My lensography Books Make Great Gifts

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.

Similarly, it’s important that the first paragraph of your introduction contains keywords and is likely to capture the attention of someone searching on Google.

I use two ways of trying to make lists of lenses interesting and attractive. The first can be seen on a page I did to gather my book reviews together to which I gave the title Books Make Great Gifts. I took the ‘give a book as a gift’ angle using my book reviews as suggestions. I wrote about why books make good gifts and the importance of matching the book with the recipient. I divided the lens up into different sections according to genre, eg Mysteries and Thrillers, Books for Children, Classic Books, and wrote a bit about each genre followed by a list of reviews of books of that type. I followed each list with an Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list of books in the hope of making some sales.

The other type of lensography I’ve done can be seen on England’s Seaside Towns. I wrote a little about individual lenses on individual seaside towns (one of them made by another lensmaster but it fitted in well) but mostly I’ve written about different types of seaside town with a link to more information from tourist information sites. There are maps for each place I wrote about on this page so people can see exactly where it is in England with pictures and a video of one place. Towards the end, I included a list of my lenses about seaside resorts. This seems to work quite well as it gets a few hundred visits a week – not earth shattering numbers but better than many lensographies. I used a similar style on a list of lenses about historic towns called Historic England.

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.

It’s a straightforward sales page but I have written something about each clock I feature so it’s not just copy and paste.

One of the reasons I wrote it was because I wanted relevant pages for Unusual Novelty Teapots and Local Time and Railway Time. I’ve struggled for about a year to find something relevant to go with the page about Railway Time. I know novelty clocks aren’t very relevant but they both have something to do with time so that’s good enough for me!

I also like the subject of my new page. I enjoyed looking at various clocks on Amazon.com and found several that I would be happy to have in my own home.

For me, it’s important that I’m interested in the subject I write about, even on a sales lens, and that I enjoy producing the page. If I don’t, I’m sure it can come over to the visitor.

Cynthia starts her introduction on a personal note, telling us that her husband and daughter love this dessert. Then she goes on to say that it is quick and easy to make, again relating the task of making it to her and her family’s pleasure in eating it.

We have faith that this is a recipe she makes regularly and so we can be sure it will work if we make it. I’ve tried new recipes I’ve found online or in cookbooks and found they don’t work as well as they should so this is important.

The ingredients are clearly listed and there is a photograph alongside so we have no excuse for any misunderstanding! Then there are the instructions to make the Blackberry Cobbler dessert. They are clear and we can see it’s going to be easy to make. Just in case we have a doubt about how quick and easy it is, Cynthia provides a slide show, with directions, of each step of the recipe.

Finally we have a large close-up picture of the delicious looking dessert, complete with a serving of ice cream. My mouth is watering  just looking at it. In fact, I plan to make it this afternoon but I’ll use blueberries instead of blackberries because that’s what I have in the refrigerator.

I kept meaning to write a post here about the new quiz but just never got up enough enthusiasm even to open this blog, let alone write anything. There have been other Squidoo related topics I’ve had in mind to comment on here but, again, haven’t written about them.

Right! This has to stop now. I’m going to make myself write here and on Squidoo. I know once I start I enjoy it.

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.

We all know that updating our Squidoo lenses is important. Google likes fresh content is one reason, another reason is it helps our lensrank. One thing that is worth remembering, when updating, is to check any dates of events that you give on the web page.

This was brought home to me just yesterday. I was updating my page Historic City of York, England when I noticed the section called Festivals in York. In it I’d put the actual dates of the festivals for the year I wrote the page – that was 2008! That’s dreadful and I am embarrassed to admit I was so careless.

Now for the excuses: this was one of my early lenses and I’d forgotten I’d put in precise dates – how stupid is that? When I’ve updated it in the past, I’ve obviously just skimmed that section without reading it at all.

When I use the Countdown module, I remember to check it. When I use it on a Christmas page, I make a point of changing the year soon after Christmas. I’m so annoyed with myself for not noticing I’d left these old dates in place even though I’d put links to the festival websites so people could check dates.

Of course, I’ve changed them now. I haven’t put in specific dates, some of the festivals haven’t published them yet for next year, but I’ve given the month they usually take place but kept the links in place. I’ve also checked that all the links work.

I’m not telling this story to punish myself! I hope that reading this might remind you to check dates and links on older pages.