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28/07/2011

Safety on Guy Fawkes' night

How well do you know the special British celebration named "Guy Fawkes"?

The first time I went to England in the month of November - normally I used to go during summertime - I discovered the Guy Fawkes celebrations.

It was very intriguing as in my country, although we didn't start to celebrate the Halloween yet, we celebrated the Day of the Deads and All Saints Day. So, between religious events and the things I was in England, there was some kind of difference as big as the Channel that separates our countries.

Lensmaster Becksta built a page that provides you with tips for enjoying a safe Guy Fawkes night. However, instead of just putting together a few tips, she made it a very intersting read!

So, I highly recommend to check out Safety on Guy Fawkes' Night.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66
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All About the Piccolo

Today, I blessed a lens that relates to the use and the story of the piccolo, a type of flute.

I've always loved music courses at school because they allowed us to play with instruments and, one of the mandatory instruments of the time were flutes. You know, those standard wooden flutes, soft as the wind...

Therefore, when I came across the All about the Piccolo lens made by lensmaster Flutestar123, I was brought back to those memorable days when we used to imitate our music teacher, who was a former opera singer and who taught us how to play the flute.

If you like flute and, more particularly piccolo or want to learn how to play piccolo, I suggest to take an eye to All about the Piccolo.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66
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07/07/2011

Lens Indigestion - Strange Traffic Drop

Browsing Squidoo's Summer Fun category looking for bless worthy lenses today, I've got my (un)fair share of indigestion.

What have Squidoo's standards become? I spotted a so-called giant having built a lens that looked more like a trash-can than like a lens built by a newbie... though this lensmaster is a giant - and an old timer who has also power to decide on what's good and bad on Squidoo. I mean, this lensmaster is like me: an angel... who'd bless outstanding lenses. However, what's this lensmaster's notion of what's outstanding when one sees what's their own lenses?!?

I've also spotted a bunch of spam (almost all checked lenses were spam), plagiarized lenses (hoho... I thought we had some kind of duplicate content filter that would be triggered during the publishing phase whenever one would use duplicate/stolen/plagiarized content on our pages? Seems that it doesn't work at all. Or not entered into action yet :(

Have I been assigned the worst category on Squidoo? I don't think so, I hear so many angels who complain about the huge range of junk, spam, TOS violations, and the like they happen to see on their angeling duties.

Everything, from the one who copies/pastes their own store content, what they want to promote through Squidoo, but don't even take the time to rewrite their texts or add pictures/graphics/images, in order to make it attractive and, therefore, worth entering the payout category (as those lenses are related to hot keywords and might very well enter tier 1) and, therefore, prevent quality lensmasters from getting decent earnings to the one that violates the TOS building Squiddon't lenses, to those who simply don't care at all and just build keyword stuffed lenses hoping to rank high in the SERPs; I think I've been given the great advantage to start the day with an horrible indigestion!

On the other hand, I also noticed that since I posted my sincere and honest thoughts about the giant programme last week and that I disagree with it, traffic to my lenses dramatically dropped. I already spoke about it, but not on a public post.

As a matter of fact, how could someone explain how a lens that has 75,000 monthly searches; which sites on Google page result 1, 3rd position - no other lens before mine and before page 2 - doesn't get at least 1% of the monthly searches in traffic? 

I mean 1% is a really low share of the traffic if my lens is on Google's page 1: I've already had my sites on Google's page 1 and they got at least 10% of the traffic, though keywords didn't bring in 75,000 visitors!

Unless people reject Squidoo pages as a whole when they search on Google, there's definitely something wrong with those results! And I made a decision on analyzing my 5 best ranking lenses and study their evolution in order to learn why this can happen. More particularly when a similar lens sits for weeks on a higher lenrank although it gets less visits than mine and isn't listed on Google's page 1.

Ah well... let me share a few lenses that were bless worthy those days:


As usual, I'm going to ask you to pay those pages a visit: you won't regret the time you'll spend reading them and admiring their beautiful layout.

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01/07/2011

Everything Is Going to Be All Right

My moral's raising; I feel really better since I made my decision on not renewing my giant status. And this allowed me to do a few things yesterday afternoon after that crucial step!

I finally joined Amazon.co.uk - it had to be done, but I never took the time to fill the application. And, while browsing this store, I found a myriad of absolutely adorable strawberry themed things. These are going to soon be featured on my main site. Ah, the pleasure to look at all those cute accessories and write about them...

Yesterday afternoon was also the opportunity to start my Squidoo account clean up.

I deleted the remaining work in progress lenses I built - I'm planning to move them on to one of my sites or a blog I'm planning to create.

I deleted a few too low ranked lenses, those lenses that never get any significant traffic. One will be rewritten and posted on one of my sites, the others will just sit in a file on my computer. I have any plans to rebuild them.

For one or two weeks, I'm going to study three former "ever.com" lenses that have been converted into Squidoo.com lenses and make a decision on deleting them if they don't pull any more traffic; or keep them if their traffic raises by mid-July. If there's a significant change (and there's already one minor change), I'll keep them in my account. To say the truth, I hope that there's no significant change and that I can move them on to my main site. They will work very well on there!

Because I mainly build seasonal lenses, starting in August, I'm going to closely check my Halloween lenses, and get rid of the low traffic drivers and transfer them to my main site too. Then, in October, I'll do the same with my Christmas lenses; in January with the Valentine's Day lenses, etc. This way, by next year, I'll have a very clean Squidoo account, bringing me a stable small monthly income. 

As said earlier, having a shorter account will allow me to save time in updating my lenses, and probably even split my current account into several ones. Let's say that I'd have one Halloween account, a Christmas account and one general celebrations account in addition to my existing Squidoo account that would host my history, about me, general lensography and angel lenses.

I think that my lenses will have better results in niche accounts than in just one that's absolutely not related to a single niche I've built.

I'm also taking some distance with the forum where a new hot debate is going on and threats have been made... Oh my. How happy I am to put this so-called "community" on the place it should be!

A community where everyone's supposed to help everyone and where those who know how to do things and pretend to share their knowledge always keep 50% of their knowledge for themselves so that they make sure to always keep the top spot. Ah well.

Leaving Squidoo aside of my online life doesn't mean that I won't do my angel duties with conscience! And here are a few lenses for you to check out. You may consider them as not outstanding but in my opinion, they were worth a blessing, whether because they actually are great or just because they're outstanding and that they should inspire you when building lenses - warning: I said "inspire", not "copy". Thanks for them!


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