mosaic + squidoo

So, uh, looks like my new year’s resolution didn’t get very far. Last week, I did not create a brand new lens at all. I was extremely busy but that’s hardly a valid excuse. However, I did finish up a lens that has been around but was not yet complete. I finally put in all of the game recipes for my Chocolatier 3 strategy lens. Off the top of my head, there are two other lenses that need a bit more to be complete. Those would be my Pillsbury Bake-Off Recipes lens and my Free Nancy Drew Walkthroughs lens. Both are relatively new and are of the informational “link hub” style. Hopefully, I’ll start finishing those off…. and then think of a new lens to do! How’s everyone else’s new  year resolutions working out?

For this week’s lens, I decided to do a little web organization and create a sort of hub page. I recently bought a new game from Big Fish Games called Nancy Drew – Curse of Blackmoor Manor. It’s an adventure style game where you are the famous Nancy Drew and you must roam around to find the clues and fit the pieces together to solve a mystery (or crime?)!

Many of my most successful lenses are gaming lenses related to providing hints, tips, cheats, or strategies. I looked into writing my own strategy guide for Blackmoor, but well, I haven’t beaten the game yet. Then I discovered that there are 21 (?!!) Nancy Drew games. Wow! So here it is, a lens where you’ll be able to find free Nancy Drew walkthroughs for every Nancy Drew game.

(Okay, as of this writing, not all 21 are there. But they will all be there within a few days. Just wanted to get this lens out there as soon as I could.)

Happy new year, everyone! Well, here is the first lens for my new year’s resolution. It sounds a little dull but this lens has been on my WIP list for a while now. The inspiration was to do a little organization on the web. When I tried to search for KitchenAid appliance manuals, I found that on the official customer service website, you had to search by model number. But what if you didn’t know the model number? There was no way to just search generally by the type of appliance. So, I decided to do a little digging and found some model numbers for most countertop appliances KitchenAid offers. Then, I looked up the manual pdf and organized it all on my KitchenAid Manuals lens. Of course, there wasn’t really a way to find every single appliance, but I feel confident that I have covered the popular ones. If anything is missing, let me know!

In keeping with this bridesmaid dress fix that I’ve been on recently, I’ve just added another lens called… Inexpensive Bridesmaid Dresses Under $200. It’s pretty similar to my previous lens but one of the ideas of building this lens was to start monopolizing my own Discovery Tool. Lots of lensmasters have had tons of success by building out a niche. In fact, my California missions niche is quite nice. Google likes it, they all link around to each other, the other mission lenses dominate the Discovery tool and kids who need their homework done fast tend to find my lens and leave me desperate comments!

I digress. Anyway, I think I’ve put together more than enough “inexpensive bridesmaid dress” lenses. Time to branch out in a more creative direction. I’ve already started brainstorming lens ideas for the new year.

It’s engagement season again! I read somewhere that approximately 35% of couples get engaged during the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Years. (Any of you out there?) Soon after the engagement, wedding planning begins. With this timeline, the popular wedding period is in late spring and summer.

I recently put together a lens on inexpensive bridesmaid dresses under $100. It surprised me a bit when I first started looking, but plenty of name brand dresses and really nice looking bridesmaid dresses (not ugly at all!) can be found for under $100. I put together some of my favorites along with some tips for finding bridesmaid dress bargains. Buying in the off season is a great idea, but if you can’t do that, well, there are still some great looking dresses. Some I think I could even wear to another event….

Wow. Okay, I’ve totally fallen off the face of the planet when it came to Squidtop. I see that my last blog post was back in February! It doesn’t mean that I slacked off on Squidoo, though. I’m now over 80 lenses, though I won’t be hitting the 100 mark for the 100 club this year.

I have gotten involved in other ventures in the meantime. I’m currently working on a new website for inexpensive bridesmaid dresses. It’s called Shiny Orb and it’s my first attempt at a retail / comparative shopping kind of website.

But, I digress! This post is about my new resolution for 2010. I’m not going to go super ambitious but I’m going to go challenging for me….

I resolve to make 1 new lens a week every week during 2010.

And a sub-part of that resolution is to blog here regularly about my lenses. Do you have any Squidoo-related new years resolutions?

$54.87 = (3 x $11.33) + (5 x $1.78) + (42 x $0.08) + $8.62[royalties]

In terms of lensranks, I went from [2, 5, 33] to [3, 5, 42]. Again, even more lenses have made it into pay tiers. The biggest thing was that I managed to bump a third lens into the top tier!

Woooooweeeeee.

That’s all I can say. Woooooooweeeeee!!!

Just wondering what all you lensmasters out there think about groups. I used to be pretty good about surfing the list of groups and adding my lenses to what I felt was appropriate. Sometimes I get in, sometimes I get rejected. Anyhow, I have to admit that while I used to surf the list of groups, I never really surfed the lenses IN the groups. So I guess I never gave traffic to any other lenses in the group. Therefore, it seems unreasonable for me to expect traffic to MY lenses from groups. Because of that, (and some laziness) I stopped surfing the groups and didn’t really add my new lenses to any groups in the past few months.

Has being in a group helped anyone? Do you find it good to be a part of a group?

I suppose you could join groups for SEO reasons. I’m not sure that it counts as a real backlink (or rather, a really useful backlink) because the link is still from the Squidoo domain. On the other hand, I think some group pages have decently high PageRank so then it would definitely help to get some Google juice from them. But then, do you have to be linked from the front page / headquarters page of the group?

Just wondering. Anyone have some thoughts?

I just went through and added my lenses to tons of groups. I feel like a spammer.

Before I introduce my new lens, I just want to say that I’ve reached a milestone! I just got my first lens to get over 1000 hits in the rolling 7 day window! It’s quite amazing, really. I signed up for another site in order to submit my lens as a game walkthrough. Who knew that there are soooo many people looking for a walkthrough for Fish Tycoon. Goodness. Within hours of submitting the link, I got several tens of people. Now that it’s been a couple of days, I’ve gotten some 600+ referrals from that page. Just goes to say, backlinks can help! Now my lens is climbing the LensRank. I hope it climbs Google PageRank, too.

So… one of my newest lenses (I’m a little behind on lens introductions) is on Golf Gift Baskets. I suppose there’s not much more I can say about it to clarify the topic. It’s a bunch of golf-themed gift baskets for your favorite golfer. However, I’d like to mention a couple of things that came to mind while making this lens.

1. Images. I got some great images from flickr. Keep in mind that you should always ask for permission and/or follow CC licensing!
2. This lens is yet another attempt at making a money-making lens. I decided to try golf gift baskets because people do search for the term, though only about 5k a month, and there are relatively few pages, about half a million. (Little did I know that those numbers aren’t great and I found another product with much, much better numbers. But I haven’t been approved as an affiliate yet.)
3. There weren’t any golf gift basket specific lenses that I could find on Squidoo. So I’m hoping this will give me an edge in Google. Now I’m just waiting for Google to pick it up. *crosses fingers*