More lenses – 200 is the next mark and I’d like to be there by the end of the year. I currently have 160, including my group and all my WIP. So that’s a doable goal as long as I don’t get sidetracked doing research.

Use all my affiliates – I have a lot of affiliate programs I got accepted into that I only use one or two products from. This is not fair to either of us. Need to use them to develop more lens ideas and get more lenses that have selling potential. Either that or ditch them.

Think shorter!! – I tend to do a shop lens that is meant to be a one stop shop for some category. And I do that well with items from lots of different stores, so it truly is a one stop trip. But I need to test my theory that I might do just as well creating a lens that sends them on to the store where they can do the shopping rather than trying to put every item on the lens. This is becoming highly inefficient in terms of my return.

Get organized – I want to plan for doing market research for a set period of time every week, then spend the rest of the week working on lenses based on what I find. I love reseearch, so I do find that it can distract me from my regular work as well as from actually making a lens. Spend too much time looking for the exact right phrase and never get around to working on it. (If I could do shorter, spend less time overall with the research and the creation, my ROI would be much higher overall. Duh!)

It took me forever to see any kind of sales at Squidoo. Forever. What helped me turn the corner? A little luck, good instincts, paying attention to my stats and learning keyword research techniques. The luck comes in with my political lenses, which are leading the pack. Follow this with new keyword research, which gave me a great Halloween niche. Good instincts brought me the Kung Fu Panda wave, while closely following what people search for brought in the cycling jerseys series that has been a steady producer.

Now if I could just keep Google from dropping lenses right when they should be hitting their peak!! My election party and Tinkerbell costumes lenses are MIA right as they should be getting their best (last-minute) traffice. Sigh.

So what do I have? Sarah Palin, of course, which I started back in March. In the last few weeks, though, totally based on some cool products I found, I did a lens with items for Democrat donkeys and Republican elephants and one with supplies and ideas for throwing an election night party. Biggest challenge was figuring out the right keywords for the URL and titles.

Having gone through this, I really wish that Squidoo had done a 2008 election front door. Would have been fun to see all the lenses in one spot. Or maybe not. I think I’ve had 15 people try to leave the links to their Sarah Palin lenses (created after she was nominated) on mine. There were a lot of people trying to grab that opportunity. Kind of surprising to me. Unless I was already in that vein and working on related lenses, I don’t think I would have bothered to do one on her. Wouldn’t have seen it as worth it at that point. Too hard to build an audience after the fact.

So have I done everything I possibly could now at Squidoo? I’ve had #1s in three categories (non-profits, people, movies) and now #1 overall. I’ve got a couple of LOTDs. I’ve got sales, I’ve got traffic. What am I missing here? I need something else to shoot for!! (Not that I’ve really shot for top ranking or LOTD.)

• Of my 133 live lenses, only seven of them have had no traffic in the past week. Given that one’s my testing lens and five are events that are long past, that’s pretty good. Another nine have only had one visit, so that’s a little over one percent that are really struggling. I’m good with that.
• I’ve got two lenses that have dropped below the 200,000 mark. Both are still featured.
• My iCarly related lenses have apparently returned to favor with Google as the traffic is picking up again. Looking at the dates it’s been almost a month since any of them have been looked at though. Yikes!
• Halloween traffic is definitely starting. My Tinkerbell costumes lens is getting more than 500 hits a week now and my lens on the renaissance festival held here in the Dallas area (which has a few costumes on it) is getting almost 200 despite not being a true costume lens. People mostly like to look at the pictures, though.
• My lensography has suddenly taken off. While there has been a dribble of traffic from Sarah Palin, there hasn’t been any consistent reason I could see as to why. More traffic to my twitter and blog though as a result.
• First women in politics is getting some nice traffic. Unfortunately, haven’t touched it since June, which is probably why it’s not getting above the 10,000 mark. Missed opportunity there before the end of the month.
• Think I missed some opportunities with my green chile lens as well. Traffic just didn’t pick up there as I hoped, but I didn’t get on the promotion enough before the Hatch festival.
• Things I see that make a difference in lensrank – ratings, sales and clickouts. I’ll have two very similar lenses in terms of freshness, clickouts and traffic, but one can be ranked 30K higher just because it has stars. I quit announcing every time I had a new lens because that gets annoying after a while for others, but I’m beginning to wonder if I need to do a little more on that. Squidcasts on every new lens? If a star is the one element needed to bump something from third tier to second, that’s probably an effort that’s worth $1.35, right?
• My oldest WIP was started in December last year. Actually, I have a WIP on my hubby’s account that’s over a year old. Guess what my new goals for the month are?

First lens ever

• Green Chile (someone one-starred this guy almost as soon as I published it. and I got my first suck-it-up comment from Glen.

Then the two for my husband’s account related to his TrackAddict forum

• Skip Barber Racing School (I am still really proud of this guy. I did a great job for having no clue. Only updates have been to add links to forum posts and change that Kevin went.)
• Car Clubs
• (Just noticed that I had started a lens for him that shows a date of 8-24. Never got back around to finishing it!!)

Second lens I did for me

• How to Donate Your Hair (have done one complete re-vamp of this guy. Considering another one)

(However, it seems to be taking a little time for Gravatar to update. But I think I’ve done all my other major ones. I made this guy over at http://www.facemymanga.com. First one I’ve done online that I was able to actually download properly to use.)