Lensmastery by Linda

For those of us with hundreds of Squidoo lenses, updating becomes a challenge. I’ve set an annual update date for every one of my lenses. Today’s update was for my Websites For Writers lens. I culled some bad links, added new content, improved the SEO, pinged it, and created a few new backlinks. Let’s see if it does any better in coming months. It is currently at a 11,729 lensrank. I expect it to move back into tier 2 when the Christmas season is over.

I set up a file in OneNote for my annual updates list. OneNote is a Microsoft program that comes bundled with Word and Excel, so unless you own those programs you probably don’t have it, but you could buy it separately at a reasonable price. It is a fantastic place for keeping notes about Squidoo work, plus I have a recipe file there, and lots of other things.

My page for updates is simple. I have one line for each day of the year, and have a link on that line to one of my lenses. I don’t have 365 lenses yet but when I do I’ll have to double up on the dates and do more than one update each day. I think I can handle that, because the updates are fun to do. You can always think of something cool to add to a lens. Also, I notice that lenses in the top 100 often have gobs of information on them, so there’s no harm in making a lens longer. The search engines love that!

When I update a lens for its annual refurbishing I like to look at every component of what’s already on there to make sure it is the best it can possibly be. One thing to watch for is whatever is in the Amazon modules. Often books are updated, or new books have been published that are perfect for display on your lens. Also look for better YouTube videos. You never know what might be out there that would be new, since last time you did a thorough update on that lens.

Happy lens updating!

What do you do when you’re burned out? Take a few weeks off? Well, I took more like a few months off – really – most of this year. I focused on my own websites instead of Squidoo – but now I’m back!

I made some changes in my Squidoo life. I’ve deleted some old lenses I was never too happy with. I think more will be deleted as time goes by. I am so happy seeing them gone. They were trouble to keep updated and for no good reason. They were neer-do-well lenses. Now they’re gone. What a relief!

I’ve gone back to having multiple accounts. I have over 200 lenses – split between four accounts.

1. My main account is for literature, food, and whatever else comes to mind. LindaJM
2. My American Citizen account is for lenses that wax political in nature.
3. Geniyyah is a spiritual name I use, and so this account contains a variety of woo-woo type spirituality lenses.
4. The last account is for lenses about the Baha’i Faith: Baha’i Light.

This week I’ve been working on building up the last three accounts. I’d like for them all to become Giant Squid accounts. Fifty lenses, minimum, as I recall. I have a long way to go on that! Still it is fun to stretch my imagination and get into those topics. This week I wrote about how to define spirituality which was insightful, especially when I started watching the many youtube videos about what spirituality is. Everyone has such individualistic beliefs about spirituality.

On the Baha’i account I wrote about Allah-u-Abha – What does it mean? because someone signed my profile page with the word, Allah’u'Abha. I thought maybe everyone who sees that might like to know the meaning of it. Then this morning I decided to start the day by writing about Baha’i morning prayers. Another great experience, sharing what I know about the Baha’i Faith. I’ve been a member of that religion for 42 years now! Some years better than others!

Hmmm… and that’s what Squidoo is about. Writing about what you know. I know a whole lot about Baha’i, and I need to share that. So far the account has only three lenses. Two are new. One sat there for months – all alone – it was about ‘Abdu’l-Baha and how He used to give his coats to the poor people every winter where He lived, in ‘Akka, Palestine (now Israel).

I’ve also managed to make a few new lenses in my main account. I made a lensography for my Christmas lenses: Pictures of Christmas, and also finished a Christmas lens about classic holiday movies. Fun, fun, fun. I should probably make a lot more Christmas lenses.

One lens at a time. It is good to be back!

Do you, as a Squidoo lensmaster and content writer, have a concept of ‘proprietary information’? This would include everything from the lensrank history of your most popular lenses, to the way you do updates, and what products sell best for you.

There seems to be a tendency with some lensmasters to “let it all hang out” but… we are not playing games here… we are conducting business. At least, most of us are. There are some very serious and talented earners among us and I aspire to be one of them.

I feel no need to let people know my Squidoo income level. Why others do, is strange to me, to say the least. What are people going to do when they see private income information: feel jealous or feel sorry for you, one or the other. So no, I don’t disclose my income just like I don’t tell people which of my lenses are making the most sales. The last thing I need is for fifty other lensmasters to make lenses that resemble mine and interfere with their success.

If you’re serious about making money, realize that a lot of what you do with your online business is proprietary information. You need your privacy. You don’t need to give away your hard-earned secrets.

I do plan to let people know some of my secrets, but have decided there will have to be a price. I will publish an ebook and those who are willing to pay the price will be allowed to know what I’ve learned… my proprietary secrets… or at least, some of them. I of course thought about putting my method on a lens and giving it free to everyone, but then, everyone who reads it would be doing the same things that I do, so no. I won’t do that. But those very few who are willing to pay for it, yes, they can share in the knowledge. This is my way of making sure that not too many people will have the information I’ve collected and done experiments with over the course of many months.

So, I wonder, do you as a content writer think it is better to tell everyone all about how you conduct your business, or do you think a certain amount of control over your proprietary information is necessary?

More next time…….

I haven’t used this blog for the last year but finally have come around and decided it is a great place to be. I will find new ways to use it – and have set up Chrome so it opens to this blog every Sunday. Blogging here once weekly will suit me fine.

2010 has been a year of re-creating myself as a blogger and online worker, and I’ve made progress at keeping many sites updated and learning new ways to make money online.

Squidoo has changed as well, and though I’m sure it is all good progress, sometimes I want to climb into a shell and pretend it isn’t happening. I’m not a huge monster fan (sorry!) but I like the points tab, and have enjoyed doing a few quests.

Most recently there’s the retro quest which I participated in by making San Francisco Sound Psychadelic Rock – Music of the Sixties and Early Seventies. A little trip down memory lane there, for me, featuring Janis Joplin, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. Other bands are listed but there’s a limit to how much I could fit on one lens!

Also there’s the Holiday Gift Guide challenge. So far I’ve done one lens for this: Top Ten Electronic Gadgets This Christmas – 2010. I found the research for that lens to be a lot of fun. Of course, I’d love to have some of those gadgets myself! Sure, why not?

Other than that I haven’t been doing much on Squidoo this month because I was busy doing the HubChallenge over there at HubPages. I had an account there but it took almost two years for me to make my first hub – and that happened on October 19 with Favorite Horse Movies – a hub I originally made to backlink to my similar Squidoo lens: Ten Fantastic Horse Movies. Then I realized HubPages gave no ‘do-follow’ links to anyone without a certain HubScore. So I joined the month-long HubChallenge to build myself up to 30+ hubs, and get that backlink friendly HubScore. Well, it worked just fine and I discovered that I love HubPages! So it was a great month… lots of work but lots of benefits too.

More next time…….

While reading comments on another blog I noted that some lensmasters feel that lens making is more important than networking on social media sites. They feel that Squidoo is enough online activity, and that lenses will promote themselves as much as they need to.

I made a study of social media sites during the past few years for my lens, How to Promote Your Squidoo Lens. I’ve been looking for sites that provide good SEO backlinks, as opposed to sites that cloak or add ‘nofollow’ to links so they provide no SEO value.

Whether or not you choose to promote your Squidoo lens by participating in other social media sites may depend on what your goal is for your earnings. If you have all your lens earnings earmarked for charity, perhaps you don’t care about revenue as much as someone who lost a job and is in deep financial turmoil. If you are trying to make money with your Squidoo lenses, lens promotion has got to be at least as important as lens making, and probably even more time consuming.

Some social networking sites have minimal use in terms of SEO. For example, FaceBook and MySpace both cloak all outgoing links so any links placed on those sites do nothing to make your lenses more visible in search engines. There are many other social bookmarking sites and social media sites that are similarly useless for me, for the most part. I know that people can always go there, see the link, and click on it to land on my lens, but that’s pretty much nothing in terms of numbers. The big influx of lens readers usually happens from good search engine optimization or from having a link on a site that is capable of funneling large numbers of readers to a lens.

For example, if I put a lens link on Facebook I’m lucky to get one or two viewers clicking on it. However if that same lens link is on a high-traffic blog, I may be able to get hundreds of visits per week from that venue. Even better, if my lens ranks high for a popular keyword in Google, I may get thousands of visits per week. I believe that SEO is a vital issue for anyone wanting to make a lot of money on Squidoo.

My recommendation is not to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, truly a lot of social networking sites are a waste of time — but not all of them. It is important to recognize good backlink opportunities and to follow up on them.

For example, the site Qondio states it is there to give good backlinks for content writers. For each article I write there I get a backlink for one of my Squidoo lenses or blogs. It is a wonderful opportunity and I’ve even been able to add AdSense to my Qondio pages. I don’t know how profitable this will be for me yet; I’ve just started submitting articles there.

Gather is a popular site for informal article writing and networking. Lensmasters can put links in their Gather articles to let people know about their lenses. You can even put them in comments on other people’s articles. If you want to join Gather, please use my link as it will help me earn a few more points. Gather pays with gift cards or PayPal payments but I think it is easier to earn money at Squidoo.

One BIG caution is not to let your articles look spammy. If your articles look like spam, promoting products like medications, ebooks, and breath mints, nobody will appreciate them no matter where they are. Make sure you speak from your heart, never copy writing from elsewhere, be a real person who is sincere in making friends and participating in the sites, and offer something that goes beyond the mere hope for material gain.

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Recently I issued a challenge on SquidU: to create a lens listing your ten most recent lenses, and to place that in the “Featured Lenses” section of your Squidoo profile/bio page. Here’s my challenge: Quick Challenge: Your Ten Newest Lenses . . . and here’s my lens with my ten most recent lenses.

More next time…….