Cat Mugs for Cat Lovers

My new lens, Cat Mugs for Cat Lovers, has been done in response to a Fresh Squids Challenge to Nail that Niche.

This encourages new lensmasters to drill down on a subject and make their lenses as specific as possible – covering a very small niche. The thinking is that the more ‘niche’ a lens is, the better the chance of not only getting targeted traffic but also making sales.

This makes sense. If people are looking for cat humor or mugs featuring cats, for example, hopefully my lens will come up on their search and they will visit. While there, they are more likely to find something they want to buy or at least click on an affiliate link and maybe buy other things which will earn commission for the lensmaster, in the case of this lens, that’s me – fingers crossed.

I hope that people will find this lens humorous. It’s meant to be. The cat related pictures and sayings on the mugs make me smile as do the quotations and pictures of cats which I’ve included.

I hope I’ll be able to add more lenses to this particular niche which is the advice given on Fresh Squids.

Why, you might ask, am I doing something suggested on Fresh Squids when I’m a member of the Giant 100 Club? It’s because I can always learn something new. As it happens, I had known about concentrating on niches and most of my lenses probably qualify for that description. I’ve made very few of them very commercial, though, so I thought a lens about coffee mugs featuring cats would be an interesting experiment.

For the very first time since I joined Squidoo, I’ve bought a lens. It’s about dolphins, one of my favourite animals, and it was transferred yesterday.

The transfer was so easy and quick which was a relief because I was expecting it to be time consuming and difficult. All I did yesterday was to remove the affiliate advertising. I haven’t replaced any of the personal affiliates with my own yet. I’ll do that later in the week or next week maybe.

Today I spent about four hours working on it. I updated some of the out of date news articles on there and added a lot more pictures – I got some good ones from Allposters.com. I don’t make many sales but the commission is between 25% to 30% so at least it’s a significant amount when a poster does sell. The main reason I use them, though, is that there are so many posters on such a huge variety of subjects, they are brilliant for illustrating web pages.

I took  the basic facts about dolphins out of the introduction and put them in their own module. I then wrote a proper introduction to the subject touching of some of the issues affecting dolphins and discussing our relationship with them.

I hope this lens is going to be successful because their conservation and protection is a subject about which I feel passionate. In fact, I’m passionate about conserving wildlife generally and, by that, I mean keeping them in their own natural habitats, not in a zoo or other artificial environment.