Cruising Along & Wham I Hit A Telephone Pole

Last Update: September 29, 2010

Hello WA!

I'm learning so much here and I'm trying to implement everything I'm learning, you know "Take Action" so I get the hang of things and understand what I'm reading. 

I started out my journey with PotPieGirl's The Dam Way. Once I finished I thought I'm ready for the next step so I bought her One Week Marketing course. I'm cruising along each day doing my thing making lenses, publishing lenses, submitting my RSS feed for each lens, writing articles, etc. By this point I'm thinking to myself I'm getting better and better, you know really feeling proud of myself and then Wham I hit a telephone pole. I became part of the SquidU forum and asked for constructive criticism well I got it. The thing is I'm not sure if I'm doing everything wrong instead of right and the criticism comment is correct or if I should go about my day the way I have been. This is where all of you come in, I need to know from my fellow WA'ers what you think.

Criticism Comment:  It's common practice on Squidoo to only ask for critique on one lens at a time. So I'll critique the first you mentioned. Because the first 4 are so similar, I checked them all out. 

It's clear you're only on Squidoo to promote your site. The four lenses are different enough not to get flagged as duplicate content by me - but similar enough that you need to do some serious improvement to get anyone to give them the thumbs up. 

It would be nice if you would give at least one actual skin care tip on each lens. And I don't mean cleanse, tone, moisterize. On one lens you might want to explain what cleansing is. On another what toning is, and on the third what moisterizing is. Give us a tip on how to cleanse our face and hands naturally. The same with toning and moisterizing. 

In fact  - a whole lens on each topic would be good, far more useful than three nearly the same lenses with no information beyond a link. I'd rename each lens to something including the word you're targeting. For instance: "Cleansing: DIY natural skincare"

To make some money out of it, you can feature the product you're recommending from Amazon, using the Amazon Spotlight module for instance.

I did like the comment about adding tips, but I honestly thought the whole process of the lenses was for them to be similar in nature and link them all back to one another. 

Please, Please, Please let me know what you think I should do.

These are my lenses. Thanks!

http://www.squidoo.com/diynaturalskincare

http://www.squidoo.com/explorediynaturalskincare

http://www.squidoo.com/naturaldiyskincare

http://www.squidoo.com/Naturalanti-agingskincare

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dec944 Premium
I could only wish my first 4 lenses looked this good!! That being said, the critique is constructive and really will help drive more traffic for you. You need to follow PPG's advice but remember Squidoo owns the site and they have gotten really picky. The lenses need to be similar but not alike. Pay attention to URL titles as they should be somewhat alike and keywords. Stay the course....they didn't lock the lenses so that is good news! When you do your next campaign do as good of job as you did on this and take their critique and implement. You didn't hit the pole. If your lenses had been locked that would have been a pole! You're doing great and taking action. Keep going and good marketing.
Judy
prinker Premium
Thanks! I'm glad to hear they look nice; that's a plus. :) I think I just completely misunderstood what exactly I was supposed to do; I think that probably happens a lot. I've created one new lens on just cleansing with a skin care cleansing recipe. I'm going to begin working on some others. Hopefully I'm going in the right direction this time.
Frets Premium
I would tend to agree ... but aesthetically, they look nice!
prinker Premium
Thanks! Sounds good!
Labman_1 Premium
Well, it looks to me like the Critique is valid. All four of the pages are very similar. It would seem to me that directing each of the pages to a similar location would work, and if they came into the link from different directions this would be a good thing. Not only would you capture those just looking for the overall skin care but the focused markets would feed your site. If I were to use the jargon I would say to focus on the niches and not the big picture.
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