I’ve neglected this blog again. I went to Ireland for a short stay and since I arrived home I’ve just seemed to be so busy all the time.
The good news is that I’ve finally joined Zazzle and started a store. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for about three years. Of course, there’s quite a lot of work to do just to get a store started so it’s very easy to put it off indefinitely – even for as long as three years!
One off-putting thing was reading that a minimum of 100 items for sale in a Zazzle store is really essential if you want to make sales and that you need to update your store everyday to get it indexed by Google. Of course, it makes sense once I stop and think about it. I tried Cafe Press for a while but I never really put my heart into and made a 100 items for sale so I only made about two sales in a year. I don’t think I ever made the minimum amount for payment. I’m going to try very hard not to fall into the same trap with Zazzle.
Of course, putting in a lot of effort to a Zazzle store leaves me less time for my Squidoo lenses – making new ones and updating existing ones. Anyway, here’s my Zazzle store and the products I’ve done so far. There’s no where near 100 yet, in fact I don’t think I’ve even got 20 items but I shall persevere.
My cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Henry, at about 5 years of age
On September 25th, 2009, our cavalier King Charles spaniel, Henry, died after a stroke at the age of eleven. Because it’s now September, he is very much in my mind. He was a sweet and lovable dog, very typical of the breed in that respect. I still miss him and think about him a lot.
We got Henry when he was 8 or 9 weeks old and we always had him with us, we never put him into kennels while we went away or asked other people to look after him. As a puppy, he was the sweetest little thing you can imagine. He was irresistably cuddly and it took a lot of will power to put him down once you picked him up.
Do you know the difference between high tea and afternoon tea? Both are traditional English meals but afternoon tea has probably spread to many other parts of the world whereas high tea, I think is particularly British. It’s certainly the meal I remember best from my childhood.
Lensographies (lists of Squidoo lenses) are usually not very interesting although they can be useful. This is more likely if you do lensographies on individual niche subjects. It is also possible to make them interesting and attractive to visitors looking for information on the topic of your niche too.
First of all, don’t use the word lensography in the title or text because this means nothing to anybody outside Squidoo. Think of a good title using relevant keywords and that is going to sound attractive to someone searching on Google.
We had an election last weekend for eight people to serve on the Squidu Council (Squidoo’s forums) as moderators particularly to control the problem of spam.
I was one of the people who put my name forward. I came tenth so I was one of the losers. As numbers 8 and 9 had exactly the same number of votes, Megan Casey, co-founder of Squidoo, decided that nine members would serve on the council.
The amazing thing about one Amazon link on your Squidoo lens or web page is that it can lead to several sales to the same person in one go.
Many people make a lens or page containing many links to different products on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or other Amazon sites in your targeted countries. That’s not a bad thing to do as long as your page is interesting enough to keep visitors reading and looking at your links. This is why it’s important to make your links to Amazon products relevant to the subject of the lens.
Here in the UK, we are enjoying beautiful, warm, sunny weather. It’s much more like summer than spring and not what we expect in April.
As usual when there’s a sudden warm, sunny spell, we all change to summer clothes and start thinking about our gardens. Garden centres are doing booming business and people are busy digging or weeding their neglected flower and vegetable beds as well as sowing seeds and putting in plants – let’s hope none of them are tender because we could still have hard frosts at night.
I finished a Squidoo lens called Quiz: What Do You Know About the Old American West a couple of days ago. I made it as a companion to an orphan lens (orphan because it’s the only one I’ve done on the subject) so that I could link between the two. That one is called Legends of the Old West and I made it as a Senior Squids group challenge. That’s why I never made anymore on the subject.
I had so much trouble writing my latest lens, Celebrate National Women’s Friendship Day. I struggled with it for days and I was on the point of deleting it even though it was kind of finished. I just didn’t think it was particularly good.
As a last resort I posted a link on the Fresh Squids Forum and asked for help and got some good suggestions which I implemented. I’m delighted to report that the page was awarded a Purple Star yesterday.
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Oct 19, 2011 
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Google, ireland, products, sales, squidoo, squidoo lenses, zazzle, zazzle store
