The role of Squidoo Angels has changed slightly for this new intake of Angels. I’m lucky to be accepted again because I love the chance to bless outstanding lenses. We now have to bless a minimum of five lenses a day for about a month. At that time, new Angels will be appointed although we can re-apply.

Today I blessed a mixture of new and old lenses. They are:

Opera for Children by Jimmie

20 Reasons to Love Opera by Photohsiamirabel

A Guide to the Undulatus Asperatus Cloud by LKW31

Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism by Kylyssa

Candy – A Honey of a Dog by cdcraftee

I love opera and I thought both of the ones on the subject were excellent for anybody who wanted to explore this kind of music. I blessed the Cloud lens because it was interesting, had good pictures and it was about a type of cloud I’d never heard of before. Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism is something I feel very strongly about. It was well written and had good links for more information. I’m a sucker for dogs and Candy really did seem to be a honey of a dog. It’s another interesting, well written and illustrated page.

That’s what I look for when I decide whether or not to give a blessing.

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.

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.

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.

I have accidentally started a new niche of Squidoo lenses: recipes for lemons.

I really do try to expand niches so taking my own advice given here in Nail that Niche way back in March of this year. Unfortunately, I have a bit of a butterfly mind and always want to write something new or different.

I am determined to turn over a new leaf and expand on topics I have written lenses about already and, if I start on a new subject, to first of all have ideas for other lenses in the niche to complement it.

It was funny how I started on this niche. I’ve mentioned Get Cracking With Bonnie and Robin before and how I find their daily suggestions for Squidoo lenses helpful and, sometimes, challenging – not a challenge I always rise to either!

On July 11 they suggested ‘Get Cooking’ as the topic. I wanted to find something a bit different to write about – not just another main course, cake or dessert but also something that might catch people’s interest. I came up with Make Lemon Curd, a delicious, traditional, sweet spread for bread, cakes or desserts. At the same time, I was reminded of how many excellent recipes I have for lemons and so I saw the possiblity of a niche.

The Lemon Curd page seems to have been reasonably successful in the short term (who knows how it will go over months or years?)  mainly because many Americans who left a comment hadn’t heard of it. Several thought it sounded easy and good enough to try as a way of using up a surplus of lemons in those places where they grow naturally.

This good reception encouraged me to make more pages with recipes for lemons. So far I have published Make a Glazed Lemon Cake and Make Lemon Drinks with links connecting all three lenses. I have another lemon recipes lens half finished and I hope to complete it today or tomorrow and I have plans for another two at least, perhaps more.

It seems to me that the way to make a niche of complementary pages successfully is by starting out with more lenses in mind even while you are writing the first one. Fingers crossed that my lemon niche does well.

I see the heading “My Lens Needs a Blessing” often on Squidoo’s Angels Forum and it always makes me want to shout, “No, it doesn’t!”

Quite often the body of the post reads like the writer thinks an Angel’s Blessing is something to which he or she is entitled just by virtue of finishing a lens.

This attitude is usually confined to new Squids, though. Anybody who has been on Squidoo for a while knows that this is not how Blessings work.

A Squidoo Angel’s Blessing is only given to pages that are, in the opinion of the Angel who gives it, exceptionally good. It isn’t for a page that is quite good or just good, it is for those that are excellent.

Going on to the point about ‘needing a Blessing’ – no lens needs one. Any well written page can rise to the top of its category and even into Squidoo’s Top 100 lenses without being Blessed. The Blessing only gives it a temporary boost in lens rank. If the lens isn’t good enough to make it on its own, then it will slide down the rankings fairly fast once the Blessing wears off. A more long term way to success is make sure your work is as good as it can be:

• It should be well written.
• There shouldn’t be any big slabs of text making it hard to read.
• You should illustrate it well – pictures help to break up text.
• You should know your subject.
• You must have written it with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind. That means using keywords sensibly particularly in titles, subtitles and in the opening paragraphs. It doesn’t mean writing for search engines, it should all still read well.
• You need to work hard at promoting your lens by getting backlinks (links from other sites to it).
• You then need to be lucky.

Don’t worry if your lens isn’t Blessed. It can still be big success in terms of both lensrank and producing an income.

Yesterday evening the gremlins were partying on Squidoo.

When I was updating a couple of lenses yesterday afternoon (UK time about 4 hours ahead of EST), it seemed that Squidoo was barely crawling and so I gave up. I don’t have the patience to wait several minutes for a page to load.

Then yesterday evening, around 10pm BST (British Summer Time), 6pm EST, I wanted to check the lens rank update which should have been done a few hours earlier. The Squidoo server was down. I went on to the Squidoo forum and others confirmed they couldn’t access Squidoo.

Bearing in mind the time in the USA, early evening or early afternoon depending on the time zone, this must have been hugely frustrating for Squids trying to make lenses or update them.

This morning, Squidoo was back online but there was a new problem, affecting a lot of lensmasters. As I usually do, I went to the Squidoo forum soon after switching on my computer and there were complaints from several well-respected Squids saying their accounts had been locked and they had received emails from Squidoo. They were told their lenses broke the terms of service and their accounts would be deleted in 30 days. They could, however, send an  email to a specific address asking for a hand review which it seems many of them have done.

It gets worse…

Their accounts were already deleted, they couldn’t access them at all. They hadn’t got their 30 days to stop it happening!

Because of the number of people affected, it’s obvious that there’s a gremlin in the system. It seems an over-sensitive ‘abuse’ filter is responsible for false positives so prompting sending out all the emails and shutting down accounts. They’re working on it and hopefully it will be fixed soon. One person has already been told his account can be reinstated as soon as the problems are solved.

It’s causing a lot of worry and distress for great lensmasters who have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into writing excellent lenses that comply with Squidoo’s terms of Service. Let’s hope it’s fixed very quickly.

7.7.2010 UPDATE

As usual, Squidoo responded to concern among Squids and sorted out the problems the day after I wrote this post. All of the lenses and accounts that had been erroneously caught by the spam filter were reinstated.

Bournemouth Pier

I just spent a week’s holiday (vacation) staying at my best friend’s house in Bournemouth on the English south coast. I was very lucky with the weather because it was hot and sunny all day, everyday and the good weather continues still.

We didn’t do anything very special but we had fun, caught up on gossip, went shopping, sat in the garden, and enjoyed ourselves. As we’ve been friends for over 30 years, we have a lot to talk about and we share so many memories.

Now I’ve had a break, I’ve come back with ideas for new Squidoo pages. I finished a very long but excellent novel while I was away so I might write a review of it. I bought about eight new books so there might be more reviews I can do of some of those too. I’ve also been looking through an old book in which I wrote recipes that people gave me. I haven’t made some of those for years so I’ll probably try some of the old favourites and put them on lenses if they are suitable and good.

This week I’ve written two new Squidoo lenses (web pages). The first one was in response to a suggestion on Get Cracking With Bonnie and Robin to write about a specific fear so I wrote about my dental phobia. As I explain, it started when I was a child in response to something a dentist said to me and it continued for many years. It was desperation that finally led me to conquering it with the help of a very understanding, patient and sensitive dentist. You can read more about it on Fear of the Dentist.

Other pages on this topic featured on the Get Cracking page are:

• Overcoming the Fear of Poverty
• Fear of Insects
• The Fear of Bees
• Needle Phobia

I’d recommend visiting the Get Cracking page if you are stuck for a subject to write about. Even if you haven’t got writer’s block, you might fancy a change of topic from the ones you usually tackle. Another good reason for checking the page regularly is that the suggestions are usually for very niche subjects. Most of us are convinced that we can’t compete with the big sites on the most popular topics so the more niche the subject matter of our own pages, the more likely they are to come up high in search results particularly if we make several pages dealing with different aspects of the same niche subject and link between them.

The second page I did this week was a book review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, the latest novel by this author. I’d never read anything by David Mitchell before and was a bit worried that I wouldn’t like the book as Mitchell has the reputation for writing very ‘literary’ books which I interpret as difficult to read and sometimes just plain boring. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This book gripped me from the first page and, as soon as I finished it, I wanted to share it with as many people as possible so I wrote the review. Now I can’t wait to read more of Mitchell’s work.

Reviews of books, movies, music, etc, are all good topics for a web page. If you have written several pages about a particular niche, you can usually find something to review that fits the niche to expand your coverage.

Now all I’ve got to do is keep up the writing.

Back at the end of March I posted here New Squidoo Widgets – Absolutely Brilliant! I’m really pleased to report that it looks like I was right to be optimistic. After looking at stats and sales on Amazon.com, I’ve had sales of three books that appear in my right hand column Amazon Spotlight widget and several lenses are showing referrals from lenses with the Featured Sites widget, obviously I checked that links to the sites receiving traffic appear in the widgets.

I’ve been a bit lazy about using the Amazon Spotlight widget because I haven’t always wanted to spend time looking for products to appear in it. Now I’ve seen this, I’m definitely going to spend time gradually going through all my pages and putting this widget on and finding really relevant products.

I’ll report again, if and when I have more news.