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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.

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.

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!

On October 5th I gave my last Squidoo Angel blessing to Of Mood and Mind Surreal Original Paintings.

From September 1st to October 5th I blessed 180 lenses and some days it took literally hours to find just five I thought were exceptionally good – take a look at the full list of blessings.

In Squidoo’s forum there is a controversy about how Angels find lenses to bless. Should they consider those for which lensmasters ask a blessing? Should they look at lists of new lenses or use a search for different subjects? Does it matter how Angels find blessworthy lenses as long as the quality is high enough?

Personally, I don’t think it matters and the whole controversy is a storm in a teacup.

I did look at links to lenses posted in the old Angels’ forum but I never expected too much from them – usuallly quite rightly although occasionally I got a pleasant surprise but a page that truly deserved a blessing. I also looked at lenses posted in the forum or on Facebook. Mostly, though, I looked at lenses made by my fans and their fans. Then I would search by broad subject areas like ‘modernism’ or ’surrealism’ or ‘Italy’. It’s quite amazing the huge variety of topics that fall within these categories. With ‘modernism’ and ’surrealism’ I expected to get lenses about art but I got many others too including history and philosophy. Even putting ‘Italy’ into Squidoo’s search engine brought a huge variety: travel in Italy, Rome, Naples, Italian food, recipes, art, glass, and much more.

What happened to my own writing and Squidoo Lenses during my Angel period? Not a lot – I made one new page: Glazed Lemon and Almond Tart and that took several days when I should have done it in just a few hours. It was a recipe so nothing that involved a huge amount of work. As for existing lenses, many of them are in urgent need of updating because I didn’t do a few each day which is my normal routine.

In spite of this, I enjoyed being an Angel. I loved the pleasure and encouragement many people got from a blessing and I would do it again but not yet. I think I’d better get my own Squidoo work up to date with a few more new pages produced first.

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.

In between those two are pages about calligraphy, patchwork quilting, dogs, flowers, music, autism, recipes and just about everything else you can imagine.

You can see the complete list on Angel in Disguise.

The role of Squidoo Angels has changed slightly for this new intake of Angels. I’m lucky to be accepted again because I love the chance to bless outstanding lenses. We now have to bless a minimum of five lenses a day for about a month. At that time, new Angels will be appointed although we can re-apply.

Today I blessed a mixture of new and old lenses. They are:

Opera for Children by Jimmie

20 Reasons to Love Opera by Photohsiamirabel

A Guide to the Undulatus Asperatus Cloud by LKW31

Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism by Kylyssa

Candy – A Honey of a Dog by cdcraftee

I love opera and I thought both of the ones on the subject were excellent for anybody who wanted to explore this kind of music. I blessed the Cloud lens because it was interesting, had good pictures and it was about a type of cloud I’d never heard of before. Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism is something I feel very strongly about. It was well written and had good links for more information. I’m a sucker for dogs and Candy really did seem to be a honey of a dog. It’s another interesting, well written and illustrated page.

That’s what I look for when I decide whether or not to give a blessing.

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.

This week I’ve written two new Squidoo lenses (web pages). The first one was in response to a suggestion on Get Cracking With Bonnie and Robin to write about a specific fear so I wrote about my dental phobia. As I explain, it started when I was a child in response to something a dentist said to me and it continued for many years. It was desperation that finally led me to conquering it with the help of a very understanding, patient and sensitive dentist. You can read more about it on Fear of the Dentist.

Other pages on this topic featured on the Get Cracking page are:

• Overcoming the Fear of Poverty
• Fear of Insects
• The Fear of Bees
• Needle Phobia

I’d recommend visiting the Get Cracking page if you are stuck for a subject to write about. Even if you haven’t got writer’s block, you might fancy a change of topic from the ones you usually tackle. Another good reason for checking the page regularly is that the suggestions are usually for very niche subjects. Most of us are convinced that we can’t compete with the big sites on the most popular topics so the more niche the subject matter of our own pages, the more likely they are to come up high in search results particularly if we make several pages dealing with different aspects of the same niche subject and link between them.

The second page I did this week was a book review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, the latest novel by this author. I’d never read anything by David Mitchell before and was a bit worried that I wouldn’t like the book as Mitchell has the reputation for writing very ‘literary’ books which I interpret as difficult to read and sometimes just plain boring. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This book gripped me from the first page and, as soon as I finished it, I wanted to share it with as many people as possible so I wrote the review. Now I can’t wait to read more of Mitchell’s work.

Reviews of books, movies, music, etc, are all good topics for a web page. If you have written several pages about a particular niche, you can usually find something to review that fits the niche to expand your coverage.

Now all I’ve got to do is keep up the writing.

We are now in the final few days of May and we really should be working hard on summer web pages for Squidoo or other web sites.

People are now thinking about their summer vacations, recipes, drinks, clothes and many other associated topics. We need to have the information ready and waiting for them now.

It’s hopeless writing about summer at the end of July or in August (unless you are in the southern hemisphere, of course) because you will be very lucky if Google and the other search engines pick up your article in time to generate much traffic. You want them available in search results as soon as possible and certainly before your potential visitors have started to think about the autumn and winter months and events.

If you wrote about summery subjects last year or earlier, look at those articles now. You can probably improve them by revising and refreshing the content. Don’t forget to update advertising for books, music and anything else that brings in an income. Companies bring out fresh products for every summer, don’t miss out on these.

Remember to interlink your summer lenses and/or web pages. If a visitor likes one of your articles, they might well want to read more that you’ve written on the subject. Of course, this applies to any subject not just seasonal ones.

Now it’s confession time: so far this year, I’ve written only one new summer lens – Summer Pudding – A Great British Dessert. I’ve also got to update other summer articles I’ve written over previous years. I have got plans for some other new ones which I must get on with writing. I also intend to revise and update the old ones.