The proof came to me when I was riding one of my horses this afternoon…

The horse was a bit distracted by things that were happening outside the arena, so to ask him to pay a bit more attention I said:

“Can you please focus on what’s happening inside the lens?”

Yep… ‘lens’ probably wasn’t really what I meant to say there! ‘Arena’ might have been a slightly more appropriate word!

Oh dear… I think it may be too late for me! I’ve got a chronic case of Squidoo-itis!

P.S. In case you’re wondering, talking to horses is perfectly normal, and there’s nothing crazy about that at all

My Olympic Equestrian lens got LOTD, which then helped push it into the Top 100, and the Olympic traffic has helped the Beijing Olympics group climb up to number 2 group. If you’d asked me when I joined Squidoo whether I thought any of these things would happen, I probably would have laughed and said ‘yeah, right…’

I just noticed that I haven’t posted in here since the Olympics started! Just goes to show how little time I’ve had lately!
It’s friday night and I’m half asleep in front of the TV… but I feel like I’ve got so much to do! Such as visiting the people who have visited my lenses and left comments lately. I’ve got a few of them to catch up on!

Ah well, the weekend is prime squidoo-ing time! I’ll just rest my eyes one at a time so I can still check out lenses…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

I just checked the top 100 groups list and the Beijing Olympics 2008 Group is number 4! Wow! That was completely unexpected! I thought when it reached number 9 that it had reached an all time high, but it looks like it still had a little bit of climbing to do!

A week or so ago I noticed that a lot of the traffic for the group was from people searching variations of ‘which countries will be competing at the Beijing Olympics?’. It was good to be getting traffic to the group, but it was a bit unfortunate that when they got to the lens the information they were looking for wasn’t there!

So as an experiment I made a lens that was basically a list of the countries competing, with a random selection of other Beijing Olympic things thrown in for a bit of ‘colour and movement’. Within the first week it had nearly 200 visits, mostly from the group lens. Of course now it’s decreased, and (as I pretty much expected) no-one has bought anything! (They’re just looking for a list of countries after all! And my sales abilities aren’t quite at the level where I can convince people to buy stuff they’re not looking for! ) I hope people found the information they were looking for. I’m sure I could have set it out a lot better, and done quite a bit more with it if I’d thought of it earlier when I wasn’t so busy!

Ah well, it was an interesting exercise, and hopefully I’ve learnt a few things from it… About key words, and getting people to go from one of my lenses to another. It’d be nice if the lensrank would be cooperative and stay in the top 10,000 for a little while… I think the timing of the games isn’t quite right for it to last right through to the end of the month for me! Oh well

Phew. You know I may actually be relieved when the Olympics are over! There’s so much stuff I want to do with these lenses and so little time in the day!

Ooh, and my second payday ever was much better than expected (after the approx $1.50 from the first one), with $24.82 total, of which $9.45 went to charity! How cool!

I started with Natalie du Toit, who has an absolutely amazing story. She’s had one leg amputated, but that hasn’t stopped her from qualifying for the Beijing Olympics!

As an aside, I feel a bit weird about making Squid Who lenses… what if the person googles themselves and finds it? (Heh, sometimes I think too much…)
Next is Azumanga Daioh, an anime TV series that is cute, quirky, funny and just a bit bizarre! The problem is that I start watching YouTube clips of the show and get a bit distracted…

Ooh, I just noticed my Horse Computer Games and Video Games lens is number 57 in the Video Games category

Rankings on Squidoo are funny things. Some lenses seem quite ’stable’ in their rankings, and some yo-yo about all over the place… I’ve so much to learn!

Ok, better get back to my Azumanga Daioh clips lens tweaking

The strange thing is that I’ve started all of my lenses off by thinking ‘ooh, that’ll be a good one to do, I can make a great lens on that!’ Yet on some the motivation just doesn’t seem to last…

I think I have to re-think some of the WIPs I’ve had sitting around for a while. Sure, I haven’t had much time to spend on Squidoo for the last week, so nothing much has got done on any of my lenses… but I definitely think an ultimatum of some sort is in order! If I don’t get them published in a reasonable amount of time then I’ll just have to delete them!

Now, I wonder what a ‘reasonable amount of time’ is…

It’s at the top of the list in the Sports category, and number 64 in the Top 100 Groups list! I was just having a look at the list to see what sort of groups make it to the top of the pile, to see if I should consider the Top 100 Groups as a goal for it, and lo and behold, there it was! I’m guessing it’s thanks to the work of the experienced lensmasters hard at work making great Olympic lenses and submitting a new one or two every day!

In other news, I had to boot my first off-topic lens submitted to the group. That wasn’t fun, but it was for a non-Olympic sport and they didn’t even mention the Olympics… But I still went and checked it out, rated it and left them a comment, so hopefully they’ll understand. It was a good lens, just not on the group topic!
Oh, I have so much more to ramble on about, but that will have to do for now! Busy busy busy!

Edit: Here’s a link to the group.

And how am I doing so far?

Well I’m not really sure, but it feels like I’m doing ok! So by completely unbiased self-assessment I’ll say I’m doing great!

Today I’ve got six lenses in the top 10,000. Which I think is cool. My top lens is Planning a trip to an Australian Zoo or Wildlife Sanctuary? which is today ranked at 1,280 overall. My goal is for it to crack the top 1,000 some time in the next week!

I’ve just noticed that it’s ranked at 80 in Animals and Nature! Woohoo!

I’m going to visit Taronga Zoo this week, so I’ll be adding some fresh, up to date information about my trip which should hopefully be the sort of useful information that will bring people to the lens

The other cool thing I’ve got going on at the moment is my Beijing Olympics 2008 Group! When I started it I wasn’t really sure that people would join… but now I’m getting a couple of lenses coming in every day! It’s growing, slowly but surely, which is good because I can keep up to date checking out the lenses and featuring them in an organised fashion on the HQ lens!

Ok, enough rambling for one morning

I don’t want my boyfriend to get sick of hearing me prattle on about it! I tell him about how my traffic and rankings are both gradually increasing, but he doesn’t quite ‘get it’ yet. One day I’ll invite him to join and make his first lens… but I can’t do it yet, because at the moment we’re sharing one computer between the two of us. He’ll be trying to pinch my precious Squidoo time!

I can’t believe how addictive Squidoo is. I discovered the site about a month ago now, in a rather round about sort of way… I read the StumbleUpon reviews for Associated Content, and one of them said that Squidoo was better. So I searched for Squidoo, and read everything I could about what it is and how it works.

I decided that it looked and sounded good so I dived in head first!

My first lens was ‘Planning a trip to an Australian Zoo or Wildlife Sanctuary‘, which is still my best performing lens. Today it has reached number 107 in Animals and Nature, and 1,853 overall. I’m pretty happy with that considering this is all very new to me. I’m still experimenting and ‘learning by doing’

I’ll be updating it in a big way in about a week, so hopefully it will continue to grow. I’ll be visiting Taronga Zoo, so a detailed review will be added to the lens. I’m pretty excited about the zoo visit. I haven’t been to Taronga for over 15 years!

I think my main problem at the moment is that I keep starting new lenses instead of focussing on getting traffic to the ones I’ve got! I just keep having more and more ideas. I need to call a time-out or something!

Although today was a bit of a milestone… I reached 100 visits within a 7 day period for the first time. Although judging by what other people have posted on SquidU, I’ve got a lot of improving to do in that department!!

Ok, back to do a bit of lens polishing!