Tribute Lens

The best lenses to build are the ones that you have a genuine interest in, like my new Zach Condon lens. Coming back to Squidoo, I find it very difficult to create pages that focus on affiliates only, and to be honest they are never as successful as the ones that reflect my personal passions. Maybe this is because they are short on text, short on inspiration and new ideas.

On the financial upside, I now have $31.42 in my affiliate pot, which gives me great pleasure considering the fact that I have been away from Squidoo for so long. One of my lenses accounts for two thirds of this.

10000 Hours of Squidoo?

Well so far my health updates haven't taken a huge amount of effect. However, my new Christmas Books lens has suddenly picked up and is getting a decent amount of traffic.

I've been pondering on the messages coming out of Malcolm Gladwell's new book - Outliers - recently and have been really interested to see how the 10000 Hour Rule works. It's not surprising to me that so many successful lensmasters either work from home or have literally put 1000s of hours into the application. So far, I would imagine that I'm at around 600 hours, so I still have a long way to go.

Squidoo Health Check

I'm loving the new health check tools that are now available for Squidoo users. There is the Squidoo Healthcheck Tool, that can be found on the dashboard and gives a quick snapshot of the strengths and weaknesses of a lens. Similarly, there is also the Beta version of Squidutils Health Check, which highlights potential problems. Luckily for rusty lensmasters such as myself, these both direct you to Squidaholic for solutions. Squidaholic contains lots of nifty links to essential tools such as Wordtracker, and Google keywords.

Having examined some of my failing lenses, I've been able to apply some extra love and attention to weaker areas, but time will tell whether I have managed to revive them. I'm keeping a note of the progress of two in particular and will be reporting back on the success of the revamps shortly.

In the meantime, I have created a new lens to showcase Orla Kiely Handbags on eBay. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Like a Virgin!

I've spent the last day or so creating a new lens. It's been great fun, but has also taken me a long time to get back in the swing of things, especially as there are so many new and exciting features to play with!

My latest lens was requested by my husband and lists the Best Christmas Books. It has been surprisingly difficult to find a wide range of classics so some of them are a little unusual, but I am ultimately happy with the final selection. I intend to keep on adding to this over the next few weeks and will hopefully rediscover my Squidoo creativity again!

10 Months On

It's a cliche, but how time flies! What was meant to be a 3 month break has tripled due to work pressures/big move and I've come back to some surprises.

First of all, is my new-found status as a Giant Squid! I was absolutely thrilled to be awarded with this honour, especially as I haven't been active in the community for a long time. To me, this is pretty special.

Second pleasant discovery is that although some of my lenses have crashed and burned, others have been ticking along nicely, despite a drop in lensrank. My passive monthly income from Squidoo has ranged from around $12-25 per month. Not a lot, but a welcome bonus, which has helped me to buy the odd treat online.

Now I am in the process of updating all my lenses pre-Xmas. With an imminent change of career and a driving test on the horizon, it remains to be seen how much energy I can devote to Squidoo, but I would like to at least try to make my 100 as originally planned.