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.

Just to get this blog authenticated, I couldn’t put the code in the HTML tab because it was automatically deleted. I succeeded in authentification by putting the code in the WSIWYG tab instead. I’ve just deleted it as I don’t need to keep it any longer.