Republishing and Refreshing Your Lenses

I have been trying an experiment on Squidoo for the last two months to see how much republishing lenses made a difference on lensrank. What I have been doing is refreshing and republishing my top two tier lenses every day. What I noticed is that while my lenses do not go up in rank too much, they also do not go down in rank as much as they do if I leave them alone.

With the drain on my time, I have found that I normally do not republish a lens more than once every two or three months, and that affects my lensrank quite a bit. So while I cannot continue to republish every lens daily, (because it just takes way too long), I am going to keep better track of the lenses in the top two tiers and republish them more often. Just like everyone else, I can use the money that the lensrank payout will give me. In the meantime, I will work on increasing the revenues that I can get without such minute attention.

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Frustrating Slow Load Times on Squidoo

I thought that I would preface this post by saying that I really do like Squidoo as a site in general, and will continue working with Squidoo for quite some time. I have had success, and learned numerous things as well as become part of a very interesting and dynamic online community because of Squidoo.

However, I have to say that I am very frustrated by the very slow load times that I face on a daily basis on Squidoo. I have come to realize that the best times for me to work on Squidoo are either extremely late at night or very early in the morning, most likely because the bulk of Squidoo users are American and after 11 am my time, the entire country is awake and on Squidoo.

My solution to this problem has been to simplify some of my more complex lenses by taking off widgets, polls, and other more complicated modules that hold up load time, and just mainly fancy up the lens. I also do my Squidoo updates in the morning between 7 am and 10 am before I go to work.

I have talked to Squidoo's technical support department about this, and personally I think that they are between a rock and a hard place. Because they have made Squidoo such a complex site visually, and interactively, the lenses load slower. Personally, I would trade many of the visual effects for the faster loading times, but that is probably not true for everyone. I am a pretty impatient person, and don't like waiting for pages to load. Never have, never will.

So I will continue to work with Squidoo during early morning and late evening, and say that the European Squidoo lensmasters have it best right now, by being ahead of us timewise.

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Changing the Way We Rate on Squidoo

Squidoo has just made a new change, that in my opinion is a very long time coming. That change is moving from a star rating system to a thumbs up system. In the past, we had to choose how many stars to give a lens, and it was extremely subjective. Many people used the 5 star or no star method of rating. On the other hand, it was also a attraction for jealousy and mean spirited behavior. There were people who would rate lenses with one star just to bring down the star average for that lens.

With the new system, you either like the lens or you don't. Very simple. I like the lens, it gets a thumbs up. I don't like the lens, it gets nothing. No fretting over how many stars, just a plain old thumbs up. I think it will much easier for people to decide what rating to give.

Being a simple person myself, and not really wanting to waste time with the worries over the rating system, I am happy to see it go, because I don't think it really served enough of a purpose to negate the controversy that surrounded it. Now people can have more time to place their focus where it should be, on the lenses themselves, and creating and maintaining their own lenses.

What is your opinion?

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Your Niche is Not Specific Enough

I just finished writing a hub on Hubpages about my experience on Hubpages and what I have learned so far.

I wanted to discuss one of those lessons further because I think that they can be applied to any webpage you write and somewhat to blogging as well. The lesson is that writing a hub or a lens on Squidoo for that matter, cannot be specific enough.

What exactly am I talking about?

The most successful, easily searched pages are extremely specific in topic. For instance, it is not enough to make a page on great Versace products. You need to break it down to what type of product category, and what type of product. For example, Versace men's sunglasses.

The more specific you are, the better.  And yes, you CAN write an entire lens on just men's Versace sunglasses.  Maybe even on just one style of men's Versace sunglasses.

Now before you decide on your specific topic, you still need to research the keyword phrases and see if people are searching for Versace men's sunglasses.  If they are, you can write the lens.

When I was new on Squidoo, I didn't really understand why this was better.  I though that it made more sense that a broader topic was better.  But a broader topic is not better because of the way the search engines work and how people search online.

When people search online, they are looking for a very narrow topic.  I need sunglasses this summer, but if I just put in the word sunglasses, I get way, way too many answers, so I have to narrow it down to exactly what I want to get the responses that I want from the search engine.  That would mean I will do several narrow targeted searches, for instance, men's Versace sunglasses, men's Ray Ban sunglasses, men's Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses.  I might search for the men's sunglasses that Ryan Seacrest was wearing if I saw someone wearing a pair I liked.  This is how people search, therefore your article needs to meet these criteria to be found.

That means that not everyone who is searching for sunglasses will make it to your page, HOWEVER, the people who do make it to your page are already searching for what you have written about and are much more likely to buy from you.  Isn't that what you want anyway?

This is not just the case for lenses that strictly sell.  This is true for any article you write online for any purpose.  You need to keep fine tuning the focus on your camera lens (hmmm. . .do you think that is where the name lens came from?) to get closer and closer to the subject until it is sharply focused.

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Moving from Free to Paid Memberships on Ning

For those of you who do not already know, Ning is changing their system to a paid network within the next few months. This is a sad moment for many of us who have used Ning for all kinds of networks, but I have wondered for a long time how Ning paid for such an involved and complicated site.

As many of you know, I have been advocating and recommending that you check out Professional Squids since I found out about it. Professional Squids is really a wonderful network for all level of Squidoo members and it is really just getting off the ground. Unfortunately it is set up on Ning, so that will necessitate a move to another forum.

I still advocate for you to join Professional Squids, and then you will know where we travel next. I have a really amazing group on affiliate marketing for tangible items (if I do say so myself) that has brought up a lot of great discussions already. And there are other great groups as well. So this dilemma will not be a set back for Professional Squids but just a minor glitch in the forward motion.

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Changes to the Workshop on Squidoo

If you haven't been on your Squidoo workshop in the last few days, you may not have realized that there have been some more changes.

I just wrote about the new sidebar widgets recently, and now the entire workshop has been updated. The new workshop is not much different than the old one. The look has changed slightly, and it is a sleeker look, but the biggest difference is that it is loading faster than the last version.

Load time is a frustration on Squidoo mostly for the workshop and behind the scenes pages, although somewhat for the public face.

I emailed support recently that I would trade all of the fancy templates for a faster load time. The new workshop definitely is an improvement over before, although it is still not quick enough for me. I am not known for my patience when it comes to things like these.

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Using the New Sidebar Widges on Squidoo

Recently, Squidoo added some new sidebar widgets to the modules that we can add to our Squidoo lenses. I thought that I would try them out, and I just finished a new lens using the sidebar widgets, called How to Create a Retro Chic Vintage Wedding. So far, we don't have a lot of widgets to choose from and you can only add three of them to your sidebar.

I decided to add two Amazon Spotlight widgets, and one RSS feed widget. The other choices are Featured Lenses, Squidcast, and Facebook Fanbox. So far I have to admit that my favored widget is the Amazon Spotlight. It gives me another chance to sell related products from my topic on the lens. However, I added the feed to a related blog, which worked fine in the workshop, but for some reason did not work on the published lens. I am sure that these kind of kinks will be worked out, so I will wait to see how it shows up.

If you look at my lens, you can see where the sidebar widgets show up in the sidebar. They are below the "Explore Related Pages" (Discovery)and the ad that is directly below that. Not too far down the sidebar. The widgets seem quite simple to use. Does anyone have feedback from them? Or have you sold any products from them yet?

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