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Singapoor
Member
Joined: 6 Feb 2009
Posts: 161
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# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 06:31
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Of course, I clicked around while I was busy looking for that disappearing comment. And.... I clicked on the health button for the first time.
As it turns out, you're supposed to be regular about this thing (doh!). Now I'm wondering this. I took the time beforehand to make sure that my lens was super close to my vision of it. Actually, taking my time to do things the way I see them is why I haven't published my second lens yet (which, I now consider publishing then making a work-in-progress online to please the health bot).
But to get back to the topic of my first lens tho... Since I set up my first lens the way I saw it as being, there isn't really anything I'd like to add to it or take away from it. With that being the case, I'm in a tricky situation.
I understand that it pleases the search engines to have regular content added to the lens and can also think of a few ways to make regular adjustments, but what do you do if you, literally, have said all that you've wanted to say and have formatted things in the way you want to format it? Do you then just start adding content or making changes [u]merely for the sake of adding content[/u]? Or do you just say accept that you take a hit when you're not making a change regularly?
I don't see me doing that, but I thought I'd get a discussion going. Hey squids, what are YOUR approaches to lens-ing... how regularly do you update your lenses?
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A8ch
Joined: 24 Jun 2005
Posts: 580
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# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 15:41 · Edited by: A8ch
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Singapoor: I understand that it pleases the search engines to have regular content added to the lens and can also think of a few ways to make regular adjustments, but what do you do if you, literally, have said all that you've wanted to say and have formatted things in the way you want to format it? Do you then just start adding content or making changes [u]merely for the sake of adding content[/u]? Or do you just say accept that you take a hit when you're not making a change regularly?
Singapoor, you raise very interesting questions and I can relate to the virtual box that lensmasters can seemingly be painted into as a consequence.
Here's my attitude on the matter:
Squidoo is a tool, a means to an end. It's a platform that accomodates the self-serving interests of the two main players - Squidoo and the lensmaster - and the rationale is that both parties will derive mutual reward.
On the one hand, Squidoo gets to exert its influence by promoting its benefits and encouraging the use of its many features. On the other hand, the lensmaster gets to determine how much leverage she wants to extract from the relationship.
She decides when...
- the surface of her lens is carrying the desired content
- the presentation is exactly how she envisioned it
- the under belly - tags, keywords, links - is in sync
- the click through rate is where she wants it to be
- the comments and feedback support her intentions
At that point she's free to ride whatever waves of glory the lens delivers and turn a blind eye, (or lend a deaf ear) to Squidoo's solicitous recommendations of other shiny things. [I just love metaphors! Don't you?  ]
The way out of the "box" is simply to make new lenses to complement and enhance the original or those preceding.
It's kinda like a courtship. There are several ways you can express your love. You don't have to use a dozen red roses everytime, there's candle-light dinners, soft music and poetry. The method you select ought to be inspired by the mood you are in at the moment... or (more practically) the mood you want to create. 
Hermas
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moneymaker1008
Member
Joined: 25 Jun 2009
Posts: 18
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# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 17:19
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Well, if you think about it it counts as an update each time you approve a comment. It also counts when you update your tags. If you have nothing else to add you can also check your grammar as you can there's usually areas you can find that need cleaning up.
By the way, the Health Check thing is useful sometimes, but there are a lot of problems with it so don't depend on it.
Personally I update my lenses almost everyday in one way or another. It does seem to be helping with ranking.
-Danielle
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Newbie Shield
Joined: 22 Sep 2007
Posts: 2114
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# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 19:03
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Hi Singapoor,
Hermas and Danielle raised some good points.
Once your lens is set up as you envision it, don't change anything. Never tweak past a couple weeks or a month on the extreme outside. It's not worth it for a single page. Your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
Just think of the law of diminishing returns.
It's better to create a new lens or to do something to your main site or to write a new article.
As Danielle pointed out, approving comments counts as an update. You might want to do that once a week or so for a while and then less often later on.
If you want lensmasters to visit and rate your lens then interact on the Squidoo forum. You can also rate, comment, and favorite the lenses of others. Some of them will visit yours and do the same for you.
The poll module also counts as interactivity so that's why I suggested a while back that you include one.
Some people create a lens in a single day and only return to approve comments once in a while. I've seen some accounts that have over 500 lenses.
The more you have, the better the chance you'll have of creating a few that do real well both in terms of lensrank and income.
Your main site is far more important that a lensmaster account so spend most of your time on your own site.
~Newbie Shield~
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Singapoor
Member
Joined: 6 Feb 2009
Posts: 161
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# Posted: 23 Aug 2009 22:51
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By no means is my first lens "perfect", but it is perfectly what I wanted at that stage in my Squidoo-ing. And as such, my plan was to focus on building more lenses to compliment it. The end goal being, instead of tweaking the lens to death, take the time to do it well then build new ones that folks could click on (if they liked it, of course) to learn about other things that are under the same topic umbrella.
I like your courtship analogy A8ch, it's a good one. But like you said, it's not always about roses - sometimes there are candlelit dinners, sometimes poetry. I bought the flowers once, so I figured I'd move on to the poetry . But, I feel like Squidoo ended up telling me "The poetry is great, but you need to keep sending flowers." .... which is led to reevaluation.
It's strange how these responses trickled in, because they actually follow my train of thought. Next I figured that changing stuff on the back end would likely do it (updating tags, lensroll, confirming comments... but my comment disappeared so I couldn't test that particular hypothesis). So what I did was changed the tags and checked to see if that pleased the health bot. No effect. It could be that it was slow to update, but nothing at the time.
Then I arrived at the decision that NS talks about. I figured, there's nothing wrong with my plan to just go ahead and add new lenses, so why worry so much about tweaking this one? In the end, I WON'T put my incomplete second lens up and display it as a work in progress just to have the continuous activity going, but I sure did consider it at the time.
BTW moneymaker, I meant to double check the lens today to see if it's really just slow to notice that the tags had been changed and therefore show an "update" for the health bot, but I've not done that yet. I'll check to see because now it's more a matter of academic curiosity to see whether or not that impacted the health bot's advice.
Newbie Shield: If you want lensmasters to visit and rate your lens then interact on the Squidoo forum. You can also rate, comment, and favorite the lenses of others. Some of them will visit yours and do the same for you. The poll module also counts as interactivity so that's why I suggested a while back that you include one.
Also, thanks for these points too NS. I'll definitely start interacting more and throwing polls on my next lenses... but yeah, my main site comes first.
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