When you find a lens you like, ask yourself: WHY do you like it? You can get insights about building good lenses, articles, and blog posts by jotting down what on that lens worked for you, what didn’t. Don’t copy their content (please!), but learn approaches to presenting your own content in more effective ways.

Here is EditorDave’s Guam: Where America’s Day Begins lens.

What I Liked About This Lens

What I love most about this lens is the personal, unique content.

So much of the web is just regurgitating content someone else wrote, or providing bare-bones information that has no personal stamp. Dave’s writing about a topic he knows: where he lives! He gives his lens lots of life with his own experiences, his own photographs. That makes his page very different from a standard tourism lens, even though he may give less information about hotels, transportation and local attractions (instead, he links to sites on those).

Little details like typhoon-proof (or not so proof) architecture, the plants in his back yard, the “critters”, things to look for in old grade B movies filmed on Guam — make his Guam a real place. This is a first-person story.

Dave also mentions his other lenses on Guam without doing a ton of promotion for them. His writing is good enough, and his content is interesting enough, that I may really want to read more!

I also like his mix of his own photos and using Allposters.com to provide beautiful images to illustrate his content (rather than his content only being there to sell the posters).

Something That Works Here That Might Not On Another Lens

One thing EditorDave does NOT do is provide a Fancy Table of Contents. (Sorry.) That is, there’s no road map to tell us how long his lens is, what topics it’s going to cover, or where he’s going to take us while we’re visiting his lens. His writing is good enough that we don’t need it. I enjoyed browsing and being a tourist on his page.  On other lenses of this length, I’d probably want a road map.

Quibbles/Areas for Improvement

Dave could probably capture more clickthroughs— which boost lensrank and thus sales— by making some of the words in his lens clickable links. He mentioned a page about sea cucumbers at one point, but forgot to include the link. People can ignore links in your text if they want to, but don’t be shy about including links to related pages now and then, as long as you don’t go overboard with it— you never know when a visitor might turn out to be a huge sea slug fan!

There’s a number of links to dead auctions –probably an artifact of this being an old lens.

The one thing that didn’t work for me is the Ebay and Amazon modules. The lists were long, I didn’t get the impression that Dave actually had picked out the products in them, and I didn’t feel like clicking on them. I just wanted to get back to Dave’s own writing. Then again, I’m not thinking of going to Guam, so I’m not a target customer for those products.

I think my experience — quickly scrolling past a long list of products to get to the “next part of the page” — is fairly typical of user behavior. You may have more success with fewer products, more closely integreated into the content, using Amazon Spotlight or some other method to draw attention to them. It also helps when you include your own comments about books or products, so we know you picked them out yourself and have at least some reason for recommending them. But let’s face it — only a small percentage of visitors to any web page buy from it or click the sales module links.

For example, Amazon modules send us “royalties” if a visitor makes a purchase through them. We get a commission for any purchase the visitor makes after clicking on that link! (Tip: if you regularly make 7 or more Amazon sales a month, it’s time to get your own Amazon Associates ID. Captain Loyalis explains why.)

Other Squidoo modules, like Zazzle, don’t earn a commission, but members of those online e-commerce sites can can use the appropriate module to show off their products and stores.

What’s in it for the rest of us? Should we, as one member in SquidU said he was doing, rip out non-commercial-earning modules?

There’s four or five reasons why the answer is “Not necessarily!”

1. Squidoo wants to negotiate with more e-commerce merchants to get them on-board. (See Kimberly talking about Squidoo and Etsy). It helps if Squidoo can say, “We already have X number of webpages promoting items from your site!” If you’ve already got modules in place, you’ll start earning commissions if/when those modules do start earning commissions, whereas otherwise you’d better hope you don’t miss the announcement.
2. Content is content. Do you avoid YouTube modules, Flickr Galleries and RSS feeds because you’re sending someone traffic without getting paid? No. You use those modules to add value to your lens, giving your visitors a reason to visit your lens!
3. Many online shops donate part or all their earnings to charity. I found Watercoloryourworld while looking for a cool ShopIt example for my Selling Stuff Modules Guide. Not only does it have pictures of cute cats (a perennial web favorite), but it also donates part of its earnings to pet rescue. We only have their word for it, of course, but that’s true of the whole web, when you stop and think about it! Using the web means asking, “Do I believe this?” and “If it’s phony, will it harm me?” more often than most people realize.
4. Wall Street’s got its bailout, but Work at Home Moms and small online shop owners don’t. This is an easy way to help them while helping ourselves (reasons 1, 2, and 5).
5. Shopping modules attract CLICKOUTS. As you may recall from my examination of Squidoo lensrank factors, clickouts boost lensrank. So non-commission-earning modules CAN help you earn money: Squidoo payouts!

Here’s an example. My Funny Signs and Bizarre Billboards lens was Top Tier or close to it for about a year. In March it dipped below lensrank 2000. What to do? Improve it! I noticed it had almost no clickouts, since it’s a photo gallery lens: fun to view, not much to click on. There was an Amazon module featuring collections of funny photos, but people weren’t buying. I updated the Amazon module to find better-rated books, turned the ratings on, and turned the prices on (people are less likely to buy if no price is listed), but I also added a module that would get clicks. Which module?

A Zazzle module featuring some very funny posters. Check it out. TELL me you don’t want to click those thumbnail photos and see them up close!

Result?

Look, Mom, clickouts!

Visitors in the last 7 days: 122 (which is down a bit, so yeah, I’m not telling you this solely for your benefit!)
Clickouts in the last 30 days: 193
Clickouts via that Zazzle module: 71
Lensrank: bouncing around 1800-1900.