Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

Weblog from Katinka Hesselink on any lenses she may decide to make :)

New lenses 2010

It’s time for my monthly update on the new lenses I made… As those of you who follow squidu know, I’ve landed a big webdesign account, so I won’t be as active here. Still, I’ve managed to build quite a few lenses in the past month:

One of the most influential Zen Buddhist teachers of our day is Steve Hagen. So I finally made him a lens…

Calendar lenses:

2010 Real Leather Planners, Date Books, Calendar books
Owl Calendars 2010
and Fun trivia facts desk calendars 2010
Farm animals 2010 Calendars

Then three lenses that have to do with calendars, yet aren’t built to sell… Two of them were made as part of the giant squid challenge. One was made because I felt that my calendars blog account should not hold ONLY sales lenses. So here goes, in chronological order:
A calendars quiz
Calendars Blog: How I stay organized
Digital Calendar or Pen to Paper?

I did three book reviews this month:
A World Full Of Gods: about the early history of Christianity, The Miracles Of Exodus and Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin D. Yalom.

In my new mini-niche I made three lenses about laptops and their bags:
First about my new Lightweight 13 inch laptop, then about rolling bags to carry it, and then for good measure a lens about cute wheeled bags in general.

Sometimes, not often, I make lenses simply because a reader suggests it. This month the result isn’t yet that good. But they’re a start on gathering anti religious and anti Christian quotes.

We had a rare white winter, with not just snow but natural ice to skate on as well. For the Dutch this is common enough for us to know what to do, but rare enough to make it a special occasion. So, of course, I made a lens about skating on natural ice.

My last niche this month was a dive into Marjolein Bastin. Marjolein Bastin is a Dutch lady who makes water color art, that is turned into all kinds of stuff by Hallmark. Some of it is rare by now, because the line sold out fast. I started with Marjolein Bastin calendars, and expanded to Marjolein Bastin Checkbook Covers, Vera the mouse, Marjolein Bastin Christmas and Marjolein Bastin Collectibles.

Squidoo tips Dec 2009 & Jan 2010

I’d already wished you all a Happy New Year, but I’d forgotten to mention the blogposts I’ve recently written on my Marketing Spiritual blog. Since today I’ve added a third, I thought I’d share them with you here:

  1. Clean up after the holidays: page speed and more
    Christmas is gone and online marketing is getting back to normal. Time to start thinking about some maintenance issues.
  2. How to get your page / lens / blog indexed in google
    I did an experiment…
  3. Advantages and disadvantages of having several squidoo accounts
    For psychological reasons some people choose to move their non-successful
    lenses into a separate account. If that’s the only way you can avoid obsessing over them, by all means go ahead. But personally I’d rather you just didn’t obsess. Low ranking lenses are as much part of life as blogposts that don’t get traffic.The only difference is that you don’t know they don’t get traffic. You, nor your lenses, don’t have to be successful to be worthwhile. But that’s a whole other post.

New lenses & new squidoo account Dec. 2009

In December …

I went on making squidquizzes: Quiz: Dalai Lama facts and trivia , Wicca and Paganism facts and trivia , Harry Potter Magic Facts and Trivia, Judaism facts and trivia and Islam facts and trivia. I’ve now covered the main world religions and to gather them all together, I’ve made a lensography of the best and Coolest Spiritual Quizzes Ever. I’ve included spiritual and religious squidquizzes by other lensmasters, so this is sort of a group.

I wrote a book review that has already been featured on two squidoo related blogs: You’re Not Going Crazy…You’re Just Waking Up! Michael Mirdad. Another book review… Buddhist Texts Through the Ages

I shared my experience preparing for Christmas: Beautiful Christmas Tree Skirts for sale, Adapt your small decor to Christmas, find red and gold christmas tree decorations and tree toppers.

I shared Acim quotes and started a new blog about my spiritual quotes.

Having recently bought a 13.3 inch laptop, I made a lens about laptop sleeves for 13 inch laptops.

I’ve made over 300 lenses now and thought it was getting a bit hard to manage. Also, from an SEO perspective, it’s always good to organize by niche. So I decided to group my calendar lenses together on a new squidoo account: calendars blog. One of the first lenses to move over to this new account was my very new, and late for this advent season, lens featuring chocolate advent calendars.

Now nothing more is left for me to say, except: I hope you had a great Christmas and I wish you all a Happy and wise 2010.

New squidoo lenses november 2009

I’ve been very busy this month making lenses. I became Citizen Squid: SEO Mentor and that has caused me to make several lenses. I also love the new squidquiz template and have been making quizzes about all my major topics. The series is only just started I’m sure.

But let me start with the lens which caused me to sell a 250$ item on Amazon. Inspired by the rocketmom challenge to make a lens about an expensive Christmas Gift item, I made a lens about flutes: Student Flute – get a flute for a beginner player. I used to play a flute for years as a kid and young teen, so I know a bit about them. However, not surprisingly, given that it is totally outside my niche and I wasn’t able to give it any serious backlinks, this lens isn’t getting much traffic. However, it did make a sale of a $250.00 Gemeinhardt 2SP Silver Plated Flute. I mean seriously – that was easy money. The lens was created on the 12th of this month, which is also a bit late for the Christmas season, so I guess I am hoping it will do even better next year :)

Continuing on with lenses totally outside my main niches… I made a lens about How to start an Aloe Plant. Simply because I’ve been having trouble doing so. I thought I’d gather the conflicting advice I found online, try my own experiments and record the results. So far I think the main conclusion is that the advice to keep the soil moist is not good. Succulent plants simply don’t need that amount of moist, not even when roots are absent. In fact: a bit of dryness will stimulate them to make those (ultimately) very necessary roots.

I already had two lenses about fractals, which I guess as a math teacher I’m qualified to make. However, I’d totally forgotten to answer the basic question: what is a fractal… till Brenda reminded me. So now I have. From an SEO perspective this is likely to be only a supporting lens for my other lenses about fractals. It gives them on topic back links and establishes my squidoo account as a bit of a fractal ‘hub’. In other words: I really don’t expect much traffic on this lens. However, so far it is getting one visitor a day from search engines, so perhaps I’m being too pessimistic. I did do my keyword research to make sure I combined the topics and associations in ways that weren’t already done to death.

While I make money online, enough to keep afloat, I also design and make websites. There is a high chance of me getting a gig (my biggest so far) to transfer a website to the Joomla CMS next year. So to prepare myself, I’ve been reading up on Joomla and Search Engine Optimization. Since this turns out to be less than self evident (wordpress is much more SEO friendly out of the box) I’ve started a lens to keep my notes in one place. This lens even gets one or two visitors a day, which is good for a lens I only made for me and without much attention to keywords at all.

Now for my niches. I’ve made a LOT of lenses about calendars in the past year. Just one at a time. I thought I’d been pretty thorough, but sometimes you find out a lens is missing that just needs to be made. In this case the total opposite of my flutes lens: a lens about cheap planners. It gets lots of traffic already and a few sales so I guess it’s doing what I made it for.

Then my main niche: religion and spirituality. I’ve made several religious quiz lenses: Jiddu Krishnamurti Trivia Test, Free Christian trivia test, Test your knowledge about Blavatsky, Religion facts and trivia (also a lensography), Buddhism trivia and facts, Yoga trivia and facts, Hinduism facts and triva and last but not least a lens where I’m gathering all the best spiritual trivia quizzes made on squidoo (a sort of group): The Coolest Spiritual Quizzes Ever.

As you can perhaps tell: the titles are all over the place. This is on purpose to figure out what draws traffic to this kind of lenses best. I’ve not yet decided on the outcome, but I do know this trivia quiz niche is a definite traffic puller. My general religion quiz is already one of the top lenses in the squidquiz template.

Then, appropriately but a bit late for the season, I made two lenses with Buddhist Gifts. One simply a lensography gathering my Buddhist gift lenses together. The other, suggested again by my friend Brenda, a lens devoted to Buddhist Tees.

Last but not least, and probably not news to any of you, I made three lenses devoted to SEO. The first was my SEO mentor lens. The second about optimizing tags for squidoo and the third my story of increasing squidoo traffic. That last lens could have been made ages ago, but I never saw the point. Having made it however, and seen just how people respond, it’s clear this sort of lens works as a motivator to people. You can tell them a zillion times that they should blog and interlink their stuff, but when they see the effect of doing just that, it becomes real.

Meet the new squidoo SEO mentor & learn about tags

There’s a new addition to the squidoo mentor team, and it’s yours truly :) I set up the SEO/Marketing mentor lens, though I’ve stayed mostly on the SEO side for this one. Where my original SEO lens was more theory minded, this new lens is much more practical. As in: this is what you should do, never mind why.

My old How to do Keyword research lens is also part of my SEO pack of course. If you want to get traffic fast, keyword research is a must.

On a related topic, I decided to turn my post about how I optimized tags to get more traffic into a lens about optimizing tags. I turned the whole thing into a prioritized step by step process. I mean really: get rid of those orphan tags! If you’ve done that on all your lenses and you still have energy to go on, then do the rest.

Easily ignored, because there is so much advice out there, I do also want to remind you of one of my lenses about blogging. Especially: Success at Blogging tips.

Helping Clouda9 out a bit more…

I think most of those active on squidu have figured it out by now. Clouda9 is having a rough time. To help her out a bit I thought I’d link some of her second tier lenses here, in hopes that they might become first tier.

Bloody Bones is Going to Get You! A Halloween lens.

Squidoo Chefmasters: Their Yummiest Recipes Ever

Bunco: The Best Dice Game Ever

Cowboy Candy Recipes!

Yola Websites: The Real Deal

Rocket Mom’s Photo of the Week Challenges

Apply for a Railroad Job

Especially For Couples: The Sexiest Games Ever

My Squidoo Angel’s

Top Ten Sexiest Christmas Songs Ever

Meth Can Mess Up Your Life

Last but not least Clouda9’s Lensography and Crabbysbeach blog.

Squidquiz: religion and spirituality quizes on squidoo

I love the new squidquiz theme. I can see myself making a whole series of lenses for each of my religion or spirituality subniches.

Today I made the lens that will become my lensography for the whole series – suitably it’s also a squidquiz lens itself: Quiz: Religion facts and trivia.

I’ve also made one with Christianity trivia and more niche Krishnamurti trivia and Blavatsky trivia.

New Squidoo Lenses Oct. 2009

This month I’ve made, as usual, quite a few squidoo lenses. Right now I’m up to 258 lenses, visited 16,140 times in the last 7 days.

Let me start with a lens that was inspired by a squidu forumthread: My newest lenses :)

I made two lenses devoted to desk calendars: Spiritual and religious desk Calendars 2010 and the more general: Desk Calendars.

Devoted to a book that is a classic in the Theosophical World: Man The Measure Of All Things. Book reviews never get much traffic for me, but I can’t avoid reviewing a book when it’s good enough to blog about. Who knows, I may even sell something :)

I found myself making some new banners & thought I’d make a lens about how to make one: How to make a banner for your website or myspace.

In the past month I’ve added two lenses to my Harry Potter niche (a very unsuccessful niche btw, due to competition). First, my Harry Potter Candy Store, which is at least a lot of fun. And second – stand up dolls of Harry Potter characters.

I created another religious Hey Monkeybrain debate: Are experiences of aliens a form of psychic experience? Simply a topic I wanted to get a better grasp of. But I noticed that I already had A LOT of religious and spiritual debates, so I decided to make another lensography: Religion, Science and Spirituality Debates.

One of my newest projects is to help set up a search engine friendly Joomla site. I know a lot about search engines, but not a lot about joomla, so I decided to record what I learned in a lens: How to make Joomla Search Engine Friendly. My first impression? Wordpress is A LOT easier to make search engine friendly and maintain like that.

Last but not least: Buddhism. I’ve added not only a list of Pema Chodron Buddhism Books , but also, in the spirit of the season, Buddhism Gifts and presents. You may have guessed it, but that last one is another lensography…

Launch new squidoo seo & marketing blog

As I was preparing the launch of my new blog, which I’ve started because I needed a home for my ebook, I came across this post, written Oct. 2008. How happy I was to have 3000 visitors in that week :) In contrast, this week I had over 15000 visitors to my squidoo lenses. That’s five times as many visitors with about twice as many lenses. Not bad, right? Not bad at all. I think it proves that I do have good reason to write an ebook about a topic that has been done a LOT before.

I started working on my ebook this summer. My brother gave me some feedback that sent me right back to the drawing board: a reshuffle of the information was necessary. That it’s not yet out has nothing to do with me slaving away daily, but with other distractions. But the flu made me concentrate so I’m launching my new blog Marketing Spiritual. Pronounce as the type of negro religious music (is one still allowed to say that?).

I’m still working on the design, but the content is the best of my blogposts on squidtop – especially those posts of course that are devoted to marketing and SEO. The blog will be a place for me to share my insights about online marketing to a somewhat broader audience than just squidoo. Think hubpages and spiritual organizations needing help. Several of the blogposts have been updated so there’s no outdated info to be found on this new blog.

This post here will be cross posted there it’s my last squidoo tips post on squidtop. I will probably keep using the squidtop blog for the usual promote your last or least ranking lenses type post and sharing favorites I come across browsing on squidoo.

For now: subscribe to the RSS feed and read my best posts in the past two years.

Squidoo friends – Giving tribute to great lenses and lensmasters

I’m starting a squidoo blog here to give tribute to great lensmasters. You’ll find my best squidoo friends in the lensroll. The blogposts will be sort of a continuation of my Thank You Lensmaster blog. I think I’ve interviewed the main lensmasters, though if I find new great lensmasters, I’m sure to interview them… But on here I want to simply share great lenses I find. So far I’ve featured the Giant Squid Community Showcase, Traveling with squidoo and Cabaret Squidoo Best Recipes.