking.  I ran across a blog post by Captain Squid (aka Loyalis) discussing the option of adding “no follow” to your affiliate links.  Ok, now why hadn’t I thought to do this? Now I don’t know that this will make or break a lens but it certainly makes sense.

To start, I think I will just implement this on 10 lenses or so and watch them for a few weeks.  Then maybe I will be able to determine whether or not any positive results are due to the “no follow” affiliate links versus the typical lensrank boost that occurs when I freshen up a lens. Time may tell.

Ok, it’s not really a big deal but this is the first time I’ve had a lens in the top 100. My  Text Messaging Help lens hit #98 today. I didn’t notice it until just now….ki yi yippee yippee yi!  It’s not a personal favorite, but I’ll take it where I can get it. My overall lens rank for 78 lenses is 18,460 but I have one pulling things down at 435,000 because it hasn’t been published yet.

I’ve worked in health care for many years; with the elderly, those with brain trauma, and even with the hearing impaired, deaf, and children.  My online life has been more devoted to electronics and tech products.  I guess because of my background in working to help families and patients better understand their situation and how to deal with it, I have devoted myself to teaching the basics and trying to do it in a fashion that’s useful for those with very limited knowledge about the subject matter.

I have even found that I still very much enjoy exploring the options available for those with special needs. My Cell Phones for the Hearing Impaired, Cell Phones for Seniors, Amplified Phones, and HP Printing Mailbox lenses are examples of this. I suppose these types of topics will never receive thousands of visitors within a month but they do give me personal satisfaction.

With Boomer’s coming of age, I see that large companies are beginning to shift some of their energy toward the needs of seniors and I suppose I will be finding even more fodder for related topics. My recent Emergency Only Cell Phones touches on this a bit and I am hoping that the increased need for such information will be reflected in my traffic.

I seem to prefer lenses that are all encompassing but I might do better to break them down. I created a Growing Up 70â’s lens recently and chose to include a little bit of everything in it: news, fashion, food, music, movies, toys, cars, and so forth. After I got started however I realized I couldn’t add much detail about anything due to the length of it. 

My Saving Money lens suffers from the same affliction. Too much info for one lens and probably not targeted enough to get good traffic. Now I have topics to last me for another 10 or 15 lenses which can link back to these broader topics.  I need to get more photos to do that but it may be fun.

Lenses, just like webpages obviously need to be highly targeted, niche specific creations to get the best results.

Good news, bad news. I’m finally working on lens number 75. It’s my only work in progress. The good news this morning is that all of my other 74 lenses are above the 39,000 mark in lens rank. The bad news is that only 7 of them are in the top tier, 35 of them above 10,000 and as usual none in the top 100.

Top one hundred hasn’t really been a goal based on my lens topics but it has been a bit tantalizing when some of them linger close. Targeted traffic has really been more of my focus. Still it’s nice to see nothing languishing at the bottom of the heap.

A couple of months ago, Squidoo changed the layout of maxed lenses a bit and Table of Contents/Explore Related Pages sections were added directly below the introduction module.  I wasn’t too pleased at first as I felt there was far too little of my content above the fold and was concerned visitors to my lenses would simply click away from my page before seeing any content. In desperation, I did the only thing I could imagine to get as much content near the top as I could: I turned off the Table of Contents.

Recently, when I was viewing my lenses as my visitors see them, I realized what a nasty experience it was to navigate my lenses. Even my lenses that are rather short require quite a bit of scrolling down to find information. As a visitor I would likely leave or possibly miss the information despite sticking around to look for it; I simply hate scrolling.

I think about lens content and how to organize it as I build my lenses. I think about how easy it is to read, how it looks visually, and so forth after it’s published and I can view it as others do. However for reasons that completely escape me, I never really imagined what it was like to navigate the page. How basic, how embarrassing. In my own defense I often tried to bullet point lens content in the introduction so that visitors knew the information was there; but they were still left with scrolling and searching to find it.

This weekend I’m going to be spending some time going through my lenses adding in a Table of Contents for easy navigation on any lenses that are missing that feature; the majority of them. In addition, I will probably need to do some editing of module titles so that my readers can easily interpret which one contains the information they want or need. 

Well, we are just past mid-year and it is also the midway point of the month. At the beginning of the year I set some Squidoo goals.  First, I wanted to have 120 lenses by the end of the year.  I’m working on number 74 as I write this so I think I may get there. I just finished All About Cell Phone Batteries and Foreign Film Reviews among others in the past several days.

Another goal was to earn an average of $2 per lens from Amazon and e-bay.  Since my first lenses in 2006 which had few products actually featured on the page, I have targeted adding more relevant Amazon and e-bay modules. In addition, I have moved such modules to mingle with the related text versus reserving it all for the end of the lens.  I was hesitant to do this as I was concerned about it looking spammy but it seems to be working a bit better. I don’t know that I will hit my target; for the month of July I stand at only $.52 per lens showing on the dashboard for such sales. Even if that doubles I will only be half way there.

Most lenses age. Something may be a hot topic for a few weeks or months and then it fades into oblivion. Certainly my gadget lenses are prone to dropping off of the map; especially when they are targeted toward one device.  I understand lenses will come and go but I prefer longevity so that the lens is more of an investment, something that will continue to earn over time.

Unfortunately I haven’t spent much time contemplating how to extend the useful life of a lens but I think I should .  One strategy that I have played with some is shifting the focus, or at least adding a focus, to a lens regarding accessories, repair, replacement parts and so forth for people who already have the device in question but might be looking for such things. My AT&T Tilt Phone and DLP TV lenses are two examples.  I have seen some signs that this can breathe some new life into a lens that is fading in popularity. Visits go up and a few sales for parts, repair manuals, and so forth generate a little more from lenses that seemed to be destined to produce absolutely nothing more.