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.

make custom gifts at Zazzle

My lensography Books Make Great Gifts

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.

Similarly, it’s important that the first paragraph of your introduction contains keywords and is likely to capture the attention of someone searching on Google.

I use two ways of trying to make lists of lenses interesting and attractive. The first can be seen on a page I did to gather my book reviews together to which I gave the title Books Make Great Gifts. I took the ‘give a book as a gift’ angle using my book reviews as suggestions. I wrote about why books make good gifts and the importance of matching the book with the recipient. I divided the lens up into different sections according to genre, eg Mysteries and Thrillers, Books for Children, Classic Books, and wrote a bit about each genre followed by a list of reviews of books of that type. I followed each list with an Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list of books in the hope of making some sales.

The other type of lensography I’ve done can be seen on England’s Seaside Towns. I wrote a little about individual lenses on individual seaside towns (one of them made by another lensmaster but it fitted in well) but mostly I’ve written about different types of seaside town with a link to more information from tourist information sites. There are maps for each place I wrote about on this page so people can see exactly where it is in England with pictures and a video of one place. Towards the end, I included a list of my lenses about seaside resorts. This seems to work quite well as it gets a few hundred visits a week – not earth shattering numbers but better than many lensographies. I used a similar style on a list of lenses about historic towns called Historic England.

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.

Even though I don’t think this is one of my best lenses, I’m sure it wouldn’t have got a Purple Star without the help I received from my friends on Fresh Squids. The moral of the story is don’t be afraid of asking for help or a critique no matter how experienced you are.

Even the most experienced and brilliant writers and webmasters can have problems writing a new article for a web page. Sometimes, the subject doesn’t come together well for you or the writing doesn’t flow properly. When this happens, it often doesn’t read well either. Before you cut your losses and delete a lens, ask for help and you’ll find plenty of people on Squidoo or are willing to advise you on how to improve it.

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.

If I wanted, I could do it very fast by looking at lenses made by Giants and Giant 100 Clubbers, particularly the best known ones. I don’t want to do that, though. I want to find pages from aspiring lensmasters because they often don’t get enough attention. When I was new to Squidoo, getting a blessing for a lens gave me encouragement and made me want to write more lenses. I want to pass that on to other newbies to the network.

So what’s the problem?

So many people don’t read the basic instructions or the Terms of Service (or if they do, they take no notice), and they don’t bother to look at lenses made by established lensmasters to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.

I’ve seen pages with well written content and some relevant pictures but they’re a mess. Sometimes it’s just one giant wall of text with no effort made to split it into separate modules.  Sometimes the concept of paragraphs seems to have passed by the writer. Who is going to try to read that?

Other times writers haven’t changed the default titles of modules. It ain’t rocket science! If a module is called ‘New Introduction’ or ‘New Guestbook’ then you need to change it because it won’t be new once you’ve used it , will it? Titles should also be changed because they are an opportunity to use keywords for your subject so help to get the lens listed by Google.

Does any of this matter when it comes to giving an Angel Blessing? Yes, it does in my opinion. A blessing should only be given to outstanding lenses, not ones that are OK or ‘not bad’ but the ones that are truly memorable. I can still remember many of the lenses I blessed when I first became an Angel a year ago.

No Spam Here

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.

The network has volunteers who also check for lenses that contravene Squidoo’s Terms of Service (TOS) but, again, it’s impossible for them to find all rule breakers.

You might suggest that Squidoo should employ more people to fight the problem. Great idea, except they would have to be paid so the share of the advertising revenue available for lensmasters would decrease. How many of us would like that idea?

There is a solution, though. Instead of complaining in various forums about problem lenses, individual lensmasters should use the ‘report abuse’ link at the bottom of every lens whenever they see one that breaks the rules. When the report is received, a member of staff will look at the page and assess whether it does contravene the TOS. If it does, the lens is locked so that nobody can see it.

None of like to snitch but reporting abuse is in our own interests as lensmasters. Junk lenses give Squidoo a bad reputation and it rubs off on the rest of us by association. It’s up to all of us to protect Squidoo’s reputation by reporting lenses that could damage it.

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.

I am amazed at the number of new lensmasters who ask how to improve their lenses or get more traffic but a quick look at their profiles shows that they have not rated or favourited any other lenses. That always leads me to assume, possibly wrongly, that they haven’t bothered to look at any or many others.

It truly appalls me when a quick look at their lenses indicates they have no idea at all how to make one that is appealing to the casual visitor.

Who would stop and read a lens that is text heavy with no graphics of any kind unless they are desperate for the information and can’t find it anywhere else? Well, not me for a start!

Even worse, if you do begin to read because you are desperate or perhaps kinder than I am, and you find it’s poorly spelled, ungrammatical and full of text-speak, would you persevere? I think most people would give up.

Why does anybody think this is acceptable? Why would anybody assume this is what other people are prepared to read? I have no idea. What I do know is that too many people new to lens or web page building or blogging think this is perfectly acceptable.

Guess who has seen too many bad web pages and lenses recently!

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.

In one way, I can see their point, particularly as this is the only group on the network that is officially recognised by management.  Maybe we could all say, “fair enough, maybe that isn’t right” but it seems that this was just the tip of an iceberg of resentment against RM. Women with no children argue they can’t join although they are assured they can.

Men obviously can’t join and many argue vociferously that RM provides a platform to present lenses and the RM community are so supportive that visits follow announcements in the forum of new lenses. They are also convinced that members give each other five stars, so helping to improve lens rank, regardless of quality.

All I can say about the last point is that I’ve never given a fellow Rocket Mom five stars if the lens didn’t deserve it. I’ve never given any lens an undeserved number of stars and I use the full range from one to five stars on lenses depending on their quality. I also don’t give any stars at all to some lenses including those made by RMs.

There are plenty of opportunities for Squids to join groups even if these aren’t officially recognised by Squidoo. Many of them are supportive, though, and provide a place to put links to new lenses. Many members of these groups also visit the lenses and give stars and leave comments, if they deserve them.

Megan Casey of Squidoo has announced that Rocket Moms was set up as an experiment and its great success means they intend to start more official groups. When that happens, we shall have to see if the people who shouted the loudest are prepared to join them and play active roles in the groups.

Squidoo's Rocket Moms

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.

I found most of the assignments challenging because they took me out of my comfort zone.  The very first assignment, to write about a favourite toy, nearly made me give up immediately. I couldn’t imagine writing about a toy. It took me several days to come up with an idea and the lens, Meccano – One of my Favourite Toys. I really did love playing with my brother’s Meccano set but it was a long time ago so I found it difficult to write.  I must have done OK, though, because it was given a Purple Star.

Crazy Quilts with a Difference

Another assignment that took me a while to decide upon a topic was Your Favourite Decade. The good news was it didn’t have to be a decade we had lived through so I did the 1940s concentrating on Make Do and Mend. That got a Purple Star too as did Crazy Quilts with a Difference in response to the Arts and Crafts assignment.

The funny thing is that these were all the assignments I found most difficult and least wanted to write. Perhaps the fact that I had to work harder on them is what made the difference. I also spent more time thinking about them before I wrote anything at all.

The Rocket Moms experience has been totally positive in spite of my occasional panics each time a new assignment was put in the RM forum. The tutorials put in the forum each week have been enormously helpful too by introducing me to ideas and ways of working I’d never come across before.

I would heartily recommend Rocket Moms to anybody who qualifies – the basic requirements are that you are a Mom (or Mum if you’re English like me) and you’re a member of Squidoo. If you want to learn more about building lenses (web pages) in a supportive environment with a great community, I’d suggest you check it out.