Lens Harbor

Last February was my 4 year Squidiversary and the crazy celebrating included posting my Squid goals for 2010. We’re 8 months into the year so it’s time for the obligatory mid-year check on those goals (yes, this is 2 months late).

The main goal for 2010 is to double last year’s average monthly Squidoo earnings. That’s a big goal and I’m on track to beat it. As of the August 2010 payout, my Squidoo earnings are 251% of last year’s earnings at this point! (This only covers earnings from Squidoo, not outside affiliate programs…still have a lot to learn there.)

How did this happen? Danged if I know. A large chunk of it’s due to the ad pool payouts for each tier increasing so much this year…something that’s totally out of my control. Including Chitika and Infolinks earnings, the Tier 1 payout for August is more than double what it was for August of 2009. That’s awesome news for all lensmasters.

More lenses climbing into Tier 1 also helped big time. I credit that to a mix of having lenses with original content on good topics, some promotion, luck, and, possibly, lens age (most of my lenses in Tier 1 are over 2 years old). I focused on maintaining lenses that are on the edge of going from one tier to another. Basic stuff like making sure content is still relevant, keeping an eye out for new content to add and periodically checking lens stats to make adjustments if needed.

What about the other goals? Writing ideas down and better focusing my time online were my two other goals. These are subjective and tough to measure. I’m making a little progress on them. Free time has been sparse lately so that’s forced me to focus my computer activities more. Writing down ideas hasn’t gone as well, I still have a lot floating around in my head that should be jotted down. But there’s 4 months left in the year to improve that.

Not all my Squidoo time this year was spent counting pennies, I also built a few new lenses since my Squidiversary:

A couple new fantasy sports lenses…One is a beginners’ guide to fantasy golf and the other offers tips and ideas for hosting a fantasy baseball draft party.

Gardening is a rediscovered hobby of mine and it’s begun to inspire my lens ideas. Here’s my review of The Vegetable Gardeners Bible. The oregano in my garden went bonkers this year…I can’t harvest and use it fast enough. That inspired a spur of the moment lens on growing oregano.

Halloween costume lenses seem popular so I’m experimenting with them. So far I built ones on kids’ astronaut costumes and Top Gun fighter pilot costumes.

Having a new baby this year gave me the chance to try out some new baby gear and sparked the question, “Are baby wipe warmers overrated?”

My newest lens is a review of Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes which I just finished reading.

Hopefully some of these will help keep the Squid earnings growth going!

Four years ago today I discovered Squidoo via a CNN article. Squidoo was still in beta and I’d never heard of Seth Godin or cows with long purple tails before. It was an easy, free way to experiment with creating web sites and make a little money so I signed up.

I thought that maybe I’d come up with topics for 5-10 lenses total. Ha! I’m up to 73 published lenses with ideas for dozens more. The real challenge isn’t ideas, it’s balancing time between my family, full time job and other interests to turn those ideas into good lenses.

A lot’s happened on Squidoo since I joined. Mostly good (strong community, new modules & designs, improved stats, bigger pay outs) with some hurdles along the way (spam, one star bandits, one star vigilantes, rating exchanges). I’m excited about Squidoo’s future and the opportunities for lens masters…especially after yesterday’s payouts!

Creating lenses on many topics helped me figure out where my lens building interests and strengths are. I enjoy building “How To” and info consolidation lenses the most. My limited writing experience is mostly technical so these are a good fit for me. Whether it’s providing fantasy football tips or explaining how I get rid of hiccups, I like building lenses that are helpful to visitors.

Squid Achievements
It may be a short list but during my first 4 years I…

• Had one lens selected as LOTD
• Became a Giant Squid
• Received three Purple Stars
• Had one lens mentioned in a national weekly magazine (woohoo!)
• Received several blessings from Squid Angels (thank you!)
• Was interviewed and had a lens featured on Mimi’s excellent Squidoo Lens Review blog.
• Had a lens featured in a SquidU Review post
• Had a few lenses nominated for awards in different Squidoo contests
• Founded 3 groups

Possibly the best achievement is finding that someone’s posted a link to my lenses in a forum, blog, Facebook or Twitter as a reference. That’s when I know that my lenses are useful.

These modest achievements didn’t happen overnight. They required effort, learning and some good fortune. I’ve learned a lot from other lens masters via SquidU, lens master blogs, other lenses and some really helpful lenses on lens building. To everyone who’s ever rated, lens rolled, blessed, commented on or just visited one of my lenses…Thank You!

Goals for my 5th year (2010)
Enough rambling about the past, here are my goals for this year…

• Double Last Year’s Average Monthly Squidoo Earnings
  To justify the amount of time spent on Squidoo I need to focus on realizing my earning potential. This goal will drive the others for the year. I have some strategies in mind to reach it…doubling my number of lenses isn’t one of them. Adding a few new ones while improving the quality, cross linking and promotion of my existing lenses is. The increasing tier payouts are already helping towards this one.
• Write Things Down
  Ideas have been swimming around my head for years. Ideas for new lenses, improvements to existing lenses and blog posts to promote lenses. Time to get these out of my head, on paper, organized and into reality. I bought a notebook specifically for this goal and used it to draft this post.
• Make Better Use of My Online Time
  Yeah, this is a vague goal. I have limited time to spend online and I get distracted easily. Not a good combination. I’ll fire up the computer to work on a lens then get side tracked checking stats, email, watching funny YouTube videos or logging in to play an MMORPG “real quick”. The goal here is to have a purpose each time I log on and focus only on that.

So, what will I do to celebrate my Squidiversary? Well, I wrote a really long blog post. Tonight I’ll probably pop open a bottle of Yuengling and watch the season premiere of Survivor with my wife. During the commercials I might tell her about the cool use of the BlackBox module for displaying images I saw in a recent LOTD. That’ll get me a “You and your lenses” as she shakes her head. Eventually I might convince her to start building her own lenses…but that’s a goal for another year.

When I was a kid and we traveled near a battleship, submarine or other naval ship museum, my dad always made time for us to stop and tour it. I remember the thrill of exploring the ship and its labrynth of passages and compartments. Always wondering how the builders and crew kept track of all the pipes, wires and other systems that seemed to go everywhere.

My favorite part was checking out the bridge with all the controls, switches, gauges and other instruments. After that was walking the deck and imagining life at sea as I looked over the water. It’s a wonder I didn’t pursue a career in the Navy.

Touring ships is still an experience I enjoy today and want to share with my kids. It’s fun, educational and builds an appreciation of the history these ships made and the sacrifices of those who sailed them.

When I first built my Master and Commander series lens, I added a module listing a couple tall ships from the period that readers could visit and tour. Researching those ships was fun and I discovered there weren’t many places to find such a listing online.

So Tour A Tall Ship was launched. It’s a directory of over 30 tall ships around the world that you can tour. There’s a brief description of each with a link to the ship’s official website for more details. It’s one of my early lenses and a favorite.

Over the last year I added lenses for other classes of museum ships. The format varies a little for each but their mission is the same…provide searchers a consolidated directory of museum ships in each class to explore.

First came Tour A Battleship, soon followed by Tour An Aircraft Carrier. Both include info for wrecks that you can scuba dive on, too.

The newest addition to the fleet, lurking somewhere beneath the waves, is Tour A Submarine. I’m still researching and adding links to this one but it already has nearly 20 subs on 4 continents listed.

An auxiliary member of the fleet is Sail A Tall Ship. While the ships featured there aren’t stationary exhibits, many are historic ships and make ports of call where they open up for tours.

You can find more tall ship lenses at the Tall Ship Fans Group. I’ve also built my first niche lensography featuring all my nautical lenses. I’m always looking for new ships to add to the museum ship lenses so please tell me if you know of one not listed.

I’m very happy to announce that my wife and I are expecting another baby! Woohoo! We’re very excited and looking forward to the big day.

Now comes all the planning and preparation. It’s time to start getting the nursery ready, dust off our favorite baby gear (including the onesie extenders) and agree on some names. Lots to do but it’s all worth it.

Found something interesting when looking at lens stats for one of my bottom dwellers recently. The lens was created in January, 2009. I had an idea, built the lens and made a couple edits through January. Then did nothing with it. No promotion, no updates, nothing, and it got zero traffic for months.

You can see the effect of all this inactivity on lensrank by looking at the smooth curve between section A (when I updated the lens) and section B in the screen shot below. That’s the lensrank algorithm at work, steadily lowering my lensrank over time. It’s very graceful, actually.

Then in April the lens got its first visitor and lensrank soared about 74,000 spots. It got another hit or two into May which helped it tread water for a while. Then the rank dropped, the effect of all that traffic had expired.

But look at the right hand part of section B on the chart. Instead of going back to the same point it was at before the visits, the lensrank dropped further. It went all the way down to the point on the curve where it would’ve been if no one had visited the lens. Connect the lines under the traffic blips and you’ll still see that same graceful curve in action.

This pattern repeats in section C on the chart when the lens had brief periods of traffic in June and July. There were no clickouts, ratings or interaction with polls or guestbooks for the lens during the chart’s time period so we can eliminate those as variables.

What does this mean?
1. The effect of traffic visits are short lived. Once that effect is over the lensrank returns to where it would’ve been if the traffic never existed.

2. Lens updates matter. No surprise here, but notice in section A that lensrank got a bump from my updates and continued the curve from that new higher point. It didn’t revert back to the previous curve like it did for traffic. Or maybe it does revert back but at a much slower rate.

For the record, I’m not trying to solve the lensrank code. The behavior I’ve casually observed over 3 years is mostly consistent with what I’d expect from a ranking algorithm. Even so, I was intrigued at seeing such a clean curve.

Now it’s time to get that lens out of the cellar…

Woohoo! This week the poll on my lens about the online game Fallen Sword got its one thousandth vote! That’s way more votes than any other lens poll I have.

It didn’t happen overnight, the lens will be 2 years old in a few weeks, but it’s cool to see a poll get that much interest. It’s also good to know people read down the lens at least as far as the poll module. Here’s a screen shot…

One thing that I think helped get this much participation (other than traffic) was offering more than 2 choices. When I see a poll where the only options are “It’s Great” and “It Sucks”, I’ll usually pass if my opinion isn’t at either extreme. But if there are some more moderate options to choose, I’ll probably vote.

Look at the results above…40% of the votes were for the middle three options. That’s 400 votes that might not have been cast if the only options were “Awesome” and “Complete Rubbish”.

Ain’t paid for TV in over 9 years
Been doin’ just fine with my rabbit ears

Now every month I gotta send them my money
But I’ll get to watch The Office…man, that show’s funny

Yeah, I know, a real Blues tune shouldn’t end on a bright note. But I like my TV fresh and free off the airwaves and needed to find a positive here…plus this is my first attempt at writing a Blues tune.

Our local NBC affiliate’s signal is so weak that we had to watch The Office online or wait for the DVD. Now we’ll get to watch it when it first airs! Well…except when it’s on against Survivor, but we can still tape it.

So that’s a good thing and hopefully makes it easier writing out our new cable bill each month.

This summer offers a cool opportunity to see tall ships in action during the Tall Ships® Atlantic Challenge 2009.  It’s a series of tall ship races on a 7,000 mile course around the North Atlantic Ocean that follows the routes used when tall ships ruled the seas.  The race began in Vigo, Spain, last month and the Dutch vessel Tecla won the first race to the Canary Islands.  Now the fleet is racing to Hamilton, Bermuda.

There are 5 more stops in port cities along the course with multi-day tall ship festivals held in each city.  In addition to watching the ships sail in and out, events at each port typically include ship tours, dock parties and lots of fun, food & music.   These make for a fun date or family outing and can be educational at the same time.

Check the list below for more info on each port’s festival…
Hamilton, Bermuda June 11-15, 2009
Charleston, SC, USA June 26-29, 2009
Boston, MA, USA July 8-13, 2009
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada July 16-20, 2009
Belfast, Ireland August 13-16, 2009

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend any of the festivals this year…bummer.

If you can’t attend either, but would like to check out a tall ship then here’s a list of tall ships you can tour.  If you’re land locked far away from port you can try watching a good tall ship movie to get your fix.  And, for the more adventurous, you could sign up to join a tall ship crew as a trainee.

Like others, my lenses get a variety of guestbook comments.  Unfortunately some of them aren’t lens worthy…spam, profanity or flaming other commenters mostly…so they don’t get approved.

Years ago, when Squidoo rolled out the Guestbook module, I chose to keep any comments that I didn’t approve in pending status as a record of what had been submitted.  Yeah, I can be a pack rat…hate to throw stuff away in case it has a use someday.   And I like to keep stats on things.

What use could keeping unapproved comments around have? Entertainment value mostly.  It’s funny sometimes to scroll through and see the lame spam attempts.  But the annoyance of having to scroll through them every time I want to approve a comment now outweighs any entertainment value.

I just counted and my dashboard shows a total of 73 unapproved comments dating back to June, 2007.  40 of them are from other lensmasters, the rest from anonymous visitors.  I’m tempted to keep the ones from other lensmasters because I have used those to decide whether to ban someone from commenting if they continually post spam…but that wouldn’t reduce the scrolling issue much.

So I’m clearing out the bilge and getting rid of these worthless relics.

Does anyone else keep unapproved comments around…or do you toss them immediately?

(Rereading this post reminded me of the AT&T wireless commercials about the unused rollover minutes.)

When you have multiple lenses covering a core subject (especially one with its own jargon), it gets repetitive writing the same explanations over and over again.

Consider building a glossary lens to supplement the content on those lenses.  Then whenever you use a jargony term, simply create a hyperlink and point your readers to the definition on your glossary lens.

Benefits of this are:
1. A common set of original definitions that you write once and link to from your other lenses and blogs.
2. Continue to demonstrate your subject expertise by pointing visitors to explanations that you wrote.
3. Declutter your core lenses so they stay focused on the meaty content. If someone needs a definition, they can click on the link.
4. Another lens to earn revenue, attract search engine traffic and refer traffic to your other lenses!

After my 2nd or 3rd fantasy football lens, I built a fantasy football glossary to support them. About 2/3 of the visits come from my lenses that link to it but there are search engine visits as well. Plus it even refers a little traffic back to my other lenses.

My preference is to use a text module for each term defined. Use the term as your module title and write up an explanation in the body. Then you can link to that specific module from your other lenses using the term as the anchor text. Remember to add a handy Table of Contents for visitors who found your glossary from a search engine and are starting at the top of the lens.

Final thought…only hyperlink a term once per lens.  That way your lens text won’t turn into an unsightly mass of hyperlinks if you use that term a lot.