Finishing the Squidoo Challenge
Well, my 30 Days, 30 Lenses challenge is over. I managed to complete 30 lenses, despite having a sick family for half the month and being sick myself, so I consider that to be success!
What did I learn from doing so many lenses so fast?
- While I’m perfectly capable of turning out great lenses with good content in a short period of time, I did learn that I don’t live up to my potential. I could have easily had thousands of lenses by now if I’d just done this from the start!
- Squidoo traffic doesn’t convert. Oh, maybe it does sometimes, but despite my lenses getting insane amounts of attention, my sales fell lower than they have all year. I think part of that is a natural drop thanks to the Olympics and summer, but the fact is that the hundreds of Squids heading to my lenses didn’t buy a darn thing in most cases. This reminds me to focus on getting traffic from outside Squidoo.
- Mixing up lenses is good. I originally planned to do almost entirely Christmas and Halloween lenses, to get ready for the upcoming holidays, but I ended up with five of each out of the full 30. I just get bored focusing on one holiday and it wasn’t fun. It is easier to work on a lot of lenses in a short amount of time if I have a variety of things to work on.
- Finishing lenses is a good idea. I have nearly 200 WIPs. That’s just pathetic! Now about half of those are simply lenses that have slipped below the 400,000 ranking and turned red, but that’s no excuse. I need to finish those lenses and get them out there. I tend to start lenses that I’ve done the research for and everything and then they just sit there and never get published. I may need to start a challenge where I go and finish up WIPs every day.
- Lensrank is not to be given much attention. Oh, how I wanted to keep my lenses in the top tier. I KNOW that this is a fickle ranking and that I shouldn’t focus on it, but seeing 8 of my lenses in Tier 1 at once . . . I kinda lost my mind and started trying to keep them there. Which didn’t work, of course! I usually have 3-4 lenses in the top tier and now, I have the same. Once the angel blessings and likes wear off, they sink like stones. Since I had several lenses on the front page and with purple stars, even Lens of the Day, I had some pretty awesome rankings. It was exhilarating. And then they crashed as soon as they were off the front page and it was devastating. 
Must remember not to pay so much attention.
So, besides getting 30 new lenses up and running, I learned a lot from this challenge, too!
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