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Two more lenses catching up on the last two months of books based on the reviews I do over on my blog. These aren’t doing that well so far, going back and forth on the value here of doing these, actually. Not a lot of work, but I don’t want to be making lenses just to get to a number. I want them to generate traffic, bring in sales and so forth. Hmmm.

May bookpile
June bookpile

That’s the basic premise for Carpe Demon, first in a series of books by Julie Kenner about a retired demon hunter who’s now a stay-at-home mom. Only she isn’t going to get to stay retired and finds herself balancing a secret life of do-or-die work with suburban mom. And I just saw that they’re going to be making a movie – probably based on rather than straight from the book – which reminded me to go hunt down the latest. Series is up to five books and I really enjoyed them, so I’m looking forward to the movie. Lens is pretty basic right now, but I’ll be adding to it with more on the books as well as the movie as it gets into development. Built more in anticipation of capturing on the movie when it comes out.

Ran across this through one of my many dog connections online. The Thundershirt. Given Paisley’s extreme sense of stranger danger and the fact that thunder makes her anxious, I figured it was worth a shot. And a lens of course so I could document it. And since Thundershirt just happened to start an affiliate program and roughly the same time, it was a natural match.

Already getting some traffic, although (unless Squidoo is having a bit of a snafu again), no clickouts. Boo. I’m seeing that people are looking for reviews, which is exactly what I’m going to put on there. Mine finally arrived … right as we stopped having monster thunderstorms. I’ve put it on Paisley a couple of times in anticipation of a storm coming, but no dice. And the one time she had it on and someone came to the door, she still hid. So, not sure what to make of that. Need to add pictures of her in her shirt and my thoughts still.

One of those utter weird, no clue where it will go kind of things. But I ran across some really cool toys that are just huge. Balls that are 40 feet around, croquet that you kick and so forth. Just thought they were cool and a little different. And thus a lens was born. But not really completed. This is where I start feeling the lines between just listing products and having actual content. What to say? What to include? How to organize? Ugh. But, there’s a start here and I’ve already been picking up traffic. So we’ll see just what comes of it and if it’s worth putting more effort and energy into this guy.

In the category of what to do with that … . Recently transferred a lens promoting an experiment my hubby and I tried out. Something for us to do together and something where we were trying to shine a spotlight on a place where people were being ever so blind. They ain’t so blind now (generally) and this never really took off. So, now what to do with Fear and Doubt? I’ve moved it into my main account and closed out the other one, but I’m not sure if I should keep it around. But I have lots of lenses like this that are just adding to my general numbers and not doing much beyond that. So that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason for it to die. Hmmm.

Well, when I started my garden gnome lenses, there were no NBA or NHL ones at all. NBA has slowly trickled on the scene, but the NHL ones just all came in a rush. And so, NHL garden gnomes joined the rest of the crew. Already had a sale but traffic is low, so it’s not climbing fast. That’s OK. These guys are pretty steady sellers for me and I expect when it gets back to being hockey season, it’ll take off more.

And I’m late. And yeah.

Money – $489.56 total on my sales spreadsheet for the month, includes the roughly $66 from chitka ads that accidentally ended up on the dashboard and screwed things up. A really down month for sales by the time you take that out – $423. Boo. Still have a key merchant who is offline (why?) but that doesn’t account for the complete drop-off in sales. Nor does the one-day Amazon fiasco. Just really uncertain about this but trying to explore more.

Random notes: Traffic went crazy on hair donation lens for a while thanks to the oil spill. Almost broke 4K visitors for a week, but back down in the low 2K range, which is more normal.

Lenses: Only four new lenses, if I count one I transferred over from another account I ended up closing. But my list of stuff to do just gets longer and longer and longer. So it’s not like I’m hurting for ideas. Just seem to have drifted away from lensmaking as my primary hobby time. Or maybe I’m bored with doing lenses around products and trying to sell something. Kind of a Catch-22 there. I like making random things that will never do well, but I have high goals for money making, so I need the other kind of lens. Boo.

Focus for next month needs to be on actually creating the lenses I have ideas for (and possible whitling the idea down to something tiny and quickly doable) and spending more time making backlinks, etc. The backlinks thing – kind of overwhelming when I look at how far behind I’ve gotten there. And I would really love to come up with something where I could do the linkwheel, but I think that also overwhelms me a bit. My superhero cape is apparently at the cleaners.

OK, well, I’m not sure I’d call Noah Munck weird. He’s a pretty normal kid. But his character on iCarly – Gibby? Now that’s one strange kid.

Every since I discovered Noah was pretty active on Twitter and so forth, I’ve been meaning to add him to my line-up of SquidWho lenses on the iCarly cast. And meaning to. And meaning to.

So the day finally arrived and Noah has his own entry in SquidWho. Just given the huge amount of traffic I get to my other iCarly lenses, he’s already off to a good start. I was a good girl and made sure to include lots of links around the group to spread the love. I’m not always so good about that.

Progress!!! I’m up to 276 published lenses now – that’s 16 created in May. Doesn’t quite make up for my down month in April, but mucho improvement. And only four sitting in WIP at the moment. 350 still seems really far away, but we aren’t quite halfway through the year, so there’s still plenty of time. And my list of ideas is way long, so feeling pretty good about my options.

Money wise, down for the month, both overall and on the per lens average. (Which makes sense given the increase in lens numbers.) A bit annoyed by the lower overall number because most of the new lenses I’ve done are very much selling lenses, but the traffic isn’t just magically appearing on them. And I’m not staying on top of the backlink making there. Just not really entirely certain what I want to do there because I am _so_ unfocused when it comes to lenses. I have a few patterns/niches, but nothing I want to dedicate a blog to or create another website for. I have too many things to keep track of as it is. So big thing to be working on is definitely to be working on getting backlinks to help with traffic. Otherwise, I’ll hit 350 lenses and never hit my monetary goals. Which would be a bummer.

Well, the Disney Store has started carrying bedding for the Marvel Comics heroes, which unleashed an entirely new set of bedding lenses for me. Once I started creating, I realized I had enough to then create a mother lens or lensography just for this particular set of bedding lenses and so super hero bedding was born. I’m starting to wonder about whether “bedroom” might have been a better keyword choice, but I have had good success with bedding as a niche topic, even if I do bring in a few more things than just bedding. That said, here are my super hero bedding lenses.

• Spiderman bedding
• Incredible Hulk bedding
• Wolverine bedding
• Iron Man bedding
• Batman bedding
• Superman bedding
• Team Marvel bedding

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