Lens Harbor

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 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.