Greekgeek's Squidoo Lensblography

Sixth Lens: Student Bloopers

December17

Student Bloopers: Funny Stuff Kids Write went live on May 9th, 2007 under the less-effective-SEO name, “Student Bloopers: A Connoisseur’s Collection”.

What This Lens is About

It’s my archive of funny, odd, and hilariously wrong statements from students I taught, plus links to other collections of student bloopers.

Excerpts

“Kouroi were created to portray young men and women about the age of puberty to show people in the moment in time at which the mortals were at the same perfection of the gods. Us mortals quickly lose this state of perfection.”

Q: The twins who are credited with founding Rome are…
A: Barbie twins

Why I Made This Lens

Student bloopers are FUNNY! I used to share them on my website. I was originally inspired by a student history of Europe that’s been floating around for decades, a compilation of student mistakes on various exams. It’s a time-honored practice among many teachers to keep a blooper file.

Things I Learned Making This Lens

People tend not to contribute to plexos, apart from link plexos.
Text plexos don’t take HTML formatting. Or quotes!
But plexos are a snazzy way to list random funny things or quotes.
The Amazon Spotlight is a really effective way to showcase one item.

Things I DIDN’T Learn Making This Lens

If you set a lens to an R-rating (a student had used a four-letter word) no one will EVER FIND IT. This lens languished for years without any traffic before I bleeped the swear word and reset the rating to G.
Save the puns and flowery titles for the page’s subtitle. The Title of the page is the link people will click on, so it needs to make clear what the page is about! That’s also important for SEO.
“Student Bloopers: A Connoisseurs Collection” is an intimidating title. “Student Bloopers: Funny Stuff Kids Write” is more accessible, and includes the keyword “Funny” and “Stuff”. (“Stuff” is a very common search term!)
Don’t make it so blinking long no one will read it! Lenses are not newspapers. They’re 1-page pamphlets.

Lens Stats and Milestones

As of today: Lensrank #11,288, 10 ratings, 1 favorite, 1088 lifetime visitors. (It’s now getting 30-40 visits a week. Pity I didn’t fix the rating sooner.)
Best lensrank achieved: #3695. Lifetime earnings: $3.49

Link:

Student Bloopers: Funny Things Kids Write

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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.