Plotting A Course For 2012

USS McFaul transits through the Turkish Straits to Georgian aidIt’s a new year and time to plan where I want my Squidoo career to go in 2012. Every journey has an origin, so let’s start by reviewing my performance in 2011:

New lens production was way down last year with only 8 new lenses. That’s not good and well below my career average of 1.5 new lenses per month.

My Squidoo revenue grew 31% in 2011. Nothing like the 150% revenue growth in 2010, but still healthy. That figure only includes payouts from Squidoo, not outside affiliate programs (which are also growing).

I started Lens Harbor, the blog you’re reading now, to share my Squidoo experiences and knowledge. This is my first self hosted blog and I’m excited about it. I hope you find it helpful in your Squidoo journey.

Along with many other Giant Squids, I also became a Squid Angel, covering the Fantasy Sports neighborhood. A nice surprise at the end of 2011 was learning that one of my lenses was mentioned in a New York Times blog post! Never underestimate the value of writing good content.

While 2011 was a good year, the lens building and money making lost speed. To correct for this I’m setting some goals to keep me on course. Here are my Squidoo goals for 2012:

1. Have a total of 120 lenses by end of the year.
I’m at 96 now so this means an average of two new lenses per month. It’ll be a challenge but it’s realistic and necessary to kickstart my lens building. A by product of this goal should also be earning Giant Squid 100 status during the year.

2. Grow Squidoo revenue by at least 50 percent over last year.
Higher than last year’s growth but lower than my best year. It’s a reasonable growth target that I’ll hopefully exceed through a combination of more lenses, better promotion, overhauling some old neglected lenses and focused selling.

3. Maintain a consistent posting schedule on Lens Harbor.
When I started this blog, my plan was a post a week, not counting lens launches. That’s only happened in the first month. So two posts a month may be a more realistic goal for me since I also want to crank up my lens building. I have some cool ideas for this site and I’m looking forward to making them happen!

Have a fun and prosperous 2012!

Image Credit: simminch, used under Creative Commons License.

Lens Launch: Jet Age Review and Fantasy Football Trophies

Two new lenses launched from the harbor in time to catch the last tide of 2011.

Buy at Art.comThe first is a book review of Jet Age: The Comet, the 707 and the Race to Shrink the World. The book covers the true story of the race to start flying jet powered airliners after World War II. It’s a great overview of the history of commercial aviation up to the early part of the Jet Age.

For readers who want to learn more, the lens includes some cool old videos I found featuring the Comet and 707, the two main aircraft in the book.

This season I won my second fantasy football championship! Unfortunately, that league doesn’t give its winner a trophy. For fantasy leagues that do, I put together a selection of fantasy football trophies. There are even some funny gag trophies for the losingest team.

These two bring my total to 96 featured lenses. I’m slowly getting to 100.

Have a happy New Year!

Benefits of Writing Good Content: It Gets Shared

One benefit of writing good content is that your readers may want to share it. They’ll email it, like it on Facebook, Tweet it, or post a link to it somewhere. This has happened to several of my lenses and I’m always thrilled to see a new site show up in my Referrer stats. Usually, it’s from a forum or personal blog.

Other people sharing a link to your lens is good. It can generate traffic and helps you build credibility with the search engines. It’s even better when the link comes from a well known site.

This week I was surprised to find visitors coming to my how to play fantasy football lens from the NY Times website! It was an article on their Education blog about using fantasy football to teach quantitative analysis. They mentioned my lens as a good site for students to learn the basics of fantasy football. How cool is that?

That lens is nearly 6 years old and is one of my better lenses (my only LOTD). I invested a lot of time developing and writing the original content for it. And I continue to update it regularly. It’s cool to see that other people consider it helpful and worth sharing.

My lens building philosophy has long been to “build good quality lenses that interest you and that readers will find helpful and/or entertaining.” If a lens doesn’t inform, help or entertain a visitor, there’s no reason for them to share it.

So write good stuff.

Rethinking Costume Lens Strategy

Costume lenses are popular on Squidoo…they’re fun to build and it’s rumored that they can make money. There are over 2,300 lenses with the tag “costumes” and probably many more that don’t use that tag. Only 7 of them are mine.

There are two styles of costume lenses:
1. Costume Catalog – A pictorial list of Amazon or affiliate links to costumes and accessories.
2. How To Make Your Own Costume – Step by step instructions and tips to craft a homemade costume.

Many costume lenses are a hybrid of the two styles. They offer a mix of how to info with costumes and accessories featured for sale.

Each style serves a different audience. Some people want to buy a costume and have no interest in making one. They’re looking for a catalog. Other people are do-it-yourself types, like to save money or want something unique. They want to build their own costume and are looking for instructions and tips.

My costume lenses so far are all in the catalog style. The only how to stuff is a few accessory ideas. Most were built to complement an existing non-costume lens. Colonial costumes for a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, caroling costumes for people planning a Christmas caroling party and so on. The others are costume genres I thought were cool.

I had fun searching for good costumes to feature on these lenses, but I didn’t enjoy writing them. It felt like writing a sales pitch vs. providing helpful info to readers. Writing helpful stuff is more fun. My costume lens ideas list is growing but I delay starting any more because I dread writing them.

This Halloween season I stumbled across a couple good how to costume lenses that got me rethinking my costume strategy. They are artvixn‘s Steampunk Costumes Made Easy (a former LOTD) and Nerd Costume Ideas by emmalarkins. Both offer quality tips based on personal experience (with photos to prove it). And they blend in Amazon modules where it makes sense. Now I’m inspired to think of how to build how to costume lenses.

Side note: If you were playing a variation of “Hi, Bob!” called “how to” when you started reading this post…you’d have a good buzz right now.

My wife and I do make costumes so I have experience. And I enjoy writing how to lenses. The challenge is the costume photos. Most costumes we make are for our kids and I don’t publish photos of my family on Squidoo. So I’d be making costume lenses without photos. Not a recipe for success.

How can I make my costume lenses more “how to” without posting photos of my family? A few ideas (please let me know if you have others) are:

  • Use a mannequin for pictures of the costume. I could probably find one on Craigslist. Not sure how readers would like pics of a costumed mannequin.
  • Take photos of the costume laid out on a table. Won’t pack the same punch as on a person but could be useful in small doses.
  • Add more ideas on personalizing store bought costumes. This could be a good starting point and improve the quality of my existing costume lenses.
  • Use Flickr pics of people in similar costumes. Might be tough to find good shots and I don’t like using close up pictures of people. Yeah, they’ve posted it online for all to see and granted CC license, but I don’t know if they really want to be a model on my lens.

Hopefully this will get me back into the costume lens making spirit. Eventually, I’d like to have a good mix of catalog and how to style costume lenses. There are people searching for both.

What are your thoughts on costume lens strategies?

Image Credit: zol87, used under Creative Commons License.

Catch of the Month: Delicious Dump Cake Recipe

Each month I’ll feature a lens that I discovered while exploring Squidoo.

This month’s catch was discovered by my wife (who is not a lensmaster, despite my best efforts). She was recently at an event where she tried dump cake for the first time and loved it. Last week she went online, found the recipe and made one.

As we were enjoying the delicious cake she made, my wife told me there was a Squidoo lens on page one of the recipe search results that she visited and liked. Naturally, I was curious to see it…right after a 2nd serving of cake. The lens she found was Delicious Dump Cake Recipe by Susan52. It’s a good one and worthy of representing Squidoo on page one.

Susan does a nice job of providing the right amount of recipe related info. There are tips on making a bigger or smaller cake, ideas for recipe variations, a video and links to helpful products. My favorites were the apron and refrigerator magnets with the dump cake recipe on them. Brilliant idea.

This was the first time I’ve seen the recipe module in action (I haven’t visited many recipe lenses). The module looks clean and professional with a pic of Susan’s dump cake and a link to the printable version. Definitely make use of it for your recipe lenses.

Susan’s recipe is almost identical to the one my wife used. The key difference was shredded coconut…the dump cake my wife first tried had coconut and she wanted a recipe with it (maybe Susan will add it as a variation). We learned after making the first dump cake with 1 stick of butter that Susan’s recommendation to use 1 1/2 sticks is better. That’s how much we’ll use next time. Recommendations based on personal experience like that will help any lens stand out and add value for the reader.

The cake is delicious and the kids loved it. Maybe now I can convince my wife to build her own recipe lenses…

Image by Mac33

Lens Launch: Graveyard Ghoul Costumes

BOO!

Did I scare you? Probably not.

Grave Ghoul Adult CostumeBut if I was haunting a graveyard on Halloween in a graveyard ghoul costume like this one, you’d be scared.

There are lots of costume lenses on Squidoo so it helps to put your own spin on a genre. Otherwise your lens gets lost in the crowd.

I chose graveyard ghouls because it complements my existing Halloween graveyard decoration lenses.

Add An FAQ Section To Your Lens

One way to add more on topic content to your Squidoo lens is with a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. Providing an FAQ helps visitors who may be looking for the answer to a specific question on your topic.

Where can I get ideas for FAQ questions?
Watch your lens stats for questions in the search terms. If someone is looking for an answer, it’s likely that others are, too. Adding the question to your lens helps the search engines know you have the answer. All of the questions in the FAQ section at the bottom of my fantasy football commissioner guide lens came from search stats. (A bonus of doing this is that you may find search terms that spawn ideas for new lenses to build.)

You might also find questions in your guestbook comments. Another way is to look at the lens from a visitor’s perspective and think of questions you would have about the subject. The cool thing is that you can add to the FAQ over time as you brainstorm or find new questions.

Where do I get the answers for these questions?
Write your own original answers. You’re the expert that wrote the lens so this should be the easy part.

What Squidoo modules are good for an FAQ?
The Text List and Text modules are naturals for an FAQ. They look good, the content gets crawled by the search engines and you have formatting options. When using either module, I like to put each question in bold so it stands out.

What types of questions should I add?
Only feature questions that complement your lens topic. If the FAQ list gets too long, consider building a new lens that covers a subset of the questions and point readers to it.

Any other FAQ tips or ideas?
Another option is to write most of your lens content in a natural question and answer format. Phrase the module title in the form of a question then answer it in the body.

If you have a lot of lenses in a niche, you could build one lens that’s the FAQ for all of them. Each lens in the niche would link to it and the FAQ lens would link back to the other lenses in its answers.

Experiment with different formats and have fun adding an FAQ to your lens! Let me know what you discover.

Image credit: Steve, used under Creative Commons License

Catch of the Month: Toronto Pearson Airport 5k Runway Race

Each month I’ll feature a lens that I discovered while exploring Squidoo.

Airplanes and airports have always interested me and I enjoy running in 5k races. So when the title for bassetmonkey‘s lens about the Toronto Pearson Airport’s 5K runway race popped up, I had to check it out.

Wow…this is a very good example of a lens showcasing an annual event and it makes me want to run this race!

With a descriptive title and photo from inside a hangar, the first module creates a sense of excitement similar to what a racer feels waiting at the Start line.  That’s followed with info about the race, pre and post race pictures (including the unique finisher medals) and a thorough race review from the lensmaster, who ran the 5k in 2011.

The thing that makes a race like this unique is access to a place that’s normally off limits to most people.  Bassetmonkey captures that restricted access vibe in a fun way in the lens.  It also highlights the cool stuff race organizers did to make the race experience extra special.

Hopefully I can get to Toronto to run this race one year.  If you run this (or any other) race, bassetmonkey reminds you to thank the race volunteers!

Side note: About a week after discovering this lens, I got excited when I saw an ad for a 5k at a local airport.  Sadly, the map showed that their course is only on access roads, not the runway.  And it doesn’t look half as cool as bassetmonkey makes the Toronto airport 5k look.

Image credit: Paul’s Best Shots, used under Creative Commons License.

Reasons To Publish A Lens The Same Day It’s Created

There are two reasons why I try to publish a Squidoo lens the same day it’s created.  The first is all about lens stats.

I’m a stats junkie and like using graphs to analyze lens performance trends.  One of my Squidoo pet peeves is that an unpublished lens’s lensrank is included on the stats page lensrank graph. A newly created, unpublished lens currently gets a lensrank around 1,400,000. Since the graph includes all values, lensranks that high increase the y-axis (the vertical line) range so much that it’s difficult to analyze trends of the published lensranks.  Those are the values that matter since they determine pay tiers.

SquidHQ improved this some with the recent graph redesign. Only plotting the monthly average lensrank can reduce the max value if the lens is published within the same month. There’s now a mouse over showing the actual value and date for each point. Squidoo also went from a linear graph to a log-lin graph. That gives the lower values more space than the higher values. It’s why the y-axis intervals will be 0, 40000, 160000, 360000 on a graph instead of in even increments.

Best of all is the option to click “By day” and see only the last three month’s daily lensrank graphed.  You won’t be able to see the lifetime trends in this view, but if your lens was published more than three months ago, the graph will be scaled to a usable range.

Below is the lensrank graph for a lens not published on the day it was created…

Lensrank Graph

Fig. 1: Lensrank Graph of a lens not published on the same day as created.

The lens was created in July (point A) and had an average lensrank of just over one million. Note the huge span of the y-axis, from 0 to 2,250,000.  After the lens was published in August and lensrank moved to a normal range, its best rank was at point B and then fell off to point C.  But how bad of a shift was that?  It doesn’t look like much on the graph. Is it a difference of 5,000 spots?  10,000?  30,000?  I can’t really tell without using the mouse overs.  The answer is nearly 81,000 spots.  It went from a solid Tier 3 to well into Tier 4.

To get around this, I try to create and publish a lens in the same day.  Doesn’t always work out that way, but I try.

How does that help? By publishing the lens before the next daily lensrank calculation, its first lensrank will be that of a newly published lens (currently around 260,000, assuming no traffic). So the y-axis scale doesn’t have such a large range and the lensrank graph is more usable. Here’s an example…

Lensrank Graph

Fig. 2: Lensrank Graph of a lens published the same day as created.

This lens launched at point D with a lensrank of 205,000.  The y-axis range is 0 to 360,000…not ideal but much better than the values in Fig. 1.  It’s easier on this graph to gauge the ups and downs of the lensrank value thanks to a smaller y-axis range and the line at 40,000.  You can see that when the lens hit its best lensrank at point E it was below 40,000 and above 40,000 when it got to F.  The actual values are 9,101 for E and almost 62,000 for F.

This graph would look even better if the lens had seen some traffic and interaction on its first days at sea.  That would’ve earned it a better lensrank at the start and a smaller y-axis range.

The second reason to create and publish in the same day is to get the lens done…or at least presentable. If I let an unpublished lens sit longer than a day or two, I might switch gears to something else. It could be a week or more before the lens finally gets published.

No matter if you publish your lens on the day it’s created or not, only publish a lens when it’s ready.  It should be coherent and offer value to any readers that may stumble across it. If the lens still looks like it’s under construction, then leave it in WIP status. Many of my lenses didn’t get published on the same day they were created because I couldn’t get a sufficient amount of content written or organized in time. I may obsess on stats sometimes but I’ll never sacrifice quality for stats.

Deleting A WIP Lens For The First Time

In 5 years of being a lensmaster, I’ve always finished and published every lens I started. No longer. I’m deleting an unpublished WIP lens for the first time. There’s an important reason why…

Two years ago I wrote code to work around a missing feature in some office productivity software I use at work. Nothing grand, just some XSL to display the program’s XML output in HTML so that my coworkers could easily view it. It should’ve been a basic function of the program, IMO.

It wasn’t pretty (my XSL skills are basic) but it worked. I thought other users of the software might look for this type of solution so I started building a lens to share it. Even wrote a sample file and took before and after screenshots to include on the lens. All good helpful stuff.

But when I first wrote the XSL, I didn’t start from scratch. I searched the vendor’s support site for how to do what I wanted (assuming it was a standard feature hidden somewhere). There I found an XSL snippet they wrote to do something similar. I heavily modified it for my needs (their version wasn’t very useful) but I did start with their base code.

My plan was to link to their support article and give credit for the starting point along with my version of the code. Then I thought about possible copyright issues. It’s one thing to give away code I wrote on a lens. But the snippet I started with could be considered proprietary and not modifiable, even though it was posted on a support page. Plus the software vendor vigorously defends their intellectual property so there’s a potential legal risk.

That uncertainty about the copyright status combined with the risk prompted me to stop construction after halfway completing the lens. And it’s lingered in WIP status at the bottom of my dashboard ever since.

For a while, I’d occasionally think about the lens and reconsider my reasons for not publishing it…always reaching the same conclusion. Then I learned of 3rd party tools that provide the functionality I wanted in a much better way and I don’t even use my hack any more.

There’s two lessons here for lensmasters…

  1. Think about potential copyright issues when building a new lens. Whether it’s code snippets, photos, recipes, song lyrics, or anything else that wasn’t created by you, always stop and consider the item’s copyright status. When in doubt, don’t use it unless you can get permission from the owner.
  2. Consider alternative approaches to the topic. Once I decided not to publish the lens as originally planned, I could’ve taken a different tack. The lens could have done any (or all) of the following instead: discussed and linked to the 3rd party tools, linked to the support article and given readers tips on how to use the code themselves, or hosted a debate on the value of this feature to the product. You get the idea. I’m not interested enough in the topic to do any of those.

So this lens will never be published and it’s time to send it off to the breakers. I’m deleting it right…now. Poof.

Have you ever deleted a WIP lens? Why?