I have been talking to Mary K about why our lenses might not be doing as well as some of the "Squidoo Greats" like Kelly Stone, Tiffany Dow, Lewis Smile. Today I think I may have found the key. I was reading Lewis' blog and went to check out a lens he recommended. On the lens he was talking about tagging tricks. He happened to show a screen shot of his tags from google for one of his lenses. (It happened to be a lens on myspace) I have a lens on myspace that's doing ok, but not super and I wanted to see what the difference was.
Here take a the two lenses.
Mine: How to Add More Friends at Myspace
Lewis': How to Get a Million Myspace friends (1,000,000) (free download)
OK ~ I just noticed I don't even have myspace in my URL. duh. But I think the bigger difference lays in the lens itself.
You will find my lens is kind of boring by comparison. There really is different energy between the lenses. My lens has fairly large modules of text. Lewis' lens has short sweet modules, with added images and some "feature this" modules. Although by the end of the lens I felt really great and even learned a couple things.
I think this is a key point for ME. I am LONG WINDED ~ as a reader of this blog you know. People who search the internet don't come on to find 4 pages of information on any given topic. They go looking for an answer to a question or problem.
It might do me well to learn to get to the point. If you notice on Lewis' lens he asks a question in his title and url. Within his lens he uses the modules as a numbered list of answers to the question. Each of his modules is only a couple sentences long ~ with another piece of the answer to the question. This ends up providing an interesting and informative lens, but small enough pieces the person doesn't get bored and never get to the bottom.
This is really a brilliant idea and from the screen shot of his traffic it's working. I started looking around at his lenses and he employs this technique on many of his lenses.
That's going to be my last tip of the Squidoo Marketing Experiment. If you want to continue to learn about Squidoo I am going to give you some of my favorite Squidoo Blogs. I subscribe to all these RSS feeds and learn quite a bit from them.
Lewis' Blog: SquidooCool.com
Tiffany Dow's Blog: SocialMarketing101.com
Jennifer aka Pot Pie Girl's Blog: PotPieGirl.com
Those are my three favorites and I'm sure you will learn a lot from them.
So now for the wrap up. I did some good research on some new niche ideas. I set up a couple new lenses this month and they are building traffic. I have tweaked some of my old lenses and I am getting even more traffic now. I am making a sale every few days from one of my lenses which is a marked improvement.
I am still wrestling with the ideas of building lenses on what you love vs. doing research and building lenses about what other people love.
I think I have settled on doing lenses on things that interest me, but doing some research to find keywords others are looking for related to that topic. It turns into the best of both worlds.
I imagine if I am interested in something there must be other people interested in it as well. Having some interest and passion around a topic will give a better energy to the lens as I build it. People can feel whether you do something just for the money or for the love.
It never hurts to do some testing though. Build a couple lenses on topics you love, and build some you think will be big hits from your research. Watch your stats and see what happens!!
I look forward to working with you all next month with a new marketing experiment. If you have any questions regarding Squidoo, please don't hesitate to give us a shout and we'll do what we can to get your questions answered.
Jackie Lee
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