Every morning since the beginning of September I’ve trawled through lenses on Squidoo looking for ones to bless. I have to bless a minimum of five a day. Some days it’s fairly easy and quick to find them, other days it can take hours and involve looking at an enormous number of pages.

If I wanted, I could do it very fast by looking at lenses made by Giants and Giant 100 Clubbers, particularly the best known ones. I don’t want to do that, though. I want to find pages from aspiring lensmasters because they often don’t get enough attention. When I was new to Squidoo, getting a blessing for a lens gave me encouragement and made me want to write more lenses. I want to pass that on to other newbies to the network.

So what’s the problem?

So many people don’t read the basic instructions or the Terms of Service (or if they do, they take no notice), and they don’t bother to look at lenses made by established lensmasters to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.

I’ve seen pages with well written content and some relevant pictures but they’re a mess. Sometimes it’s just one giant wall of text with no effort made to split it into separate modules.  Sometimes the concept of paragraphs seems to have passed by the writer. Who is going to try to read that?

Other times writers haven’t changed the default titles of modules. It ain’t rocket science! If a module is called ‘New Introduction’ or ‘New Guestbook’ then you need to change it because it won’t be new once you’ve used it , will it? Titles should also be changed because they are an opportunity to use keywords for your subject so help to get the lens listed by Google.

Does any of this matter when it comes to giving an Angel Blessing? Yes, it does in my opinion. A blessing should only be given to outstanding lenses, not ones that are OK or ‘not bad’ but the ones that are truly memorable. I can still remember many of the lenses I blessed when I first became an Angel a year ago.