I’ve neglected this blog again. I went to Ireland for a short stay and since I arrived home I’ve just seemed to be so busy all the time.
The good news is that I’ve finally joined Zazzle and started a store. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for about three years. Of course, there’s quite a lot of work to do just to get a store started so it’s very easy to put it off indefinitely – even for as long as three years!
One off-putting thing was reading that a minimum of 100 items for sale in a Zazzle store is really essential if you want to make sales and that you need to update your store everyday to get it indexed by Google. Of course, it makes sense once I stop and think about it. I tried Cafe Press for a while but I never really put my heart into and made a 100 items for sale so I only made about two sales in a year. I don’t think I ever made the minimum amount for payment. I’m going to try very hard not to fall into the same trap with Zazzle.
Of course, putting in a lot of effort to a Zazzle store leaves me less time for my Squidoo lenses – making new ones and updating existing ones. Anyway, here’s my Zazzle store and the products I’ve done so far. There’s no where near 100 yet, in fact I don’t think I’ve even got 20 items but I shall persevere.
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.
I had so much trouble writing my latest lens, Celebrate National Women’s Friendship Day. I struggled with it for days and I was on the point of deleting it even though it was kind of finished. I just didn’t think it was particularly good.
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.
Every morning since the beginning of September I’ve trawled through lenses on Squidoo looking for ones to bless. I have to bless a minimum of five a day. Some days it’s fairly easy and quick to find them, other days it can take hours and involve looking at an enormous number of pages.
Squidoo makes great efforts to stop spam, plagiarism, and other rule breaking lenses.
Inevitably, some do get through, though. Squidoo only has a small HQ staff and it’s impossible for them to catch all of these pages.
There certainly aren’t enough paid staff to check through all published lenses so they use filters to catch abusive language, spam, spambait, and pornographic subject matter. This is a less than perfect system and, of course, false positives do happen which then require review by a real person.
When I seriously started writing lenses on Squidoo, the first thing I did was look at other people’s work. I visited a large variety of other lenses assessing what worked and what didn’t.
I picked up many tips just by looking. It’s what I’ve always done to learn to improve my writing and web page building. Look at what the experts do and learn from them.
Who would have thought a group for women on Squidoo would be controversial and provoke discussion and argument? That’s what has happened over the last couple of weeks.
Lens of the Day (LOTD) on Squidoo has recently been featuring Rocket Moms lenses for a fixed period (I think it was ten days). Of course, this means people who aren’t RM members stood no chance of making LOTD with any of their lenses.
Session 3 of Squidoo’s Rocket Moms ended yesterday and, as far as I know, everybody managed to do the eight lenses to graduate and earn their Rocket Moms graduation badge.
The session lasted for eight weeks and the requirement for graduation was to make eight lenses that fitted the weekly assignment. The assignment was only disclosed on Sunday of each week so that gave us seven days to complete it. Of course, Squidoo is a part time activity for most people and things happen in their lives which sometimes mean they don’t have the time to finish a lens in a week but a member can still graduate as long as she has completed eight lenses by the end of the session.
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Oct 19, 2011 
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Google, ireland, products, sales, squidoo, squidoo lenses, zazzle, zazzle store
