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Umm, February has been busy?

Busy week(s) of new lenses and major updates. Just tackling a few things that have been on the mental to-do list that I finally buckled down and got done.

One of the big things was splitting off specific Sesame Street characters from my Sesame Street shirt store (and the one for adults). This was one of the few I ever did with the page breaks and was a great one for it, so now I’m working toward doing lenses for each character. Or at least the ones that are worth it. I haven’t taken the shirts off the main lens, though. Can’t decide whether that’s the thing to do or not. (I have got to start being more decisive.) Anyway, so far I’ve got Elmo shirts, Cookie Monster shirts and Oscar shirts. I know I’m going to do Bert and Ernie as well.

I did more splitting and building out on a couple of themes. One led to star crib bedding, the other to a complete overhaul of a very old lens with safari bedding. Oh, and I built out other pieces for teddy bear bedroom.

Safari crib bedding
Safari kids decor
Safari kids furniture
Teddy bear furniture
Teddy bear decor
Teddy bear wall decals

One other new lens I made, which is likely to get me off on a run of Hello Kitty stuff, unfortunately – Hello Kitty socks. You could spend years just making lenses on all the Hello Kitty stuff out there.

Also did some major overhauls of some other lenses, some quite overdue. Added wall quotes and other decals for Harry Potter decals, new products and some rearranging to iCarly merchandise and the same for Kung Fu Panda. Those last two are just crying out to be split up, but I’m just not sure given the history those lenses have already built up.

Doing pretty well on keeping up with my blog posting schedule. That editorial calendar plug-in is really helping me keep to the schedule, at least for my WP blogs. Kind of sucking over in the Blogspot realm. Of course, I’m also pretty tempted to just drop one of those blogs because it’s never panned out as a money maker for me. But it’s something kind of personal, so do I keep it for those reasons? Argh.

Where Can You Get Married On The Beach In The UK?

Right now there is only one place where you can have a civil wedding ceremony on the beach in the UK, and that is in Bournemouth, right in the middle of the south coast of England, in the country of Dorset.

Bournemouth has miles of golden sandy beaches, plenty of entertainment, as well as hotels and self catering accommodation for all price ranges, so if you have a lot of guests coming, this town can handle it.

Find out more about Bournemouth and Bournemouth Beach Weddings on this Bournemouth Guide.

January 2012 update

Going to be rambling a bit here, combining this past week’s update with report for the month.

Money – Passed more than $3K in sales commissions this month. That’s almost as much as I pulled in back in November. Woot! If I was better at reports, I’d have a clue just why this is, but I’m too busy doing stuff to make money to look at reports. Bad Susan.

Traffic steadily rising in my main account, getting back to normal in my main account now that Christmas is over. Climbing a bit on my bedroom blog, which is good since I want to be building the audience there. Need to develop a plan for getting those numbers up, though. Not sure if that should be through better optimization or just more RSS subscribers.

Lenses – 679 total, up 25 for the month. Possibly a bit behind the pace I need to get to 1K for the year, but it’ll happen.

Diversity – Doing a decent job keeping up with my blog posting. At least on the three I made the priority. Need to get on my one other money maker and do some more posting there, though.

And I finished my worksheet!!! Hooray!!! You’d think something as small as a worksheet would be simple, but because it’s small, it’s not. I have some people taking a look to give me comments and suggestions before I post it to the site and make it available to subscribers. Thrilled to be able to have that off the list (and by my deadline too!)

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Spent an insane amount of time updating college garden gnomes lens since it’s getting a ton of traffic and some sales. It’s hard to decide how to do these NCAA deals. Dividing by conference is a bummer because schools switch all the time. Dividing by area of the country also not so great. And not every school deserves to have its own lens. So I end up with these huge things with tons of products. I wonder if I should take any that have at least 10 items and split them off. I would think people are searching by school name, anyway.

Not liking the redesign of the activity stream. Or maybe I’m just not used to it. I loved that Fluff had provided the ability to see just sales, so that’s nice that they’ve added that. But why stick quests in there, when they have their own entire tab at the top? And why remove the dates in favor of “x hours ago”? I’m finding the images on the left to be distracting to my scanning. Before, I could scan what was bought and look at the image at the same time since they were both on the right side of the column. Whine, whine, whine.

New lenses:

• Giraffe furniture (final one in this series)
• Heart rugs – split off from heart decor
• Alice in Wonderland wall quote decals
• Twilight wall quote decals
• Novelty cycling socks – been meaning to get to this
• And a little holiday action – Valentine’s Day doormats, Easter doormats and Hello Kitty Easter. My first ever lenses for Easter

January 2012: week two update

Updated all my Dallas event lenses. Didn’t do that last year. In fact, some of them still had 2009 information from when I first created them. Bad Susan. One thing I realized is all the intro images are way too small and my tagging at the time of creation was pretty pathetic. Hoping these get new life now that I’ve improved some of the basics.

Deleted one lens where the event has been wrapped up into another Dallas event that I already had a lens on. And have come up with a list of new Dallas events to add. Although … only money I’ve ever really made came from the ad pool, which means these puppies have to get traffic to make them worth bothering with.

Already time to update spring and summer lenses. Got my swimsuit lenses updated and working on cycling jerseys, although those are a year-round seller for me now. But spring is a big time for people buying new gear.

Discovered a glitch in the Google Maps module as a result. Something about the API being incorrect. Waiting for it to get fixed.

Traffic back to way up on my niche account. Nice to get a steady and high amount of traffic year-round and not just over the holidays. I’m sure I’m leaving some on the table somewhere, but that’s OK. Dropping steadily in my main account due to all those holiday specific lenses.

Money coming in nicely. I’m on pace to hit close to 3K this month, now. Yowsers.

Realized I am way behind on updating in my niche account. November was two months ago, Susan, not one. So scrambling to get the most out of date stuff up dated. Want to have nothing last updated in 2011 by the end of next week.

Annoying to post here. I get “oops couldn’t find” more than I get the blog.

New lenses
Turtle Wall Decals
Polka dot rugs
Turtle decor
Novelty cycling jerseys for kids
Astana cycling team gear

Sometimes, I let things go just to get the lens up. Hate when I discover two months later just how much I was leaving on the table because I hadn’t finished it. boo. One of those was my Disney Incredibles bedroom lens.

Also spent a lot of time updating my lensographies in my niche account. Easy to forget as I go blazing away creating lenses. And I’ve got so many now that it can be hard to pick out the news ones. Bah.

I Just Love Squidoo and Facebook!

I saw a post on facebook by my old friend, John Sitton aka Sittonbull, about a friend of his who had published his second novel and was offering a free Kindle download. Now, I am not one to turn down anything that is free so I downloaded it and went to the author’s facebook page and requested a friendship. I mentioned to Sittonbull that I might want to create a Squidoo page about his friend’s book if he was interested. One thing led to another and I created this page: The Moralist by John Warley. John was fun to work with and provided me with pictures and even did an interview via email. He began replying to the comments and enjoying the Clustr Map that I had posted on the page. He decided that he wanted one of those on his website and did it.

The next thing I knew, he emailed me to say that he had registered for Squidoo and was working on his first lens. I was so excited. He is JohnWarley on Squidoo and his first lens is Writing in Mexico.

Stop by if you get a chance and meet Author John Warley!

John Warley on Squidoo

Wrapping up first week of 2012

Brief update with some of the week’s work based on my goals for the year

Blogging
I’ve gotten scheduled out a few posts on my kids bedroom blog, so publishing two a week as planned. At least through this next week. Ha! I’m adding in a third post with a Friday deals post, which I intend to change over to the weekly “newsletter”. Goal is to have my give-a-way done by the end of the month and get the sign-ups going.

Got my 2012 goals post done on my personal blog. It might be good to schedule out a calendar to do blog posts in general. I have the editorial calendar widget on one of my blogs, not sure which. But I wish that could work across a set of blogs rather than be on each one. Did my challenge recap for my 2011 quilting challenge on that blog and got a post on my libertarian lenses done on my other blog that points to Squidoo stuff. Also did two more scheduled out for the week, so that’s my three for there for the week. Go me!

Money
Stupid me. I tend to get to 7% at Amazon almost every month. And yet, given the choice between Amazon and another merchant, I tend to go with the other. I think somewhere in my head, I have the 4% we get via the Squidoo split. But often times, Amazon’s 7% with my personal affiliate account is far better. So I’m working on switching links over from one of my merchants with a crappy 2% payout that has also had no conversions in the past three months. Only benefit to using those kinds of merchants is when they have a product you can’t find anywhere else or to just show how widely you’re shopping on their behalf. But if they’re only willing to buy from Amazon anyway, it makes little sense to send them to poorly paying and converting merchants.

Money is doing great so far. Generally. I’m on pace to hit $2k this month, which is freaking me out. Just feels flukey. I hate flukey.

New lenses
Working up lots of new stuff. Well, much of it is splitting off from old stuff, but there is work involved. Got a lens featuring NCAA Hello Kitty tees done (finally), and five new crib bedding lenses – teddy bear crib bedding, polka dot crib bedding, plaid crib bedding, construction crib bedding and ocean crib bedding. All but one is a split from another lens and I actually remembered to add them all to my crib bedding lensography. Go me again!

Other
Doing some homework on popshops; I think it might be a good option on some of my more niche blogs. Also setting up a rough schedule that allows for dedicated article writing and design time. Goals by end of month are to have my kids bedroom worksheet done for a giveaway to get people on the mailing list and one new design to post on Zazzle.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I have had fun creating Valentine’s on Zazzle and hope to create many more. I am not a Graphic Artist by any means and have a lot to learn about Zazzle but I sure had fun trying.

This is one of my designs with flowers and butterflies made out of hearts. Even the body of the butterflies are hearts that have been smushed up.

Happy Valentine’s Day Card by ohmeakanancy
Browse more Valentine Cards

The next design is a patchwork type design. I have never been very handy with a needle and thread but do enjoy painting stitches.

Be Mine Patchwork Valentine by ohmeakanancy
Create a greeting card online

There are others but I did want to show you one of my favorites. I just had to have a Valentine with our dog, Bruno’s picture on it. I would like to have a whole series of Bruno Cards but he doesn’t like to have his picture made. We will have to work on that, for sure! This one is a postcard.

Bulldog Valentine by ohmeakanancy
Create your own postcard with zazzle.com

If you would like to see more of my Valentine Designs, I have them posted on http://www.squidoo.com/valentines-day-cards-and-gifts.

Wishing you and yours a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Off to a busy start in 2012

A few days in and things have been hopping. New lenses, updates, planning ahead. And sadly, focused mostly on Squidoo and not other ventures. Got to plan in time for those diversity things to force myself to do them, me thinks.

Among the new lenses is one of those “it’s about time” things. Pixar has a new movie coming out this summer that I’m eager to see. With another one-word title that’s tough to optimize for – Brave. Ran into the same thing with Up! when it came out. Feel like I’m actually a couple of months behind in getting to this, but still time for getting it attention before the movie releases.

One of the big things on my checklist is to split up some of my shops to make them more niche-y. I split off novelty cycling jerseys for women before the year end and have several more in that niche to do. Also have some decisions to make about a few in this niche. Seems a supplier on Amazon of some jerseys I had built lenses around seems to be no more. An entire line of cycling jerseys just gone. Fortunately, two were holiday related; not many Christmas jerseys like to be in demand in the spring. So holding off on a decision on those.

Also before the end of the year, I got a bunch of new calendar lenses done. I’ve been adding to my niche here with calendars that pair up with bedding lenses in my other account rather than strictly kids calendars. I mean, horse calendars work for any age really, but they go with my horse bedroom lenses. Same for skateboarding calendars and Sesame Street calendars. The Muppets calendars just fit with the general niche.

In my niche account, I’ve updated a ton of lenses with new products as well as just lenses that haven’t been updated in a while. I try to stay no more than a month behind on that as a rule. With almost 400 in this account, that becomes a job just in and of itself. Also created links for products I had discovered surfing around to add later, researched products for two new lenses that I’ve published now. Dog and puppy wall decals fills out my nice for a dog bedroom. And zodiac bedding isn’t really a kids bedding option, more teen if kid at all. Might switch it to my other account, but not sure just yet.

Also had to spend time replacing products from two merchants canceling their program. Ugh. Hate that because I’m never sure I’ve completely caught everything and these guys are on GAN. Have yet to figure out where a report on invalid links might be.

Dashboard money isn’t updating again. Should have something there because I’m still racking up a lot of points for sales.

December 2011 Update

Well, December was a happy month for me, if a busy one. Trying to keep up 650 lenses that are attracting holiday traffic takes an amazing amount of time. Not to mention, I ended up with three lenses featured on the home page – resulting in tons of traffic and comments – and had the lens of the day in there somewhere, as well.

Money

I got over the dollarsignr4600 mark in sales this month. Yowsers! That’s 4.5 times what I had last December. Wish I could count on that trend continuing. People were out to shop this year and given the amount of traffic I was drawing, it shouldn’t have surprised me to do so well. Yeah!!

Lenses

I finished the year with 654 lenses after making almost 30 more in December. Quantity is important here, but I am eying an entire new set of lenses to delete because they are just not performing. Trying to decide just where I could take the content and possibly get better traction for it.

And that’s about it for December. Just spent the month keeping things updated and responding to comments and making new lenses. Oh, and pondering goals for 2012. And realizing I need to make better use of this blog than just a monthly update post with no links. Sigh. So much for trying to whittle down things a bit.

Pendleton SC at Christmas Time

There is always so much going on in the historic town of Pendleton SC that it is difficult to get everything in. We have the annual Tree Lighting Ceremony, the Little Theatre production, Holiday Gift Market, Tours with Re-enactments at one of the Historic Homes, the Christmas Parade and of course shopping and dining in Pendleton. I was able to capture some of the events on photos if you would care to take a look and maybe you can join us next year for Christmas In Pendleton

Christmas in Pendleton SC

Laptop and Netbook Review Lenses – Past and Present

Back in 2008 I created Netbook Comparison and just recently, I focused on Toshiba laptops since we’ve owned them for about 6 years and are looking for an upgrade – Toshiba Satellite Laptop Review.

I’m digging their commercials, which are getting some flack for being stupid, but hey, most commercials are crap! At least theirs are somewhat innovative and entertaining, even if the technology costs extra. To wit:

Toshiba Zombie Commercial

Halloween is past, but it’s always a good time for zombies.

For that matter, check out my Zombie Guide to Survival, because zombies need help too.

Keep Lenses Fresh – An Annual Update Helps

For those of us with hundreds of Squidoo lenses, updating becomes a challenge. I’ve set an annual update date for every one of my lenses. Today’s update was for my Websites For Writers lens. I culled some bad links, added new content, improved the SEO, pinged it, and created a few new backlinks. Let’s see if it does any better in coming months. It is currently at a 11,729 lensrank. I expect it to move back into tier 2 when the Christmas season is over.

I set up a file in OneNote for my annual updates list. OneNote is a Microsoft program that comes bundled with Word and Excel, so unless you own those programs you probably don’t have it, but you could buy it separately at a reasonable price. It is a fantastic place for keeping notes about Squidoo work, plus I have a recipe file there, and lots of other things.

My page for updates is simple. I have one line for each day of the year, and have a link on that line to one of my lenses. I don’t have 365 lenses yet but when I do I’ll have to double up on the dates and do more than one update each day. I think I can handle that, because the updates are fun to do. You can always think of something cool to add to a lens. Also, I notice that lenses in the top 100 often have gobs of information on them, so there’s no harm in making a lens longer. The search engines love that!

When I update a lens for its annual refurbishing I like to look at every component of what’s already on there to make sure it is the best it can possibly be. One thing to watch for is whatever is in the Amazon modules. Often books are updated, or new books have been published that are perfect for display on your lens. Also look for better YouTube videos. You never know what might be out there that would be new, since last time you did a thorough update on that lens.

Happy lens updating!

Will the Clemson Tigers Win The 2012 Orange Bowl?

I guess we will find out on January 4th if the Clemson Tigers win.
I sure hope the Tigers win! Hey, want to have some fun by taking the Orange Bowl Quiz? It’s just 10 short questions about the Orange Bowl so why don’t you give it a try.
http://www.squidoo.com/orange-bowl
Be sure to let me know how you did as well as make a prediction about the outcome of the game.
Gooooooooo Tigers!