Lensmastery by Linda

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  The Muse Online Writers Conference *and* My Workshop There

  linda 05:42:48 pm on July 31, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: web design, websites, writers, writers conferences, writing

  Are you a writer? I’m guessing that most Squidoo lensmasters are writers - after all, we have to write to create lenses, right?

  Have you heard of the annual Muse Online Writers Conference?

  The 2008 conference will be held from October 13 through 19. It is all online, and all FREE.

  To participate you must register by September 1.

  Last year was my first year to participate, and I had so much fun I offered to present a workshop at this year’s conference.

  I’ve never done anything like this before, and honestly, many times during the year I’ve questioned my decision as I rushed to meet deadline after deadline, getting things ready for the conference coordinator. I’ve got a bit of stage fright but I’m going ahead with it anyhow.

  My workshop is called Creating An Impressive Writing Website.

  I chose this workshop because I was a professional web designer from 2002 through 2007. I cherish the hope of helping writers learn to make attractive, professional quality websites. I’m doing this because so many writing websites I visited were substandard and didn’t show the writer’s talents to the best advantage. Writers need help in the web design department… and I’ll be there to answer questions every evening for the entire week.

  The conference is divided into two sections - the chats and the message board. I’ll have a section on the message board that I’ll work on daily, and will appear at one chat, on Friday evening.

  The Muse Online Writers Conference is about much more than my little workshop. There are dozens of talented presenters… and they all have one or more topic to present. Some of these presenters are so gung-ho they’re presenting on multiple topics. I have to admire them!

   

• What Feelings Do You Have When You Publish A New Lens?

  linda 02:31:04 am on July 24, 2008 | 3 | # |
  Tags: lao tse, squidoo

  What are you feeling when you hit that ‘publish’ button and wait to see what your new lens looks like? Do you feel relieved to have it over and done with? Do you feel excitement? Trepidation? Exhaustion?

  Producing a new lens is like having a new baby. At first you look on it as a strange new entity, albeit one you’ve loved and become familiar with as you put it together, wrote the words, and chose the images to go with it.

  Tonight I finally finished a lens I originally set up back in the summer of 2007. It was the last WIP lens I had from last year. I was SO happy to see it finally ready to leave my WIP list and enter the big world of Squidoo.

  I felt joy, relief, and fear (of it not being perfect yet)… yet a great weight lifted from me. The topic was Lao Tse - the Chinese philosopher who wrote the Tao Te Ching more than 2000 years ago.

  What made me think I could write about Lao Tse? I didn’t know much about him though I enjoyed occasionally leafing through the book and trying to understand the philosophy.

  Honestly, writing this lens required a lot of research. I read several pages about him out there in Internet Land. I had to list references on the lens.

  It is easier to write lenses about a topic you’re intimately familiar with, but then I’d be stuck writing about what we do at work while we’re waiting for customers to arrive. Personally, I need to expand my consciousness and thought doing research to learn about Lao Tse wouldn’t hurt me at all. I was right about that, and enjoyed finding photos of Chinese paintings in the public domain that I could legally use on the lens.

  So now it is over. The lens is alive. The die is cast. The words are written, and the public can see it. I feel SO very pleased.

  What is your most recent lens? How do you feel about publishing it?

   

• Blogging and Squidoo - Each Feeds The Other

  linda 03:35:27 pm on July 23, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: blogging, lens promotion, seo

  I now have more than ten blogs on a variety of topics. I also have over 35 Squidoo lenses on similar topics. For example, I have a writing blog at Perspectives on Writing. To that blog I can link my literary arts lenses because the topics are similar.

  I have blogs on other topics - for example, Bigfoot Sightings (the blog) complements my Bigfoot Sightings lens. They are linked to each other, and they both get lots of traffic.

  I have a new movie review blog: Mystic Movie Reviews. This will help drive traffic to the SquidFlix lenses I’m planning. Likewise, I can promote my movie review blog by linking to it on my SquidFlix lenses.

  The goal is to keep the same subjects together. Placing links on appropriate sites with similar topics increases the SEO value of your links.

  I’m not recommending that anyone go out and get ten blogs. In fact, that’s crazy-making, believe me. If you can have one or two blogs and manage to keep them up to date, you’ll be doing fine. You will find tips on blogging like an expert at my lens, Expert Blogging.

  Two of my favorite bloggers whose niche is to help us learn to blog better are Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. Both these guys are phenomenal and worth knowing. Their blogs are worth reading. I’ve also participated in Chris Garrett’s forum, Authority Blogger. Great stuff there. The two men got together and wrote a fantastic book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.

  You can learn to blog like a pro. You can use blogs to promote your lenses and you can place your blog RSS feed on your lenses. It’s a win-win situation for those of us ready to do both.

   

• Thoughts on Low-Traffic Lenses

  linda 01:25:22 am on July 21, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: lens promotion, seo, squidoo traffic

  Like most of you, I have some lenses that get no hits, or very few. I’m going to have to focus on doing things to make these lenses viable.

  The most important thing I can do is to make sure these lenses are linked from as many places on the Internet as possible. I’ve got a lens that lists places where links can be posted - for example, MySpace blogs, Xanga blogs, and many Web 2.0 sites. I’m making a list of these sites on Squidoo Traffic: How To Promote Your Squidoo Lens. This lens is becoming an ongoing research project to find places where lensmasters can create back-links for their lenses.

  After making sure I’ve got back-links in place, I’m reviewing key elements of the lenses that aren’t performing. I’m checking the keywords, comparing them to the ones I find at Google’s Keyword Tool. I also make sure those keywords are represented in headings and other text on my lens. I check out the search engine results to see how possible it is that my lens could ever rank on page one of the search engine results for my chosen keywords. If need be, I change the main keywords to something longer (the long-tail) so I’ll eventually get to page one of the results.

  I’m pleased with the number of lenses I have that do get search engine traffic, and encouraged to keep trying for the lenses that are not working yet. I know that with constant updates and keyword tweaking I’ll most likely succeed sooner or later. I’ve done this with some of my websites - with great success.

  There may come a time when I feel I must leave a dead lens and go on to other projects, but for now I’ll keep trying. I like all my lenses and would love to see them succeed.

   

• Creating Titles That Attract Lens Visitors

  linda 12:51:43 am on July 18, 2008 | 5 | # |
  Tags: benjamin franklin, copywriting, titles

  I’ve learned my lesson. I created a lens about Benjamin Franklin’s amazing books, but nobody visited. Let’s face it - Benjamin Franklin is yesterday’s news, and not everyone is into rehashing history.

  The title I gave my lens, Books and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, sounded like we’d be spending an hour in a dusty old library trying to decipher handwriting barely legible by today’s standards. What could old Ben tell us that we’d want to know about, anyhow? Sure he had some cool aphorisms, but he wasn’t like King Solomon by any standards. Or was he?

  I took a good long look at the reasons why my lens wasn’t attracting any attention. I was disappointed because I read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography last year and was astounded and delighted with the personality, attitudes and accomplishments of the man I found there. I wanted to tell more people what a cool guy he was. I wanted people to read his autobiography and find out for themselves what this man who helped found our country was really like.

  So I thought about what in the book had delighted me most… and realized it was that he’d embraced a vegetarian diet at an early age. So the new title of my lens is Benjamin Franklin Was A Vegetarian. Now the lens is getting hits… maybe because people don’t believe it could be true. I dispel that notion by quoting him regarding his vegetarianism.

  Now I’m looking at a few of my other lenses that are bombing. I’ve got two I’m concerned about right now. I changed the one called Tents to Ten Ways To Use A Tent, but it still isn’t getting hits - even though I came up with some really cool ideas for using tents. I even impressed my significant other, Bob, and that takes talent.

  The other lens that is doing even worse (current rating: 75,590!!!) is Expert Blogging. I’m wondering what I can do to jazz up that title so people will click on it. Maybe the topic of expert blogging is just so overdone on the internet these days that it will never have the chance to be seen in the search engines. And possibly Squidoo lensmasters pass it by because they aren’t bloggers per se - for the most part they are lensmasters only.

  Perhaps Benjamin Franklin gave us the principle on which we should rely when choosing our lens names: “If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”

   

• Five Things I’ve Learned About Successful Squidoo Lensmasters

  linda 11:14:47 pm on July 15, 2008 | 7 | # |
  Tags: , Lensmasters, Squidoo Tips

  Here are five things I’ve learned about successful Squidoo lensmasters thus far:

  Successful Squidoo Lensmasters Help Each Other - Squidoo lensmasters, the successful ones, are some of the most helpful and encouraging people I’ve ever been pleased to meet. They’re joyfully having a positive Squidoo experience and are aware that there’s plenty of room for others to be successful, so they help lift others up by sharing information on what led to their success.

  Successful Squidoo Lensmasters Provide Helpful Information - Rather than using a lens as a simple sales page, something that turns people off, successful lensmasters provide real information that people will appreciate and return to when needed. Rather than focusing on sales, they focus on content.

  Successful Squidoo Lensmasters Connect With Readers - They get to know the people who read their lenses. They ask for feedback in terms of guestbook entries, polls, and duels. They become friends with as many of their fellow Squidoo writers as possible, and help them promote their lenses.

  Successful Squidoo Lensmasters Use Lots of Images - It is still true that a picture is worth 1000 words, and successful Squidoo lensmasters know that. They adorn their lenses with all types of graphics to catch the eyes and delight the souls.

  Successful Squidoo Lensmasters Don’t Worry About Competition - I’ve heard it time and again on advice lenses of successful lensmasters. They don’t bother looking to see if a topic has already been done. Every lensmaster will have a unique take on a topic anyhow, and those who tend their lenses like flowers in a garden will be more likely to gain in lensrank. There’s no doubt that competition will always exist; we don’t need to consider ourselves limited by it.

   

Twitter Updates

LindaJoMartin: I just updated my Squidoo page: Bigfoot Sightings / http://tinyurl.com/6dwsen

LindaJoMartin: Tonight we watched Surfwise, a documentary about the Paskowitz family - two surfer parents with nine surfer children raised in an old RV...

LindaJoMartin: I just updated my Squidoo page: John Titor / http://tinyurl.com/6yvwam

LindaJoMartin: I just updated my Squidoo page: Raymon Grace: The Future is Yours - Do Something About It! / http://tinyurl.com/5tybqq

LindaJoMartin: I just updated my Squidoo page: Ten Must-Read Classics of Great Literature / http://tinyurl.com/6at32q

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