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.

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”.

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.

Three groups that I was a member of closed in the past week. Two of the groupmasters entered a reason why they disbanded the group in the notification email. Both were basically due to the level of effort to maintain the group and lack of participation. No idea why the third closed.

I wasn’t an active participant in any of the three but I am sad to see the “Dads of Squidoo” group close down. It was one of the first groups I joined on Squidoo and I always thought it was a good group theme.

Maybe I’ve been lucky or it’s because of their niche focus, but my two groups don’t take much time to maintain. I get the occasional off topic submission but those are dealt with easily. I doubt they’ll get to a point where I want to shut them down completely. At worst, I would just post a note that the group is closed to new lenses.

With many lame groups being created daily, it’s getting tougher to sift through and find ones worth joining. Fortunately, Spirituality did a lot of the work for us by building the Great Groups Guide. It’s a cool and handy guide to focused groups that actually feature their members’ lenses. What a concept! (Full disclosure: both of my groups are listed on the lens.)

Woohoo!! It took nearly 2 and a half years, but I published my 50th lens today!

Now I’m officially eligible to become a Giant Squid in September. I haven’t been this excited since I turned 35 and became eligible to run for US President! (hopefully I’ll have more success becoming a Giant Squid)

So what was the 50th lens? It’s my review of an excellent book called American Shaolin. The author took a break from college to study kungfu for two years with the Shaolin monks in China and wrote about his experience.

I’m creative writing challenged. I can wing it occasionally, but it’s not a skill that I’ve practiced much. So it’s a challenge to come up with funny or engaging lens and module titles.

Then I read Shane Amber’s amazing Rubberwood lens. It was featured as a Lens Of The Day back in the early days of Squidoo soon after I joined. Sadly, the lens has disappeared, it was one of the best I’ve seen…on topic, well laid out, witty, informative and about an interesting topic I didn’t know existed.

Anyway, Shane credited a site on the lens that he used to generate his module titles. It’s called the Advertising Slogan Generator. Simply enter your subject and the site returns a real advertising or popular slogan with your subject mashed in.

A few examples using “Squidoo” as the subject are:
Moms Like You Choose Squidoo
Snap! Crackle! Squidoo!
There’s First Love and There’s Squidoo Love
Obey Your Squidoo

The site has been very helpful to me when I’m struggling to find the right title. Now, instead of staring blankly at my lens workshop, I click over to the generator. I’ll use a slogan as generated or one of the slogans will trigger my creativity to develop the right one myself.

Give it a try when you need a creative catalyst! And thanks to Shane for the link!

It’s interesting to read different lensmasters’ opinions on the star rating system. Some like it, some don’t, some want to change it and others are indifferent. And everyone has their own way of assigning ratings.

The best approach for me is to evaluate each lens as objectively as possible. Over time, I developed a mental checklist of attributes that make or break a quality lens and I use that to score a lens. To keep that list consistent, I’ve published it in my new Star Rating Guide lens.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. What criteria would you change and why?

You think up great descriptions for your Link or Amazon Plexo items, save, publish and what do you see? The first 50 characters followed by more….

D’oh!…all that hard work writing the perfect description and now you have to hope readers will take the time to click more… to read it. For every single item in your Plexo.

Here’s how you fix that:
1. Edit your Plexo module
2. Click the Display tab
3. Select “Nope” for the “Use one line previews for item descriptions?” field.
4. Save the module and publish the lens.

Your Plexo will now display the full description for every item.