A Squid Named SusanVillasLewis

OK – two jumping related items for today.

One – I can’t stop jumping around. I go from thing to thing to thing to thing. I end up with long lists of ideas for lenses and blog posts and work stuff and nothing actually accomplished. This is very unlike me. Very. Not happy about it. I’ll never get to 350 lenses by the end of the year at the rate I’m going. On the plus side, the few things I’ve managed to finish – they kick butt. Lower my expectations in terms of quantity and be happy with my current quality? There’s one to ponder.

Two – I’ve been branching out my jumping toys lens as part of the 52-week project. And using that as a branch of a new niche blog on backyard fun. Totally working backwards on a lot of this and taking on too many ideas at once. Still, I’m seeing some progress. First I did lenses on the PowerStrider jumping stilts and the FlyBar 800 pogo stick. Then got distracted by a few things, but finished up a lens this morning on the Gymnic Rody hopping horse. It’s just too cute and caught my eye as I was browsing through the bestseller lists as Amazon. This was a case of not thinking too much, not getting caught up in keyword research, not thinking about eventually writing an article – I just did it. My other brilliant insight is that thinking too much makes things too hard.

Or rather a not-yet-success lens, right? After all, failure is a necessary step toward innovation and success rarely comes on the first try.

End of zen lesson.

So I’ve been intrigued with the program Tiffany Dow started this year to get people to make 52 lenses this year, one a week with a very set method designed to not only create a solid lens, but also all the necessary juice to get traffic and attention. Me – I see so many places to start that I hadn’t actually started anything as yet. (That ever happen to you? Choice is good, too much choice not so much.) So I finally got started this weekend by revamping one of the few lenses I have that are on a single product. It’s sitting down in the 130K lensrank range, had a total of maybe 10 visits in its life and made a whopping 30 cents or so. Now, it has some stars and comments from when I first created it but it never took off. Sigh.

So, complete overhaul – well except the intro, just added to that a little – of my review of the VacuVin wine saver, a gadget that I don’t think we could live without at our house. I just wrote without really thinking about keywords and the like, so still some tweaking maybe. Following Tiffany’s instructions so that includes figuring out blog post and article still to go. Will report back on this guy as it’s a definite opportunity to see what kind of difference her system makes.