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.
