What This Lens is About

My third day in Athens, visiting the Parthenon and monuments of the Acropolis. Originally it also covered the Museum of Athens, but that’s now a separate lens.

Excerpt

The Parthenon was massive, powerful, yet as familiar as my hand. There it stood high over Athens in the blue sky, sun, and open air. The wind was gentle, yet its soft breath added a sense of timeless presence and the natural world. Birds added a lively presence to silent stone: pigeons, doves, magpies, sparrows and swallows.

The old marble is faint gold. How many have walked there? I nearly shed my shoes again, but we had to keep moving. Our guide, Anna, provided a quick orientation to the Acropolis: the sack by the Persians, the Periclean building program (Parthenon’s dates: 448-447 BCE), the Parthenon’s use and the damage it suffered in recent millennia.

Why I Made This Lens

Yet again, my goal for Ancient Greece Odyssey is to share my journey to and love of ancient Greek sites.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

Vary blocks of text and photo galleries. Too much of anything gets long. I also found and linked to a good site on Greek art history where my readers could go for more details instead of filling the lens with too much info.

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

Yet again I tried to cover too much on one lens: a whole day in Athens which included multiple museums and monuments. Keep lenses focused on one topic. Don’t use artificial divisions like days. Break your topic into smaller chunks and link lenses together. I later broke the “museums” section onto a separate lens.

Lens Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #32,795, 14 ratings, 4 favorites, 6734 lifetime visitors.

Best lensrank achieved: #943. Lifetime earnings: $27.58.

Related Lenses:

• Part One: Arrival in Athens
• Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens
• Part Two B: Museums of Athens
• Part Three: Eleusis, Demeter and Persephone
• Part Four: The Temple of Apollo at Delphi
• Part Five: The Citadel of Mycenae
• Part Six: The Palace of Tiryns
• Part Seven: The Sanctuary of Epidaurus

Link:

Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens

What This Lens is About

It’s an index to all my photos of ancient Athens — monuments and Greek art — plus recommended books and links on ancient Greece.

Excerpt

Temple of Hephaistos in Athenian Agora. 1st May.

Why I Made This Lens

Originally, I was thinking of Ancient Greece Odyssey as if it were an online e-book. Books should have indexes! So I made this lens as an index to help people find every single photo, recommended link and bit of info across all my Ancient Greece Odyssey series of lenses.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

It is too hard to make an index of an online e-book as a Squidoo lens. It’s too much material on one webpage. Lenses need FOCUS. So I stopped keeping this lens updated.

Today I finally tackled this problem lens. I had three choices:

• I could delete it as a failure.
• I could turn this lens into a table of contents to all of Ancient Greece Odyssey, so that it became a lensography for my Greece lenses.
• I could reorganize the content I wrote on this lens to make it more focused.

Deleting a lens is almost never useful. There’s always the possibility it could get some traffic and earn a few pennies. In fact, according to the stats tab on the dashboard, this lens draws a lot of traffic — through image searches! People come to this lens for its photos.

I realized that if I deleted the long list of photos and turned this lens into a lensography, I’d lose all that image traffic. Instead, I reworked the lens to focus on the content that’s bringing traffic.

I added alt names to each image to help boost traffic/SEO. I put them in a more logical order. And I made them into clickable links — if someone clicks on them, they get full-sized versions of each photo. Why? Clicks boost lensrank! Plus the links include the filenames of the images, which means more SEO-boosting content.

I also made the decision to license my photos through Creative Commons for non-commercial purposes, on the condition that people link to the front page of Ancient Greece Odyssey if they use any photo. Why? Backlinks boost search engine standings. Offering images for Creative Commons is one way to get people to make backlinks to your site.

So what did I learn? Image-heavy lenses draw a HUGE amount of image traffic. If you have photos, exploit them. They’re original content, just as much as text!  NAME your photos with keywords, give them alt-tags, and you will get image search traffic! Need help? See my How to Upload Images on Squidoo tutorial for more info.

Related Lenses (Ancient Greece Odyssey)

• Part One: Arrival in Athens
• Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens
• Part Two B: Museums of Athens
• Part Three: Eleusis, Demeter and Persephone
• Part Four: The Temple of Apollo at Delphi
• Part Five: The Citadel of Mycenae
• Part Six: The Palace of Tiryns
• Part Seven: The Sanctuary of Epidaurus

Lens Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #28,695 2 ratings, 1 favorites, 4430 lifetime visitors.
Best lensrank achieved: #3063. Lifetime earnings: $7.81+ some sales of designs.

Link: Photos of Ancient Athens

Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal  (May 5, 2007) was my first lens, created the day I joined. It’s my baby, and I’m so proud of it!

What This Lens Is About

The beginning of my Greece travelogue, this lens covers my first night and day puttering around Athens. Between Orthodox Easter and an encounter with a very surprising group of musicians, I was pretty busy!

Excerpt

“At the floor-length window of a tiny room, I sit late in the night in the glow of the Acropolis. The fireworks that sprinkled the city are over. Gunfire and the sound of Greek Orthodox hymns have died away. The city is very quiet, although I still hear a few glad voices, the swish of a car below, and the soft squeak of bats.”

Why I Made This Lens

This lens is why I came to Squidoo: to find a place to share my Greece travel diary, and to promote items from my It’s All Greek to Me! Cafepress shop using my Greece photos. I had tried doing it as a blog, but the tools Squidoo offered made it easier to integrate photos, links, and book recommendations.

Related Lenses:

This is a whole series of lenses. To date, there’s:

• Part One: Arrival
• Part Two: The Acropolis of Athens
• Part Two B: Museums of Athens
• Part Three: Eleusis, Demeter and Persephone
• Part Four: The Temple of Apollo at Delphi
• Part Five: The Citadel of Mycenae
• Part Six: The Palace of Tiryns
• Part Seven: The Sanctuary of Epidaurus
• Ancient Greece Odyssey Updates Blog

What I Learned Making This Lens

• On long articles, mix in images, link lists and other kinds of modules so it’s not Wall o’ Text
• Host pictures on your own website, then use HTML and CSS to place them
• How to start a paragraph with a big fancy capital letter
• Edit, edit, edit. Long articles must be very well-written to hold readers’ attention.
• Promoting the lens on travel blog related websites and forums.

What I Didn’t Learn Making This Lens

• Keyword research and search engine optimization. I’ve had to do it retroactively.
• Include a text description of each image as an alt tag to drive web traffic.
• Brevity. I crammed a LOT into this lens. I’ve actually trimmed out many modules, and it’s still long.
• Be sparing with merchant modules. I’ve taken out a lot of them, and/or focused on a few products instead of 5 per module. They made the lens too long.

Squidoo Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #155, 202 ratings, 54 favorites, 19361 lifetime visitors
Best lensrank achieved: #3  Earnings May ’07-Oct ’09: $135.45

Reviews and Awards

Ancient Greece Odyssey was nominated by Gabi for Lens of the Day on May 17, less than two weeks after it went live. It’s also won 5th place runner-up for Lens of the Year 2007, and Best Travel Lens of 2008. Seth Godin mentioned Ancient Greece Odyssey in the SquidBlog as an example of a good lens.

Link: Ancient Greece Odyssey