Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

Although most visitors probably won’t think there have been big changes at Squidoo, that’s not the way it looks to lensmasters on the network.

The pages look much cleaner and smarter because a lot of unnecessary text and buttons have been eliminated making the page much more attractive.

Unfortunately for those of us who love Squidoo’s community, we’ve lost some of the ways of connecting with Squid friends. We have been promised, though, that there are things in the pipeline that will replace them with other ways of doing so.

Although, I regret the loss of the ease of letting other Squids know about new pages we’ve made, I have to admit I like the new page much better. The other, cluttered version was looking quite dated.

The other big news is that a few experienced Squids have formed their own network although they will continue to work on Squidoo as well. It’s call Wizzley and they say it will give us a place to get backlinks for our Squidoo pages as well as diversifying and not putting all our eggs in one basket. I’ve joined and written one article, a book review called Live Wire by Harlan Coben.

After not writing anything much for weeks, I also wrote an article on Squidoo called I Love My Kindle – which I do!

I’m not giving up on Squidoo and I haven’t joined Wizzley because of the changes. It’s just a coincidence of timing – I’d was invited to join just last week. I like the idea of having somewhere with high editorial standards for backlinks. I hope that eventually it will feature highly in Google’s search results and so provide high value links to my other work. It also works the other way too. I can link from my Squidoo pages to my Wizzley articles.

Image via Wikipedia

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.

My most popular Squidoo lens is Classic Poems for Kids which uses out of copyright poetry that children are likely to enjoy. I have seven Amazon Spotlight modules spaced out amongst the poems so they don’t dominate the page. Each one of these is totally targeted at poems for kids. I find that people click on one of these and many times this has resulted in a sale of the featured book and then other books too.

In the run-up to Christmas I’ve found this approach works well on several of my most popular Squidoo pages. Somebody buys from one of my Amazon modules then goes on a shopping spree on Amazon, sometimes over several departments as they follow suggestions on the product pages.

I think the absolute key to encouraging shopping sprees is only to include products that are bang on target for the title and keywords and phrases of your lens or web page. Visitors are there because they wanted to read or see something on the subject so therefore they are likely to be interested in books, movies, music, and other products that are totally relevant too.

In heavy shopping periods like Christmas, there is also a good chance visitors will use your Amazon link then get sidetracked into buying Christmas gifts, tableware, and other things related to the holiday. They won’t even consider how they arrived on Amazon and what a great thing it is for you when they buy several items after using your link.

My favourite climbing plants

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.

Now is the time to begin promoting gardening lenses and web pages. If you haven’t made any on the subject yet but intend to do so, get writing them now. It can take time for Google and other search engines to find your new pages.

If you already have gardening lenses, update them. Check that links to Amazon products, for example, all work and the products are still available. Check again for typos – I occasionally still find the odd one or two in lenses I wrote ages ago that escaped detection before. Is there any news that you could include that is relevant – a great new hybrid of a plant, fruit or vegetable, perhaps? If you can add new information, don’t forget to send out a Squidcast telling everyone that there is something new on the page.

The picture above is my lens called My Favourite Climbing Plants.

I’m trying to think of more aspects of the American Wild West to accompany these two but the problem is that, as an English woman living in England, it’s not a natural subject for me or something I know a lot about. I shall carry on researching, though, to see if I can find an angle connected to the topic that I can write an interesting article or two about.

Quizzes aren’t really very quick to make, even though I always think they will be. It takes quite a while to think of questions that aren’t too easy or too hard. As the format of the quiz is multiple choice, it can take a while to think of alternative answers to give the choice for each question.

Once that’s done, just a quiz isn’t enough. I feel that more content is required otherwise the visitor will feel short-changed. I’ve put in quotations, a couple of Amazon Spotlights about a relevant book and movie and some really nice pictures and posters. Then I added a bit more information about a couple of aspects of the American West.

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.

Even though I don’t think this is one of my best lenses, I’m sure it wouldn’t have got a Purple Star without the help I received from my friends on Fresh Squids. The moral of the story is don’t be afraid of asking for help or a critique no matter how experienced you are.

Even the most experienced and brilliant writers and webmasters can have problems writing a new article for a web page. Sometimes, the subject doesn’t come together well for you or the writing doesn’t flow properly. When this happens, it often doesn’t read well either. Before you cut your losses and delete a lens, ask for help and you’ll find plenty of people on Squidoo or are willing to advise you on how to improve it.

Squidoo Quiz: What Do You Know About Chocolate?

Although the quiz template has been available on Squidoo for quite some time, I made my first Squidoo Quiz last week and then immediately went on to make another two. I found them very enjoyable to do.

Of course, the hard part is thinking of questions to ask and making sure the facts are correct. Then you have to think of likely wrong answers as part of the multiple choice you need for each question.

Another consideration is to pitch the level of difficulty just right. Make it too difficult and people probably won’t enjoy doing it but they won’t feel much sense of accomplishment if it’s too easy either.

I have to admit my first Squidoo Quiz on Classic Poems for Kids is probably too hard for many people particularly as there is a difference between my British education and the American one most readers will have had. For a start, we probably learned different poems at school. In spite of this, people have taken the quiz and said they enjoyed it.

My next two quizzes, What Do You Know About Fruit? and What Do You Know About Chocolate? are easier but I wouldn’t say that many of the questions are very easy.  Again, people seem to be enjoying them.

I’ve tried to include some other interesting content like relevant quotations, two polls asking opinions about the quiz and the lens, and some editorial content too.

I think quizzes are also a good opportunity to make a mini lensography publicising my lenses on the subject of the quiz. It makes sense that someone doing a chocolate quiz might then go on to look at one or more chocolate recipe page, for example.

I intend to make a few more quizzes on topics related to my Squidoo pages then I can make a mini lensography of quizzes!

Books Make Great Gifts

I write book reviews of fairly obscure books – never those in the top 100 best sellers, probably not even the top 10,000! This week I decided to publicise them a bit with a Squidoo mini lensography called Books Make Great Gifts.

I’m using a Christmas theme for now but, in the New Year, I’ll change it.

I’ve made the point that books make great gifts for birthdays and Christmas as I don’t want it to be seasonal. I wrote about why they make good gifts and the importance of matching the type of book to the recipient. I’ve done separate modules for different genres: Mysteries and Thrillers, Historical Novels, Classics, used Featured Lens modules for my book review lens links, Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list modules for newly published books in the hope of making some sales. I also put in a couple of polls. I want to make the page more than just a list of my lenses, I want to make it interesting in its own right too.

Making this kind of mini-lensography gives me a new lens and it might draw in traffic to existing book reviews I’ve written. If I make a few sales from it, that will be a bonus.

When you really don’t know what to write about next, take a look at the lenses you’ve done so far. Hopefully, you will have written some on a similar subject so that you too can make a mini lensography. You can always add new lenses to it as you publish them.

I decided to be sensible and write a lens on Christmas gifts for children. It’s the right time of year, it might even be a little late now but not very much so.

When I started the lens, I wrote an introduction and put in a graphic. I even wrote content for another module and did one Amazon Spotlight. Then I was hit by overpowering boredom with the whole thing. The idea of having to write about several more products was more than I could bear. I haven’t deleted the lens. It sits there reproachfully in WIP, a reminder that I should finish it.

This isn’t real writer’s block. It’s not that I don’t want to write and to prove it, yesterday I wrote a book review about The Lost Garden, a novel by Helen Humphreys. The words flowed, I wasn’t stuck at all. I wrote it all in a couple of hours.

In the past, I’ve written commissioned articles for magazines. They haven’t all been on subjects I particularly wanted to write about but, nevertheless, I always fulfilled the commission to deadline and with the required number of words. Additionally, my articles have always been published with little or no sub-editing. Why, then, can’t I treat the Christmas gifts lens like a commissioned article and just write it? I think it must be because I have nothing to lose by not finishing it. If I had failed to deliver a commissioned feature, I would have never been given another commission by that editor again. I would also have lost face and reputation.

I have come to the conclusion that now I have retired from writing for magazines and I can please myself, I don’t have the incentive to produce articles on subjects that don’t interest me. Nowadays I don’t write to deadlines either. I write for pleasure. My work on Squidoo covers many different topics: books, collectibles, English towns and cities, gardening, the environment, and history. It’s quite surprising that even the most obscure subjects receive some traffic and some lenses that I was quite reconciled to never being read have slowly gained an audience. I also have my star ones that get a large number of visitors too.

If writing commercially doesn’t appeal to you, don’t worry if you are writing for pleasure. Just keep writing on topics that interest you because there are always some other people who are interested by the same things.

I Had a Mini-Stroke

I’ve been away for 10 days on vacation and came back a week ago. I didn’t have access to a computer while I was away so I couldn’t update any of my Squidoo lenses. Actually, if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway – I was too busy enjoying my vacation.

I have just four lenses that are in the top thousand regularly. In fact, these sometimes get into the top 200 at times so I’m very keen to update them to maintain their position. When I came back, all four were hovering on the edge of falling out of the top 2000. I went into overdrive – I had to update them and fast.

The top one is I Had a Mini-Stroke and What Happened After so that was the one I updated first. I then updated the other three on the same day. When lens rank was recalculated a few hours later, the updating of the lenses had no positive effect. If anything, all four had dropped slightly. This has happened before so I wasn’t worried. About 24 hours later, lens rank was again recalculated and all four had made it into the top 1000 lenses. I’ll keep working on them, making sure they are fresh because I’m sure it helps with Google too because all four get good traffic from there. I also hope to get them back into the top 200 Squidoo lenses.

I have a continuous program of updating my lenses and usually do several each day. Sometimes I make big changes, sometimes they are only small ones. I’ve even found typos on old lenses that I’ve missed many, many times.

What’s the point of all this, you might ask? I’m telling you that updating web pages works. In a way, Squidoo lens rank is the least important part of doing it. The lenses I update most often are the ones with the highest traffic, clickouts, affiliate sales and they are the ones that get the most traffic from Google and other search engines. Even ones that I had given up hope of ever getting decent numbers of visitors have had improved traffic as I’ve regularly updated them.

My recommendation is that you update lenses regularly. It’s not worth bothering too much with seasonal ones like Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. Just start updating those 3 to 4 months before the event. Update your most popular pages but don’t neglect the less popular ones either. Taking a fresh look at them from time to time might inspire you to make improvements. If you make major changes, you can send out a Squidcast telling people about them. You can blog about the changes, you might also be inspired to find more places for backlinks for them too.

One of my most personal pages, I Had a Mini-Stroke and What Happened Next, was featured on Squidoo Lens Review which is an honour particularly as the review was so complimentary.

Writing about something as personal as my health was very difficult. In my daily life I don’t go around discussing my health with people I don’t know so writing about it on the web is even more outrageous. In fact, I’m a very private person and don’t really discuss my life much with people I don’t know well. Writing about my life was a big step to take but it is one I recommend to anybody who is knew to Squidoo or other web writing.

You don’t have to reveal details of your health or anything very private, if you don’t want to do so. Bringing some personality to your writing, though, helps people enjoy reading your pages and to like you, hopefully. Just express an opinion on some aspect of the subject or write about a personal experience even if it is just how easy or difficult you found a product to use.

If you are writing a book review, tell us if you enjoyed the book and why you like it. Don’t keep it impersonal. I want to know if it’s worth buying and if you don’t tell me whether you liked it or not, then how can I know?

You can even inject some personality into a recipe page. Tell us if you make the dish regularly and how much you and others enjoy it. Think of ways to include some personality into anything you produce online. Of course, on most pages you don’t need to do this all the way through, just when it is appropriate.