5 Steps to Increase Holiday & Seasonal Traffic on Squidoo

Do holidays make a difference in your Squidoo traffic?  They certainly do with mine.  Easter is tomorrow and traffic stats this week show a steep incline, particularly on my seasonally-relevant lenses.

Without a doubt, Pinterest is the leader in referral traffic sources for my lenses and this week my Pinterest numbers have soared. I'm very grateful to all who pin and re-pin, and especially grateful to those who click through. 

Now the question is, how do I keep the traffic coming once Easter is history?  Here are 5 steps that I plan to take to increase traffic to my holiday and seasonal lenses.

1. Keep track of upcoming popular holidays and seasonal celebrations.  Mother's Day is next and summer is coming up fast.
2. Update existing topical lenses by updating keywords and phrases.
3. Make new lenses, taking a useful, unique, or even trendy approach to seasonal topics. 
4. Choose and use outstanding photos to catch the attention of prolific Pinterest users.
5. Make a promotional plan that includes my favorite social media sites. I don't want to depend on having all my eggs in the Pinterest basket. Facebook and Google+ are proving to be good traffic sources, too.

Are you seeing an upswing in your seasonal lenses?  Have any tips to share on how you attract traffic? I would love to read your success stories.

Valentine's Day Tip for Squidoo Lensmasters

It's Valentine's Day.  Why not change up your lens theme and even your lens intro photo to match the occasion ... like I did here on this lens.

Squidoo has themes (lens backgrounds) for most major occasions and seasons. St. Patrick's Day and Easter are coming up, so keep this tip in mind for those special days, too.

BONUS Quick Tip:  Love your friends and family?  Of course you do!  So why not send them a special Valentine's Day greeting that includes an invitation to join Squidoo.  You'll find three to choose from on this page. And if you haven't joined Squidoo yet, here's a greeting from me, with love.

How do you celebrate Valentine's Day on Squidoo?  Let me know in a comment below!

Squid-Goals for the New Year

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season both personally and on Squidoo!  It's always good to see those holiday sales.  And yes, it's always sad to see them dwindle away.

Don't worry.  Instead, get started updating lenses for the new year.  People will be making resolutions: Do you have lenses to inspire them?  Weight loss and fitness are two very hot topics right now, but I saw Valentine's Day candy in Walmart yesterday.  Yes, there's another holiday coming up soon.  Are your lenses ready?  Look ahead to spring with its warmer weather and busy gardening season.  And then there's Easter, which is late this year so April should be a great month for sales.

There's no rest for the weary lensmaster!  Have you set your goals for the upcoming year?  We'll be talking about goals on RocketSquids in the upcoming week.  If  you're new to Squidoo and have fewer than 25 lenses, why not join us?  Our goal is to teach and inspire you. I'd love to see you there!

Whatever your goals and plans for the upcoming year, here's to a happy and prosperous 2014!

First Christmas Sales!

Just had the first sales this fall on my cashmere robe and slippers lens.

Let the holiday shopping season begin! Yay!!

Is It Too Late to Make a Halloween Lens?

No!  It's never too late to make a Halloween lens.  This visit graph proves it.

This is from one of my costume lenses.  The first October it didn't do a lot (just a little "melted witch" puddle on the graph) but the next two, look at those nice high "witch hat" peaks!  I'm looking forward to the next one, which is trending upwards now (end of September) and hopefully will peak nice and high by the end of October.

Lesson:  Think long-term with seasonal lenses.  And watch for witch hats on your visits graph.  Visits begat sales, the most fun part of the Halloween shopping season!

Don't Forget Thanksgiving!

It's November 1st and already the online atmosphere has switched from the orange and black of Halloween to the red and green, chestnuts roasting on an open fire feel of Christmas.  Amazon has opened its Black Friday deals store.  Walmart has countered with its Gift of the Day and Ultimate Online Specials.  Gift shopping season is underway!

But don't forget Thanksgiving!

As you're creating your Celebrate gift guides (and I hope you're doing that) feel free to add a Thanksgiving-focused lens or two or three.  Thanksgiving may not be a huge money-maker, but there are plenty of people out there who need new turkey platters, table linens, fresh side dish recipes, cute Thanksgiving outfits for baby, and more. 

Think about how your family prepares for and celebrates Thanksgiving and turn some of those things into lens ideas.  Your audience may not be huge (although you might be surprised) but if it's targeted very specifically, your attention to this almost forgotten holiday may pay off for you in a good amount of traffic and hopefully even some nice Thanksgiving sales.

What comes to mind when you think of Thanksgiving?  Have you made a lens about it?

Spode turkey platter available here.

Celebrate!

There's a new magazine in Squidoo-town. 

Well, almost. 

Are you ready to Celebrate!

Cyber Monday Shopping Recommendations

Just saw this post from Kimberly on SquidooHQ in which she mentions Cyber Monday.   That triggered an idea.

To help people who happen to land on my profile page find some good holiday shopping lenses, I edited my profile to feature links to a few of my popular product reviews.  These are lenses that don't necessarily show up on page one of the list of all my lenses.  They're pages that feature popular gift items that people might be looking for on  Cyber Monday and, really, from now until Christmas.

While in general I recommend a good, brief, personal bio - and that's all - on the profile page, this might be a time to make an exception.  We'll see how it works out.

What do you think?  Good idea?  Bad?  Let me know in a comment below.

Serve Your Readers Fresh Squidoo Lenses

The ad section of the Sunday paper this week is a whopper!  You probably still have Halloween candy left, but no doubt about it, it's Christmas shopping season.

So, how are your Christmas-related lenses?  Are they fresh? 

More and more, Google is looking for fresh content to feature in search results.  Truly, it doesn't take much time to update a product review lens or a Christmas menu lens or any other holiday lens, and it will be well worth the effort you take to do so when you're rewarded with both better lensrank and more traffic from the search engines.

I've brushed off this oldie, How Do I Keep My Lens Fresh?, to give you some suggestions for freshening up those holiday lenses.  Have other ideas to offer for how to update a holiday lens?  Feel free to talk about them in a comment below. 

Another Month Bites The Dust

Can't believe that tomorrow is October already. I'm really not sure what happened to September except that it flew by faster than a colorful autumn leaf in a windstorm.

I hope your Halloween lenses are doing well. Have you noticed any difference in visits since the advent of the new Squidoo Happy Halloween magazine? If you have, I'd love to know.

The stores, of course, are full of Halloween things, but I expect to see some red and green crowding out the orange well before the month is over.  Have you started gearing up your lens list with new or updated goodies for Christmas/gift shoppers? Planning anything special to market to holiday shoppers this year?

I'd love if we could collect some marketing ideas here in the comments section. If you have a brilliant or even a basic idea for marketing holiday lenses on Squidoo, would you share it with us in a comment below? I'd appreciate it and I believe others would, too.  I'll be sharing a few of my own ideas in the coming days and weeks.

Thanks, and an early "Ho, ho, ho!" to you, too!

How to Generate a Spike in Your Squidoo Lens Traffic

Kimberly wrote at SquidooHQ today about Lens Ideas for July.  Good suggestions there to get you thinking outside the box a bit, but more importantly to get you thinking about niche topics/holidays that not everyone is writing about. 

There WILL be people searching for those topics when the day comes.  Know how I know?  Did you ever look at logos that Google displays on their main page?  Frequently they will display special logos drawn to commemorate a holiday or event.  A recent favorite was on June 9th, Les Paul's 96th birthday.  Take a look at the Les Paul logo - and strum the strings!

Now, take a look at this graph that shows the Google search trend for Les Paul:

See that huge spike?  That was June 9, 2011, the day Google displayed their special logo and millions of curious people googled "Les Paul" to find out more about him.

While I won't promise you a Les Paul spike in Squidoo traffic, I will promise you that people will be searching to learn about unique holidays and topics they hear about as they happen.  No reason in the world it shouldn't be your lens that they find when they do their search!

So, what niche holiday or topic are you going to write about in the coming month?  Have you had a lens spike in the past?  Tell us about it in a comment below.

Which Holiday Are You Gearing Up For?

My Easter lenses performed rather well this year, overall much better than in years past.  (I'll never understand Google, but this year I like the way it treated me.)  Three of them should qualify for tier one earnings this month and had several sales, so I'm happy about that.

So, on to the next holiday.  "And which holiday would that be?"  Glad you asked!

It isn't too late to make a lens for Mother's Day (though likely it will perform better next year than this), but it isn't too early to make lenses for back to school or Halloween or Christmas either.  Those are the three top selling seasons, so I hope you'll start planning lenses for one or all of them and get them published soon in order to let them "age" a bit.  Don't forget occasions such as weddings or special birthdays, though.  Those occasions occur year-round and it's a great idea to add them to your lens collection in order to keep lensrank and sales figures up all year long.

Making lenses for holidays and special occasions is a good idea, but always remember to make them with your unique spin.  You're probably tired of reading it, but I will never tire of reminding you (and myself) that unique, useful, updated, passionate lenses perform best. 

Happy holidays!