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?
This is a great lens and you have some good commonsense advice here. I did the same with my Remembrance Day lens - I published it only 3 days before the event! I had thought it was too late. I thought I would not have time to do it - but "fate" took a hand.
ReplyDeleteA sleepless night, so rather than toss and turn in bed I got up and made the lens. It got picked up by my "network" at Squidoo very quickly, shot up the rankings and despite the fact that it is not currently "topical", it is still doing very well for an "untopical" lens.
And as you say, even if it is a tad too late for this year, there's always next year - but in the case of Earth Hour, I hope it has even more success this time around.