Spotlight On Tirial
New Giant Tirial shares tips about niche building.
My top Squidoo tip about structuring lenses would be to always use a Table of Contents. It lets users jump to content that they would be interested in, and provides quicklinks that they can bookmark. As a lensmaster, it helps you because it lets you see if your titles are descriptive enough to fit your content, and really highlights any default module titles that were left in by mistake. If you use the stand alone module rather than the introduction option, it allows you more freedom to customise it by adding pictures or CSS styling, which I’ve done on a few of my lenses. Linked to this, always use both module titles and subtitles. As long as they fit your content they can really help your search engine rankings, since they are displayed twice on your page – once in the titles and once in the Table of Contents. Of course, descriptive module titles also help users get a feel for the lens, which is no bad thing.
My lensmaking story would have to be the Willard Price Adventure Books lens – or lenses as it turned out. Everyone I knew read the books when I was younger, and when a friend asked about details on the series for her children I was surprised at how little there was about them online. All the resources were rather scattered: a review here and there, an occassional bio, but very little concentrated information. Initially I thought I would just write one lens, about Willard Price and his books, rather like the Desmond Bagley lens I had already done for the thriller writer. Instead when I started researching, there was simply too much about the books for one lens. Willard Price himself proved an interesting character, an adventurer who worked for National Geographic, undertook worldwide trips for natural sciences and if that wasn’t enough, was apparently was suspected of being an American spy!
Despite the similar characters and common threads running through them, each book was set in a different environment, with different animals. My initial single lens was rapidly growing out of control. To do justice to the books, I decided to split them out into seperate lenses, and add parts of the wealth of background information that was available. It was a daunting prospect since with details about animals and articles it quickly grew into a series of sixteen lenses, a biography, one for each book, and a lensography – a much bigger project than planned! On the other hand, the Giant Squid Community Showcase had just posted about subdividing lenses into niches. With a chance to re-read some of my childhood books again, and a Giant Squid Challenge on, it was an opportunity not to pass up.
Willard Price wrote the books to encourage an interest in and respect for the natural world, so I kept the same aim in mind when writing the lenses. A few odd problems turned up, e.g. Underwater Adventure is rarely reprinted. On a re-read I was surprised to realise just how nasty the villain is, and that I had forgotten a death by negligence that could give sheltered children nightmares. Some of the science was slightly dated or disproved so I took the opportunity to put more up to date articles on the lenses, showing the different beliefs between now and then.
The Willard Price Bibliography , the core of the series, was one of the last lenses that I put live. There had to be enough detail there to make someone want to read the book, or go to the book’s lens, without spoiling them and giving away the endings. I wanted to avoid having too many work-in-progress links on it, but the longer I left it, the more work there was going to be tidying up the earlier lenses. As a result, I’m still tweaking the lenses to tie them together as a series and shake off the rough edges. For example Lion Adventure , the first lens, was done as an experiment, and the differences between it and the later lenses are clear – for example, it does not state (yet) where it falls in the series, and does not link back to the lensography, both faults I’m going to correct when I have time. Willard Price’s biography which was my original lens will get more concentrated information on the author himself and probably lose some information about the books.
The biggest problem with doing a series of lenses that I found was actually getting started. When you are sitting there, staring at your one live lens and trying to decide whether to split it down and how to do it, it can be a pretty intimidating prospect. Once you get started it was easier than I thought, but what really made the difference was preparation. I already had a good idea of the resources out there, and I’d saved several from my earlier research.
To give an idea of the difference preparation makes, I was happy enough with the idea of a lens series that I’m working on another one for a video game series I am a long time fan of. This has proved more difficult because I did not do the same amount of preparation, but also because there is a lot more information out there – choosing what to include and verifying accuracy is more time consuming. After all, you can open a book at any page, but it’s harder to jump straight to a point in a video game.
In conclusion from my limited experience; if you want to do a set of closely-linked lenses, preparation makes it much easier, as does knowing and liking your topic. After all, you’re going to be focusing on it quite closely for a while! Don’t panic just because it looks like a large challenge, and remember you can always add things to a lens after you’ve published it – very useful when you suddenly find the perfect module or article. And my personal rule No 1: Have fun – if you aren’t enjoying what you are doing, why do it?
