The Big Charity Payout

If you're not following the Squidoo Blog, you may have missed the recent post about the unclaimed royalties policy. During the upcoming Squidoo royalty payout, the Squidteam will be donating all earnings on accounts that appear to be inactive.

That means that all lensmasters who have not recieved any payouts in the last 12 months will have their earnings redirected to the Squidoo Charity Fund. So essentially, charities are about to benefit from some of the stinkier lenses out there!

If you've been stockpiling your royalties, you may need to take steps to make sure you receive your payments.

Check out the post on the Squidoo Blog to learn more.

Never Too Late for a Seasonal Lens

Last week I was looking at the calendar and saw that Earth Hour was coming up. Out of nowhere, I realized that it would make a great topic for a Squidoo lens. I didn’t spend any time debating whether or not it would be worthwhile to create a lens for an event that was only a few weeks away. Instead, I got up extra early and got to work on putting my ideas together.

I was able to publish Top Ten Things to Do for Earth Hour the next day. Thanks to the Twitter Storm module, it was picked up by eco-savvy Squid a_willow, and has been receiving a pretty decent amount of traffic ever since.

Is it making me millions? No.

Has it won any awards? Nope.

But has been in my top three lenses since it became featured, and made it into the Top 10 in the Green category almost instantly. And that’s pretty darn good, if you ask me.

The moral of this story is that although seasonal lenses are best made a few months in advance, it is never too late to create a lens on any topic, no matter how short-lived interest might be. Any notch on your dashboard is a step forward, a lesson or two learned, and one more reason for readers to find you and your work.

And if you don’t get lucky with traffic this year, it might be a big money-maker next year!

By the way, what are you doing for Earth Hour?

5 Ways to Update a Stale Lens

Making sure that lenses are updated frequently with new content is a full time job. At the very least, a once monthly update is recommended to maintain a healthy lens rank. Not only does Squidoo appreciate your efforts to add new information, but your readers do, as well.

The trouble is, not every lens focuses on a topic that makes it into the news every month. Some lenses present a single concept, recipe or idea that leaves little room for written improvement. And there are only so many products on Amazon that any one subject can relate to.

So once you’ve eradicated every single typo, polished every bit of HTML, and added as many hyperlinks as you can think of, what is there to do?

Here are just 5 of the things I like to do when a lens needs it’s monthly brush up:

1. Change the lens photo.
It’s great to have a clear, relevant and interesting picture in the introduction module, and even better if your fans and readers recognize it when they see it.

Your profile picture should be like a familiar (and hopefully trusted) face, but lens photos don’t have to be. In fact, changing your lens photo once in awhile might encourage previous visitors to stop by and see what’s new.

2. Add a poll.
There are a million and one ways that polls can fit into all types of lenses. Polls allow your readers to compare products or ideas, answer questions, give feed back or rate a list of items. When I can’t think of anything else to do with a lens, I sometimes add a poll or a duel module.

3. Edit the lens bio.
You can add or change the greeting that is displayed in the bio area of your lens, or add some links to your lensography, blog or other places you’d like readers to go.

4. Optimize your pictures.
Are your lens pictures turning up in searches? If you’ve added the alt tag, then you’re probably already seeing Google traffic for your pics. If not, you need to check out Traffic from Image Searches.

5. Add a Lijit module.
Having a Lijit account is like having your own personal search engine. It includes only content that you make or recommend. When you add a Lijit module to a lens, you can create an account right in the workshop, and automatically add all of your published lenses to your network.

Lijit is a great way to let readers find other lenses, blog posts and content that you’ve created, and you can get keyword ideas and other stats with the traffic information that your account provides.

So, whenever you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare, you can do one of these things to your most stale lens and have it smelling fresh by the next rank update.