Greekgeek's Squidoo Lensblography

Photoshop 3D Frame Tutorial

December16

After a couple grandiose lenses, I took a break and did something simple. My fifth lens, Photoshop Tutorial: 3D Photo Frame, was created on May 7, 2007.

What This Lens is About

It’s a Photoshop tutorial on how to give a photo a jazzy 3D frame somewhat like a polaroid. Note that this was before the Polaroid Module was released for Squidoo!

Example

Why I Made This Lens

I’ve loved making tutorials since the early years of the web, when commerce was not allowed and the web was simply a place to share free resources.

Glossy 3D Buttons Photoshop Tutorial | Where to Get Free Web Graphics

What I Learned Making This Lens

“How to” tutorials are a great topic for a lens: they are just the right length for one page.

Tutorials need to be clear, brief, and have good step-by-step screencaps (PrtScrn on a PC, Command-shift-3 on a Mac)!

The most important thing I learned is that Squidoo lenses work well when narrow and focused. People search the web for one to three things: to solve a problem (get information), to buy something, or to be entertained. If a page doesn’t seem to be fulfilling one of those needs within the first screen, visitors hit back and try another search result.

Here’s part of this week’s traffic stats:

I may add “photoshop frame tutorials” to Squidoo’s tags. But more importantly, for a tiny update, I’m going to see if I can work one or more of those phrases into the text of the lens, possibly into image alt-tags.

What I Did Not Learn on This Lens

SEO for Squidoo. I was just guessing what people might search for instead of researching it. Also, I didn’t yet fully understand what Squidoo Tags are for.

Clickthroughs are important. This lens gets 170-200 visitors a week, but is stuck in third tier since it makes no sales, earns few clickthroughs, and doesn’t get many ratings or favorites.