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.

Image via Wikipedia

We had an election last weekend for eight people to serve on the Squidu Council (Squidoo’s forums) as moderators particularly to control the problem of spam.

I was one of the people who put my name forward. I came tenth so I was one of the losers. As numbers 8 and 9 had exactly the same number of votes, Megan Casey, co-founder of Squidoo, decided that nine members would serve on the council.

I had several messages from Squids sympathising with me because I hadn’t made it on to the council but I really was relaxed about losing. It’s no good standing for election if your self-esteem and confidence takes a nosedive when you lose.

Then there was an announcement that one of the elected members had to withdraw for personal reasons and it was agreed that the runner-up in the ballot would replace her. That was me. When I was contacted, I accepted with pleasure and the announcement was made. This all happened within 24 hours of the original results being announced so I quickly caught up with what was going on.

I’ve been a moderator on forums since 1998 so it’s something I’m quite accustomed to doing and I’m happy to do it for Squidoo.

Having an elected council of Squids moderating the forums is an excellent idea, I believe. Most Squids are very protective of the forums’ integrity and don’t like to see them being used for spam or trolls winding people up or any other infringements of the rules. That makes it important that the moderators are accountable to their peers and have the same or similar attitudes and standards.

Well done Squidoo HQ for a good decision and a good election.

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

Although most visitors probably won’t think there have been big changes at Squidoo, that’s not the way it looks to lensmasters on the network.

The pages look much cleaner and smarter because a lot of unnecessary text and buttons have been eliminated making the page much more attractive.

Unfortunately for those of us who love Squidoo’s community, we’ve lost some of the ways of connecting with Squid friends. We have been promised, though, that there are things in the pipeline that will replace them with other ways of doing so.

Although, I regret the loss of the ease of letting other Squids know about new pages we’ve made, I have to admit I like the new page much better. The other, cluttered version was looking quite dated.

The other big news is that a few experienced Squids have formed their own network although they will continue to work on Squidoo as well. It’s call Wizzley and they say it will give us a place to get backlinks for our Squidoo pages as well as diversifying and not putting all our eggs in one basket. I’ve joined and written one article, a book review called Live Wire by Harlan Coben.

After not writing anything much for weeks, I also wrote an article on Squidoo called I Love My Kindle – which I do!

I’m not giving up on Squidoo and I haven’t joined Wizzley because of the changes. It’s just a coincidence of timing – I’d was invited to join just last week. I like the idea of having somewhere with high editorial standards for backlinks. I hope that eventually it will feature highly in Google’s search results and so provide high value links to my other work. It also works the other way too. I can link from my Squidoo pages to my Wizzley articles.

Image via Wikipedia

The amazing thing about one Amazon link on your Squidoo lens or web page is that it can lead to several sales to the same person in one go.

Many people make a lens or page containing many links to different products on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or other Amazon sites in your targeted countries. That’s not a bad thing to do as long as your page is interesting enough to keep visitors reading and looking at your links. This is why it’s important to make your links to Amazon products relevant to the subject of the lens.

My most popular Squidoo lens is Classic Poems for Kids which uses out of copyright poetry that children are likely to enjoy. I have seven Amazon Spotlight modules spaced out amongst the poems so they don’t dominate the page. Each one of these is totally targeted at poems for kids. I find that people click on one of these and many times this has resulted in a sale of the featured book and then other books too.

In the run-up to Christmas I’ve found this approach works well on several of my most popular Squidoo pages. Somebody buys from one of my Amazon modules then goes on a shopping spree on Amazon, sometimes over several departments as they follow suggestions on the product pages.

I think the absolute key to encouraging shopping sprees is only to include products that are bang on target for the title and keywords and phrases of your lens or web page. Visitors are there because they wanted to read or see something on the subject so therefore they are likely to be interested in books, movies, music, and other products that are totally relevant too.

In heavy shopping periods like Christmas, there is also a good chance visitors will use your Amazon link then get sidetracked into buying Christmas gifts, tableware, and other things related to the holiday. They won’t even consider how they arrived on Amazon and what a great thing it is for you when they buy several items after using your link.

I’m trying to think of more aspects of the American Wild West to accompany these two but the problem is that, as an English woman living in England, it’s not a natural subject for me or something I know a lot about. I shall carry on researching, though, to see if I can find an angle connected to the topic that I can write an interesting article or two about.

Quizzes aren’t really very quick to make, even though I always think they will be. It takes quite a while to think of questions that aren’t too easy or too hard. As the format of the quiz is multiple choice, it can take a while to think of alternative answers to give the choice for each question.

Once that’s done, just a quiz isn’t enough. I feel that more content is required otherwise the visitor will feel short-changed. I’ve put in quotations, a couple of Amazon Spotlights about a relevant book and movie and some really nice pictures and posters. Then I added a bit more information about a couple of aspects of the American West.

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.

Image via Wikipedia

Squidoo has changed the way its Angels operate again. Now that there are more categories and sub-categories for lenses, Angels look after a particular sub-category – mine is Growing Plants. It’s a subject in which I’m interested so I enjoy looking at these pages and have given out blessings on several. I’m pleased to say that so far I haven’t come across any lenses violating the site’s Terms of Service.

I’m really happy that my page called My Father – In Memoriam has received a Purple Star. I am so pleased because it’s such a personal and emotional subject. I’ve also had several pages blessed, including one of my earliest lenses – Dartmoor, Devon. The lensmaster and angel MakingaMark is the one who blessed it and also put a link to it on her own page called The Best of the UK.

Big Ben, London, UK

I’ve said before I like making quizzes on Squidoo so it’s no surprise that I’ve just done another one – How Well Do You Know London?

Like the other quizzes I’ve done, this one supports my existing pages on London. As I’ve done several of these, I hope that it will increase traffic to them.

One thing I’ve not done yet is to link to the quiz from my other London pages and that’s just because I’m away from home at the moment. I shall do it as soon as possible, though, so that people who are interested in reading about London are sent to the quiz.

I did list my other quizzes on the new one and they have all had increased visitor numbers over the last week so it shows Squidoo pages do send people from one lens to another. I never doubted this, actually!

It’s a straightforward sales page but I have written something about each clock I feature so it’s not just copy and paste.

One of the reasons I wrote it was because I wanted relevant pages for Unusual Novelty Teapots and Local Time and Railway Time. I’ve struggled for about a year to find something relevant to go with the page about Railway Time. I know novelty clocks aren’t very relevant but they both have something to do with time so that’s good enough for me!

I also like the subject of my new page. I enjoyed looking at various clocks on Amazon.com and found several that I would be happy to have in my own home.

For me, it’s important that I’m interested in the subject I write about, even on a sales lens, and that I enjoy producing the page. If I don’t, I’m sure it can come over to the visitor.