My Lenses Great and Small

Where are you going to spend your Summer holidays? Are you thinking about visiting Europe?

As you might know I am living in Berlin, the capital of Germany. Berlin is a great place, and I enjoy living here. But there’s another region of Germany which I know very well and which I love a lot: Upper Bavaria with its mountains (some very high, some not so high), deep blue lakes and green meadows. And with its towns and villages and wooden houses, the balconies colored with flowers.

If you want to know more about this region of Germany, you may visit my Squidoo page

Bad Tölz and Upper Bavaria

Enjoy!

Does it happen to you, too? You look at the list of lenses on your dashboard, and the rank they have and you wonder.

A the moment, “My top ten favorite Activities” is my second best lens (still #22,951 overall, though). I wrote it on my way to RocketMom Graduation which is quite some time ago. In spite of the months gone by the content of the lens is still up-to-date – with one exception: I should add “creating zazzle products” as #11 of my favorite activities.

My goal is now to get this lens up – by adding fresh content and promoting as much as I can for the next days. I will write down every single step I take, be it writing a blog post (like this one) or working on the content or tweeting it on Twitter.

I will keep you posted on the results!

Berlin is a city with a lot of water – the rivers Spree and Havel, some lakes like the Tegel lake, the Müggelsee and the Lake Wannsee.

Berlin also is not far from the Baltic Sea. In former times, when the wall was still standing, people from the Western part of Berlin could not go there easily; now you take the train or the car and after three and a half hours you are there – at Warnemünde, a sea resort near Rostock. From Warnemünde the ferryboats cross the Baltic Sea over to Norway and Sweden.

I enjoy taking photos of lakes, rivers and the sea. And I enjoy creating zazzle products out of these pictures. My newest squidoo lens focuses on those creations. It is called “On the Waterfront”, and you can visit it here.

I am still in the process of selecting “water” photos – so you may find new products when you return after some time.

And here’s one example to make you curious:

Rocky Beach Mousepad by ullahennig

Having over 50 squidoo pages and keeping them fresh is really not easy. I noticed that my lenses were steadily going down the dump, somewhere where they don’t get me any money at all.

So I tried to develop a stategy to continually work on them. Well, actually work on most of them – some of them are very seasonal (who want’s to know about Christmas Cards and St. Nicholas now in early summer?)

Here are my results:

1. Add something. This could be: New Amazon or Zazzle products, new photos, new information. Hit Publish.
2. Replace. Replace one photo with another. Change the introduction text a bit. Change the writing in one of the text modules. Hit Publish.
3. Change the theme. Change the widgets. Change the contents of the Discovery tool. Hit Publish.

One of this tree things can be done on almost every lens. And, of course, spread the message on Twitter and facebook!

Creating products on Zazzle can be a very time consuming activity: it means to select the photos and to process them, to upload them, to select those products which fit the photos. Creating pages on Squidoo is also very time consuming. So the question for me was: how to combine both activities in order to make the one support the other?

1. I looked at my photos and tried to build categories. I had photos of landscapes, of flowers, of nature, of castles, of villages, of foreign countries. Some of them could make nice Zazzle products.
2. I knew that I wanted to promote those products by writing squidoo pages featuring them. How could such a squidoo page look like? I decided to create one focusing on products which have to do with the federal state of Brandenburg – landscapes, the Rheinsberg Castle.
3. I began to create those kind of Zazzle products, stickers, cards, mugs.
4. I then created the Squidoo page and published it.
5. I am now creating additional “Brandenburg” products. I can add them to my page in order to keep it fresh.

How do you combine creating Zazzle products and Squidoo pages?

Oh, I almost forgot it – here is my newest Squidoo page: Brandenburg on Zazzle

Today I want to share a bit of a success story. I have a squidoo page created on 2 December 2009. It focused on zazzle products created by other people. At that time I already had a store myself, but did not do anything with it – I had only one product in it. The lens belonged to the ones which stayed continually at the lower ranks.

April 2010 was the month where I really began to work with Zazzle. Creating products has become a joyful activity for me, and my shop has grown quite a bit. I knew that squidoo lenses are a good way to promote Zazzle creations. So the next step was clear:

In April 2010 I decided to revamp that old lens, now  focusing on products of my own and products of my fan club. I completely rewrote it – from the introduction down to the end. I included text modules with references to products of my own shop and those of my fan club’s. Doing it this way I can give back some link love to the people who had decided to become my fans.

At the moment I am writing this the page is on rank 13.863 and my best lens at the moment. Here it is: Everything Zazzle!

I have written quite a few squidoo pages about Zazzle products. It were pages on products I searched for and found worthy to present. I did have a shop at that time but I did not do anything with it.

Well, times they are a-changing, and at the time I write this you can click through three pages. I know, this isn’t much, and I am  working regularly on creating more and more products. However small my shop is it is worth being featured in a squidoo page, and here it is:

First Steps into the Zazzle World
Flowers, Plants and a Chinese Teahouse

As you can see from the subtitle, up to now I have focused on my flower photos and my photos of the Chinese Teahouse. Maybe you are looking for a present for Mother’s day? It might be that you’ll find something on my page (and in my shop!).

Pink Rose by ullahennig
See all other greeting cards at Zazzle

Enjoy!

In my last blog post I told you about me feeling overwhelmed. Well, almost one week has passed, and I managed to overcome that feeling. How?

One evening I sat down, took a pen and a sheet of DIN A4 paper and began to draw a mindmap. I focussed on my Squidoo project and wrote down everything connected with it – writing new lenses, working on the older ones, promoting new and old ones. But I did not stop at the level of “working on older lenses” – I broke that task down into many sub tasks like “check format, replace non-justified text with justified text in introduction modules”, or “check theme, replace it with highlighter theme” (these are only examples.). In the end I got a list of tasks which could be done in five or ten minutes.

Usually I come home from work at about 5.40 pm and work for one hour and a half on my laptop for my private projects. One and a half hour isn’t much, and before drawing that detailed mindmap I always had the impression that I did not get anything done in that time. This produced feelings of being overwhelmed and frustration. Now I take my squidoo mindmap, throw a glance on it and pick out some sub-tasks. This gives me the satisfying feeling that I am doing something for my project squidoo, some tiny steps, but they keep me going on the right way.

I must admit I am feeling a bit overwhelmed today. I am on holidays, off work, so feeling overwhelmed is not the state I should be in.

I enjoy creating zazzle products for my shop, but I’ve got the feeling nobody wants to have a look at them. That makes me look for ways to promote it. Of course, there’s twitter, and there is facebook. There are facebook pages which I have to join, and there is a facebook group which looks promising. Then I have a look at all the wonderful zazzle stores out there in the internet – they are full of amazing products, and that reminds me that I should add some more products.

At the other hand I’ve got one squidoo lens not yet published. My brain tells me that I should write a squidoo lens promoting my zazzle shop. My brain tells me at the same time that I have to many lenses which are down in the dumps and that I should work on them to get them up again.

And then my heart, soul or whatever shouts out: Stop! Stop putting yourself under that pressure! Stop running like a hamster on its wheel!

Here I am, now, thinking. Reflecting upon how to combine my activities in a way they don’t make me feel overwhelmed. Maybe in one week I’ll be able to write down the results of my reflections.

By the way do you know this feeling of being overwhelmed as well? And how do you react to it?

Almost one week ago I installed Photoshop Elements 8 on my laptop. It is really a fascinating image processing software, and – as always with new software- it makes me play around and try out things.

And what could be a better place for the products of that playing around than Zazzle? I had registered with Zazzle in autumn 2009, but not really used it. Since a few days I have been adding products almost on a daily basis, and it is really fun!

Of course I won’t cry when somebody will buy one of the mugs, bags, stickers or magnets I offer, but the sheer fun of creating things is worth investing the time.

And here’s one example:

Chinese Teahouse by ullahennig
See other Chinese Bags