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 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 hope none of you are working on new Valentine’s Day lenses or web pages right now. You’ve almost certainly left it too late to get much profitable traffic this year, if you are.

Easter, though, is nine weeks away. This gives you time to get a lens or two online. You’ll have time to choose a good subject, hopefully one that puts a slightly different spin on the usual Easter eggs and little bunny rabbits. You don’t want to compete head-on with the top Easter pages, do you? Maybe you know about some Easter customs unique to your area, or your family has its own traditions or recipes for the festival.

The good thing is, you have time to look for a different perspective. To try to give you some ideas for thinking laterally, here are three top-ranking Squidoo lenses about Easter:

Easter Music for Your Church Choir – it doesn’t have a lot of original content but it’s a great resource for anybody looking for Easter music.

Simple & Affordable Little Girls’ Easter Dresses For Spring & Summer – I would never have thought of writing about Easter dresses for little girls but it’s a great idea.

Painting Wooden Easter Eggs – the lensmaster tells us about her family custom of painting wooden eggs for Easter and she also tells us how to do it.

Can you think of something about Easter that will rank highly on Squidoo and, better still, get picked up by Google and other search engines?

The Fun Side of Work

Almost anybody who writes has been there. You need to write something new, maybe because your blog need updating, you write for a site like Squidoo and you’re taking part in a challenge or perhaps you are lucky enough to have been invited to submit ideas. Some days, though, your mind just goes blank, you can’t think of a thing to write about.

This week’s Squidoo Senior Squids challenge was on Labor or Labor Day. I’m English and we don’t have Labor Day here so it doesn’t mean much to me. I knew that for the purposes of the challenge Labor meant anything job or work related. It didn’t need to be about Labor Day.

I didn’t want to write a lot on the topic because I had a Rocket Moms lens to do as well and this week it was a recipe. That meant cooking something and taking photographs of each stage. It was relatively easy to choose Quick and Easy Blueberry Cake because it’s quick and easy!

I still needed an idea for the Labor one. I came up with The Fun Side of Work. It contains a lot of humorous pictures from Allposters.com plus a couple of public domain ones from Wikipedia Commons.  I wrote a couple of anecdotes from my own experience at work.  Then I put in a few funny quotations about working like “Anyone can do any amount of provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.”

Sometimes you can use your own amusing or interesting memories in a lens or web page. Your readers aren’t going to be bored with them like friends and family. They haven’t heard you tell the same stories over and over again.

You can take one particular memory and weave an entire lens or web page around it. Perhaps you took a particularly interesting or exciting vacation, maybe you endured a trauma and writing about it might help you come to terms with it.

When you are suffering from writer’s block, think back through your favourite anecdotes and your experiences. Can you use any of them as the basis of your article?

I’ve installed cms on websites before but never blogging software and hit some small problems which held me up. I solved them, mostly through trial and error. I then installed it in a sub domain of an long standing website I run with a friend. I definitely wanted ‘pretty URLs’ there and that gave me problems. I made such a small mistake setting them up and it took me two days and four reinstalls of Wordpress. I could have given myself such a kick when I discovered the answer.

That sub domain is called Chocolate Recipes and the clue to content is in the name! I’ve stilled got a lot more recipes to put on yet.