What This Lens is About

A funny (I hope) guide on how to use apostrophes correctly.

Excerpt

If you’re talking about joint ownership, put the ‘s after the last owner:

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

But if you’re talking about separate ownership, then each owner gets his own ‘s:

Bill’s and Ted’s underwear (They’re not wearing the same pair of underwear.)

Why I Made This Lens

I have a bizarre and abiding affection for apostrophes, and I hate to see them abused and misused.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

It’s really hard to make grammar lenses funny. Brevity is key.
A printable cheat sheet / summary is very useful for many kinds of lenses. Clickouts boost lensrank!

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

The lens is a little too long. I probably should’ve put the quiz nearer to the beginning.

Lens Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #8,644, 15 ratings, 12 favorites, 5032 lifetime visitors.

Best lensrank achieved: #302. Lifetime earnings: $65.36.

Link:

The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes

Note: My sixth lens, War in the 21st Century: A New (and costly) Paradigm was about the cost of the War on Terror. (I wrote it on 5/10/07. I was even more right than I knew, but it’s not a fun lens to recap.)

What This Lens is About

Easy instructions on how to build a tetrahendron-shaped kite using plastic drinking straws, kitchen twine and mylar or wrapping paper. (Wrapping tissue works great).

Why I Made This Lens

How to Build a Pyramid Kite is actually one of my oldest webpages! I first uploaded it in early 1994, when the web was a place to share free resources, research, and information– commercial use of the internet was actually illegal in the early years!  I didn’t have much to offer, but I knew how to make a kite, so I made this page. The lens still has my old graphics from my Mac LC.

I’ve added an introduction, Amazon and video modules, but the how-to part of the lens may be oldest webpage to be re-hosted on Squidoo.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

Monitor traffic stats and adjust your content to fit popular searches!

I quickly noticed a lot of students coming to my lens searching for “how to build a pyramid.”  So I added a note in the introduction telling students how to adapt my kitemaking instructions to build an Egyptian pyramid, and made them a stone-wall texture they could print out and use to wrap their “pyramid”. (Bonus — the graphic gave me more clickthroughs.)

Targeted Amazon Module

This lens seemed like one I could monetize. I am a kite connoisseur, so I gave a sincere recommendation for my favorite commercial kite, a little pocket kite that I’ve flown for years. Few of my lenses get sales, but this module does, because it’s clearly a personal recommendation of a product that the author has honest-to-gosh used.

Outdoor Products Are Seasonal

The longterm traffic stats graph for this lens is fun. There’s a Squidoo bug making my traffic stats not display properly, but you can really tell when kite-flying season is:

You’d see similar trends on beach toys and snow toys.

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

The introduction module is a bit long. I give a little education about Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of this design) before getting to the how-to part.  I ponder deleting this, but his name attracts keyword searches. I started with a catchy phrase … “it’s a bird, it’s a plane…” which is not the most effective way to “bait” search engine results.

Also, I forgot that a pyramid isn’t really a tetrahedron. Whoops.

Lens Stats and Milestones

PURPLE STAR!

As of today: Lensrank #2,508, 15 ratings, 1 favorite, 20217 lifetime visitors.
Best lensrank achieved: #191. Lifetime earnings: $90.59

Link:

Basic Kitemaking: How to Build a Pyramid Kite

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.

Related Lenses

How to Upload Images on Squidoo | Graphics Layout and HTML for Images

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.

Lens Stats/Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #18209, 14 ratings, 9 favorites, 7856 lifetime visitors
Best lensrank achieved: #2340  Earnings May ’07-Oct ’09: $8.49

Link: Photoshop 3d Photo Frame Tutorial