Updating Lenses

How was your weekend? I seemed to be quite busy and yet still didn’t get everything done! We decided to get up and go to a Sunday market that we haven’t been to since I held a market stall there with my friend (we were making jewelry before Christmas 2008). Well it’s probably been the first time that we haven’t watched the news in a couple of days – there was a king tide due that morning and with a bit of a storm (thanks to Olga who was further up the coast) the sea was up onto the road in places and the market was closed! I did take my camera, but hubby was reluctant to stop until the rain stopped so I only got a couple of snaps :(

The most exciting part of the weekend occurred on the Saturday night however, my dd had been playing at the next door neighbors when she came running up our steps calling out something…..it turned out there was a baby koala in the tree outside of our houses. I took heaps of snaps – a couple of them are in my Zazzle store. We had to call the Wildlife Rescue team though because there was no sign of his/her mother. S/he was remarkably calm though merrily chomping her way through the ‘wrong’ leaves off of the ‘wrong’ tree. I don’t know if s/he was going through a rebellious stage or they’ve had to adapt their diet because of the change in habitat.

Now back to Squidoo. How often do you update lenses? There has been a discussion on Squidu about which lens was the oldest to be updated and mine has been a while, although not nearly as bad as if the question had been asked a month ago.

Now I don’t really know how often you should update them because when I update some it seems to give them a new lease of life, however others can tick along with nice traffic and only get updated a few times a year! During January, however, I was making a concerted effort to work my way through my lenses, just updating the tags and anything that was glaringly obvious. I was about a week into it when I realized that a number of my discovery tools were empty! There must’ve been a bug at some stage so I started checking those too.

When I do something little like that I also have a notebook and write down the lenses that need major work done – I do it that way so that I can keep working through my lenses and leave those until I can schedule enough time. The last time I totally revamped a lens it took me all day (and that was after I had made lots of notes in longhand as well and knew what I was planning). It was worth it however and I’m much happier promoting it.

The last week I’ve been spending a lot more time on Zazzle and Hubpages than on Squidoo because I’m trying to diversify my online income streams. I am working on a big project however which involves t-shirts. I have published a couple and have one in WIP, but I haven’t promoted them yet. I sometimes have an idea for a lens and I realize that I really need to break it up – once I’ve decided on how to break it up I work on the off-shoot lenses first – publish them, but don’t do any promotion until the whole thing is finished.

I promise I’ll reveal all later on this week, it’s just been really busy with pretty mundane ‘real life’ things getting in the way.