As a college professor, typically during summer I spend until the first of August or so doing non-school related projects (e.g. I goof off). This summer, I have the best of intentions. I want to prepare all of my material for my fall classes before I goof off for the summer.
We'll see how it goes. I've had some excuses to slack off a bit recently, since I have to order textbooks to review and they haven't arrived yet. But I have one class I want to take a completely different approach with than in the past, so there will be a significant amount of work preparing for that one.
Another intention is that I don't spend the entire summer creating new Squidoo pages. I'm not sure how I'll do at that one. I've already, since the Roleplaying With Kids lens was nominated lens of the day, written a couple more (one on Murder Mystery Party Ideas, and one on a review of a particular murder mystery party scenario, Curse of the Pharoah).
And may I just say, "Holy crap!" I just went over to Squidoo to get the links for the lenses I mentioned above, and found that Roleplaying With Kids is now ranked #25 out of over 100,000 lenses.
This is a big deal, because the lens was ranked #2,184 before being named lens of the day. It jumped to #105, then to #57, and now to #25. I know that this sort of trend cannot continue, because the lens simply doesn't get the traffic needed to sustain a high ranking (not that many people care about roleplaying with kids). Right now it's riding the lens of the day traffic. In fact, that traffic has dropped off considerably, so I can only imagine that lens rank takes the traffic in the last 7 days into account (that's a statistic shown prominently in your Squidoo dashboard).
As soon as the lens of the day traffic drops off the end of the 7 day period, the lens will start falling in rank.
But it's really cool to have one that close to #1, even if it's more or less a fluke. I'll have to resist the urge to keep writing more in the hopes of getting another one up that high.
Just as soon as I finish off the murder mystery party reviews for the other three or four scenarios I've run. ;-)
Showing posts with label squidoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label squidoo. Show all posts
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
Squidoo Lens of the Day!
I've created almost a dozen lenses (web pages) at Squidoo. Some are about topics I'm passionate about, some are experiments in affiliate marketing, some are mostly placeholders I want to expand someday.
The very first lens I created was about roleplaying with kids. This is one of those subjects I'm passionate about. I firmly believe in spending quality time with your kids, and encouraging them to be creative and imaginative. Roleplaying does all that.
The lens initially was quite popular, going up to about 500 in lensrank (a mysterious quality rating that factors in the amount of traffic your lens gets, the ratings it gets, the phases of the moon, and many other things to rank each lens in order, from 1 to over 100,000). Then it started dropping steadily, going down to about 4,000.
I worked with it a bit more, getting it back up to 2,000, and pretty much figured it would stay there. When lensrank was updated last night, it was at 2,184.
Now and then, the Squidoo team picks a Lens of the Day to feature in an email sent out to all the lensmasters. Imagine my surprise when today's email featured my lens about roleplaying with kids! It's a bit like opening your daily paper to find a photo of yourself on the front page.
My lens, which typically averaged one or two visitors a day, has gotten 68 visitors in the hour or so since the email was sent (no, wait, while I was typing this post it got another 10 visitors). I'm not quite sure how to react to this. I feel like someone who was talking to himself and suddenly discovered other people were listening.
Anyway, it's a strange feeling, but I'm enjoying it. I'm glad that the lens that's getting the attention is the one I'm most proud of.
I'd encourage everyone to go over to Squidoo and create a lens or two on a topic you're passionate about. You never know who might read it!
(Another 5 people visited my lens in the last two paragraphs...where will it end?)
The very first lens I created was about roleplaying with kids. This is one of those subjects I'm passionate about. I firmly believe in spending quality time with your kids, and encouraging them to be creative and imaginative. Roleplaying does all that.
The lens initially was quite popular, going up to about 500 in lensrank (a mysterious quality rating that factors in the amount of traffic your lens gets, the ratings it gets, the phases of the moon, and many other things to rank each lens in order, from 1 to over 100,000). Then it started dropping steadily, going down to about 4,000.
I worked with it a bit more, getting it back up to 2,000, and pretty much figured it would stay there. When lensrank was updated last night, it was at 2,184.
Now and then, the Squidoo team picks a Lens of the Day to feature in an email sent out to all the lensmasters. Imagine my surprise when today's email featured my lens about roleplaying with kids! It's a bit like opening your daily paper to find a photo of yourself on the front page.
My lens, which typically averaged one or two visitors a day, has gotten 68 visitors in the hour or so since the email was sent (no, wait, while I was typing this post it got another 10 visitors). I'm not quite sure how to react to this. I feel like someone who was talking to himself and suddenly discovered other people were listening.
Anyway, it's a strange feeling, but I'm enjoying it. I'm glad that the lens that's getting the attention is the one I'm most proud of.
I'd encourage everyone to go over to Squidoo and create a lens or two on a topic you're passionate about. You never know who might read it!
(Another 5 people visited my lens in the last two paragraphs...where will it end?)
Friday, May 11, 2007
Who's Looking for You?
When I was in high school, a friend of mine was interested in making horror movies. So he'd recruit people to play zombies and record the action on an old 8mm camera. Eventually he got more and more skilled through all this, and managed to get some funding from a famous horror movie producer to make his own movie.
Before he was funded by the famous producer, I believed enough in him to lend him some money. I paid off a debt he'd owed to another person, and fronted him the money for an 8mm viewer editor. By the time the famous producer funded him, he'd apparently forgotten about my loan because I never did see any of that money.
Granted, it was only about $400, but in those days that was a lot. Recently I wondered how he'd done after we lost track of each other, and did some online searches. Turns out he's still directing horror movies and has founded his own studio (more about him at http://www.tempevideo.com/bookwalter/ ). I was pleased to see that I had a mention in the credits of the movie he'd worked on while we were in high school.
But I still haven't seen any of the $400.
All this got me to thinking. How do you know who's looking for you? What sort of information will someone find out about you if they do an online search?
Up until now, it's been fairly hard to know who is searching for you. Unless you're famous, the chances are good that nobody searches for you often enough for the search engines to take notice. Generally you need at least one search a month for the search engines to be able to report the search in a keyword tool.
There is, however, an option. There's a website called Squidoo, where you can easily create a web page about any topic you like. Including yourself! The great thing about Squidoo is that web pages on Squidoo rank quite highly on Google. So a web page about yourself on Squidoo is probably going to be one of the first results if someone searches for you on Google.
This way you can help shape the sort of information people find about you when they search for you. You can take it a step farther, too, and find out where those people are located by using Statcounter.com and tracking your visitors to your Squidoo page. Or you can put a form on your Squidoo page that will allow people to contact you.
Squidoo also gives you a little money back each month for creating web pages, so you'll probably find yourself creating more than just a page about yourself. Create pages about your hobbies, your likes and your dislikes, etc.
To get started with Squidoo, sign up here.
Before he was funded by the famous producer, I believed enough in him to lend him some money. I paid off a debt he'd owed to another person, and fronted him the money for an 8mm viewer editor. By the time the famous producer funded him, he'd apparently forgotten about my loan because I never did see any of that money.
Granted, it was only about $400, but in those days that was a lot. Recently I wondered how he'd done after we lost track of each other, and did some online searches. Turns out he's still directing horror movies and has founded his own studio (more about him at http://www.tempevideo.com/bookwalter/ ). I was pleased to see that I had a mention in the credits of the movie he'd worked on while we were in high school.
But I still haven't seen any of the $400.
All this got me to thinking. How do you know who's looking for you? What sort of information will someone find out about you if they do an online search?
Up until now, it's been fairly hard to know who is searching for you. Unless you're famous, the chances are good that nobody searches for you often enough for the search engines to take notice. Generally you need at least one search a month for the search engines to be able to report the search in a keyword tool.
There is, however, an option. There's a website called Squidoo, where you can easily create a web page about any topic you like. Including yourself! The great thing about Squidoo is that web pages on Squidoo rank quite highly on Google. So a web page about yourself on Squidoo is probably going to be one of the first results if someone searches for you on Google.
This way you can help shape the sort of information people find about you when they search for you. You can take it a step farther, too, and find out where those people are located by using Statcounter.com and tracking your visitors to your Squidoo page. Or you can put a form on your Squidoo page that will allow people to contact you.
Squidoo also gives you a little money back each month for creating web pages, so you'll probably find yourself creating more than just a page about yourself. Create pages about your hobbies, your likes and your dislikes, etc.
To get started with Squidoo, sign up here.
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