The Easiest Way To Keep A Lens Out Of WIP

A couple days back I said I would be focusing roughly 95% of my time to Squidoo for the remainder of the year - assuming nothing major comes up to shake things up.

Today I wanted to dispel a myth that keeping lenses out of "WIP" or "Red" is difficult.

First of let me reiterate that I don't have a huge amount of Squidoo experience. I joined there in late 2009 and had somewhere around 4 lens published to my name by September of 2012.

Sine then I've published hundreds and over the course of the last five months I've gone in and edited 1 or 2 lenses in the vicinity of once a week for the sole purpose of adding content and pulling them out of WIP status.

When I publish a lens that lens basically goes green and stays green with very few exceptions.

Do I do amazing keyword research? I'd like to think it's good but I don't think that's what does it.

What do I do? It's Easy.

How To Publish A Lens And Keep It Green

I publish my lenses in groups under the same general niche or topic. When you do that you can easily include hand-coded or automatically generated links in the body of your content to all the other lenses in your published group.

How do I do that however when all the lenses are getting published one by one?

I publish 1st draft lenses quickly and then go back to each lens one by one cleaning up the copy, adding descriptive text, optimizing links for better CTR, and finally adding coded links to every other lens in the group.

Say I publish 12 lenses in one general topic. If all the lenses relate to one another I can link out to 3-4 lenses from the group from each lens in the group  That ends up giving me roughly 4 internal links pointed at every single lens I publish.

And because I publish the lenses in two stages I get the added lens rank bonus of updating a lens.

Sure, add some eBay modules comment modules, polls, Google News, etc. but don't forget the thing that moves traffic from one page to another: internal links.

I use the sidebar "Related Lenses" feature in the intro module to link to 6 related lenses and then I use SquidTools Featured Lens Builder to quickly and attractively code 2-4 links to put into a text module.

After a few days to a few weeks you'll likely see one lens getting more traffic that the others. Go into it and add a manually crafted link in the intro module pointing to the worst performing lens in the group. You will get a trickle of traffic flowing to the lower ranked lens and the trickle of page views will ensure this lens stays green.

In time enough page rank and seasoning will happen for all the lenses to start snowballing. Your traffic will grow, you will get likes, you will get sales. You will never again see a WIP lens.

Things You Better Not Neglect

Everything I said is important but you do have to ensure you use a lot of good tags. Find them and add them quickly using the Squidutils browser plugin while editing or building your lens for the first time.

Also make sure you use keywords that are actually going to generate traffic from buyers. This is easy enough for me to do on a small scale by hand using no tools but it's even easier to do on a larger scale with various proven web-based paid tools.

I've used Jaaxy and I've used Keyword Researcher. Both are amazing tools that cost very little but they do make it quicker to build a large list of lens titles for your net set(s) of lenses.

A lot of the time I just do it all in my head on on Google's search page but I do sit down with both of these tools quite a bit. I may get around to discussing one or both of these tools in greater depth at some point in the future but for now I'll leave you to search Youtube for your answers - or the comment box - that works pretty good too.