Have you had a chance to dive in and create a few lenses yet?
Don't worry too much about getting it perfect. A little tweaking is great, but
getting insanely perfectionistic won't move you toward your goals.

If you've been working on a few lenses, you've probably
noticed that Squidoo is an easy-to-use tool if you just want to create hobby
lenses and have fun. But there's a little more to it if you want to make
significant money.

What would be really cool would be to find a step-by-step
guideline for some of the tricky stuff, like finding the right product to sell,
creating a good "pitch" for that product, and creating a lens that Google loves
and that gets lots of traffic.
But . . . all in good time.

For now, let's keep you moving forward with a new Squidoo
tip:

How many lenses are best?

There are some lensmasters on Squidoo who are very successful
with a handful of lenses and manage to pull down several hundred dollars or more
a month.

While this is a very viable strategy and it works wonders
for some people, that's not what I teach. I would rather have 100 lenses that
make $1 each than 1 lens that makes $100.

Why is that, you ask? Couple of reasons:

1. What if your topic no longer becomes "cool"? Let's say you
   had the first lens on Beanie Babies and we were in the height of the Beanie Baby
   craze. You would have looked pretty smart . . . right up until no one cared
   about Beanie Babies anymore. But, if instead of endlessly improving your Beanie
   Baby lens you created 20 or 30 other lenses about different brands of plush
   toys, you would probably still be making money. I call this Lens
   Diversity, and it's one of the most important factors in your long-term
   success.
2. What if your only lens gets banned from the search engines?
   It happens sometimes, and it's a bummer. Now, what if 1 out of your 100 lenses
   did? You'd be out a dollar a month instead of all your earnings . . .
3. To get 100 new visitors to your material, you only need one
   more visitor to each of your 100 lenses. And when visitors do find one of your
   lenses, they can easily click through to other, related lenses, giving you
   additional chances to make a sale.
4. What's better, 100 adsense payouts a month or
   1?

I'm a big fan of having a lot of high-quality lenses instead of
just one that is the "best of the best." Being the top 1% in your field is
tough, but being in the top 5% in two fields is a lot more managageable . . .
and profitable.

So, I bet you can guess what your homework assignment
is. Take the lenses you've already made and create another one or two for each
topic. Explore another angle, a similar product, or another aspect of your main
topic.

And if you run into any snags, remember to come give us a shout
at Captain Squid chat. We can usually get your
tentacles untwisted pretty quickly.

I'll see you in a couple of days
with a new tip to keep you moving forward.

Wishing you all the best for
your success,"

The Captain.