I hope none of you are working on new Valentine’s Day lenses or web pages right now. You’ve almost certainly left it too late to get much profitable traffic this year, if you are.

Easter, though, is nine weeks away. This gives you time to get a lens or two online. You’ll have time to choose a good subject, hopefully one that puts a slightly different spin on the usual Easter eggs and little bunny rabbits. You don’t want to compete head-on with the top Easter pages, do you? Maybe you know about some Easter customs unique to your area, or your family has its own traditions or recipes for the festival.

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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.

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Jack Vettriano - the Book: My New Squidoo Lens

My new lens, Jack Vettriano – The Book, is the first I’ve made for over two months. I just couldn’t get on with any. I started several, decided they bored me so I deleted them.

I’m so glad I remembered how much I liked this book about the artist Jack Vettriano because it gave me the opportunity to write about something that really interested me even after I began to lens.

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Santa Squid from Squid Art Too by Tagsforkids

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

I’m finishing this year feeling I’ve accomplished some things that I really wanted to do. There have been some disappointments and sad times too – just like many years, in fact.

At the beginning of the year, I was making very few new lenses on Squidoo. I’d become a Giant in October 2008 by making 50+ lenses. After that I just lost inspiration for writing. I’d start a new lens, think about it, then delete it because I couldn’t think of more to write or I was bored by the subject. Worse still, I sometimes finished a lens, read it the next day, decided it was rubbish and so deleted it. Although I made a few lenses, they were a struggle.

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I know… it’s incredible that Squidoo has made me an Angel when I’ve been a bit of a pain occasionally over the last 18 months. I’ve argued when I thought things were wrong and done so quite vehemently sometimes.

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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.

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For this week’s Squidoo Rocket Moms lens we have to write about a place we’ve visited.

This is so hard. My thoughts are whirling. Should I write about St Maartens, a Caribbean island I visited briefly but loved?

Maybe I should write something about Paris, France, a city I’ve often visited and one of my favourite places. I could write about the small French fishing town of Honfleur in Normandy, another place I’ve visited several times because it’s a favourite.

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One person’s research might be another person’s plagiarism but really it should be more than a matter of opinion. The differences between the two should be obvious. It should also be obvious that someone hasn’t just done a straight rewrite of another’s material.

When I research for an article, online or off, I consult many  different sources. Usually I’ll look online first because that is quicker and easier but then I will consult reference books, either my own or in the library.

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Today I saw a post in a forum which said that it was only older people who cared about writing grammatically.  It went on to say that nowadays it’s quite OK to use its instead of it’s and that lots of newspapers nowadays do this.

All I can say is that I’ve never seen a newspaper deliberately use its instead of it’s. When they do, it’s a typo. If you doubt what I say, check on various newspapers’ style guides available online.

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Rocket Moms on Squidoo

I must be crazy joining the Squidoo group, Rocket Moms, right now when I’m so busy. It involves writing a new lens every week on some aspect of a certain subject, which is posted on Mondays. This week it was A Favourite Toy so I chose Meccano.

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