Continuing the List of Things to Do on Your Lenses

If you’ve read yesterday’s posting you’ll know that we’re examining Bonnie’s to do list for lensmaking.....if you haven’t read yesterday’s posting then off you go and we’ll wait right here for you to finish :)

Bonnie’s List Again

• DO think outside the box
• DO go with your gut instinct
• DO your homework
• DO proof read
• DO keep sharing your work
• DO focus on a niche
• DO use the tools Squidoo offers

Do keep sharing your work – a lot of people ask where you share your work to and I’m reminded of a lensography I read and I can’t for the life of me think who it was about otherwise I would link to it, but the person used to put sticky notes with her url on them in restrooms when she was traveling!

I think the moral of this is you never know where your traffic might come from so keep posting your links everywhere you can think of. Send a lens to friends and family (if you think they’d be interested), submit it to social bookmarking sites, add it to forum signatures and don’t forget to interlink your lenses together.

Do focus on a niche – niche lenses are great, but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write on other things as well and it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t have more than one niche. I use the group function available to giants to keep all of my niche lenses together. I often find that I have overlapping niches which are great.

Focusing on a niche means that you can interlink your lenses, create a lensography on your niche to promote outside of squidoo and also you can have a blog which is a great way of sharing your lenses with the world. A niche blog is much more likely to get ranked than one which is generalized as Google doesn’t know how to categorize it.

Do use the tools Squidoo offers – there are so many tools such as the Discovery Modules, Sidebar Widgets etc but one of the best tools and one which I recommend using every day is Squidu. Checking in with squidu is invaluable because you never know when someone will mention something that they do and you think – oh I never knew that or wow that makes sense. I love hearing what veterans like Fluff and Jeffryv have to say about things because they’re not only helpful they’re very successful lensmasters.

There are often some interesting debates. Flowergardener recently started a debate which has really shown a number of issues being discussed and whatever your feelings it’s good to read feedback on both sides of the discussion.