Updating & Weeding Out Lenses - Squidoo Work is Never Done!

How are you are going with the winds of change at Squidoo at the moment?   I think it's a little early to tell how the changes so far (limiting of likes and blessings) have affected lensranks, but in anticipation of the new filters I've been busily going through my lenses.

I've decided to go through the lenses alphabetically because that way I can actually go through them all.   Over the years when I want to make changes I've tried doing the lenses in other orders and I never seem to actually finish which is why I have some lenses that haven't been updated in ......... well a long, long time!

I have also used the dashboard labels and have got one called Needs Work! where I have transferred some lenses.   Next week I am husband-less which is a time when I seem to get a lot of work done and the plan is to finish working my way through the alphabet and then tackle the Needs Work labeled lenses - I should mention I'm actually doing the work as I go on the majority of them so the lenses under that label shouldn't be too many!

I am actually going to move the content of some lenses to a blog I have as there are a few which keep dropping into wip, not because of lack of content, but because people aren't searching for it.   I have a themed blog and when I feature these pages I get visitors, but I think the pages will perform better on the actual blog instead of on Squidoo.

Most of my content will be staying on Squidoo however.   

While I'm busy updating I'm also having fun adding some of the pages to my Lou16 Facebook page - for those of you who missed the news last week I've finally joined Facebook.   I don't think it's helped my traffic much yet, but I don't know as I need a few more likes in order to be able to enable stats on the page so if you'd like to visit my page and click on the thumbs up button it would be appreciated :D

Another place that I joined recently was Pinterest.   Now when this site was in beta I got sent an invite, but for some reason I could never sign in (it was my computer as there was another site that I had the same problem with) and while I was trying to fix this I started hearing all the infringement of copyright discussions regarding Pinterest.   I put everything on hold and did nothing else about the site and then the November traffic drop occurred. 

One of my lenses has done very well over the past few months and hasn't experienced it's usual winter drop (in fact it's doing better than it was in the lead up to summer which is generally it's best traffic time), when traffic on the majority of my lenses dropped I noticed that this one continued to do well.   When I looked at what was so different about this lens one thing stood out to me - it had been pinned over 1000 times!   The amount of traffic from Pinterest wasn't overly high, but I thought the pinning itself must've been a ranking factor for not just Squidoo, but also Google as Google was sending me a lot more traffic than previously (this lens has been around for years).

Check out Lou16's Pinterest Boards

I've found that pinning can be a lot of fun and I've started to spend some time each day doing it.   As I'm updating I'm also pinning lenses that I have boards for.   An example is that I just went through a selection of costume lenses I have and as I have a Fancy Dress Board I've been pinning several costumes from each lens onto the board.

I don't just pin my products by the way - I pin lots of other things too, however I have two boards where I only pin things that I will get paid for if they purchase them - my t-shirt board and my fancy dress costume board.    

I'm not sure that I'm doing everything the way I should be on Pinterest, but I've built up a few followers and the repinning of my pins has been going crazy with two of my pins going viral (unfortunately they weren't pins of anything on my lenses/pages so I don't know if that resulted in much actual traffic).   If you haven't used Pinterest before you might want to check out Lori's lens on Pinterest - A Promotion Guide for Pinterest.

Anyway time to go back to my Squidoo spring cleaning and hopefully by next week we'll know more about the changes that Squidoo are implementing and how they'll impact our bottom line.