I thought I would do an experiment after seeing certain other lensmasters create nothing but merchandise lenses - as in all merchandise and no real text apart from a rubbish introduction. So I created quite a few baseball merchandise lenses along the same lines as this lens - Arizona Diamondbacks Mercandise. After 2 months they bagged zero traffic never mind zero sales, so experiment over I deleted most of them as they were pulling my overall average down and were just a waste of space.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Great experiment… thanks for letting us know your results. I believe we need to provide a valuable service (information usually) in order to gain the trust of buyers.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Hi, as an eBay seller whose purpose for joining Squidoo was to generate traffic to my eBay store I agree absolutely that a lens has to have good and interesting content. If you do not provide some information in your lens, then it really does not serve any purpose. People can find items to buy without visiting Squidoo.
My lens, Treasures By Brenda, is promotional — but I have written it with a lot of information about how I came to sell on eBay, what I sell, how I do business, my policies, etc. I believe there is information for someone looking to buy on eBay as well as for someone looking to sell on eBay.
My lens, Are You Puzzled by Jigsaw Puzzles?, is even a Squidbid lens but without interesting information it would just have became another shopping site and there are plenty of those out there.
Thank you for sharing the results of your experiment. They prove that all of the work put into creating a better lens is worthwhile.
Brenda
July 20th, 2008 at 1:19 am
Sorry, I posted the link to my eBay store instead of my lens in my previous message. My lens address is Treasures By Brenda. I do wish we had the ability to edit comments!
July 20th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I find sometimes there’s just not enough content within a lens like that for the search engines. Personal recommendations can help. But then again, I have a series of lenses that are just long lists of Amazon spotlights with products in them. But I’m apparently in an underserved niche there as I get great traffic and sales because people are really specific as to what they’re searching for. I think your niche more than anything was the issue. I don’t think to get online to search for baseball fan gear because I get the catalog of my favorite team delivered to my home. So if I’m looking for stuff, I just go straight to them rather than do a search. The only time I would search would be if I was wondering if there was a — with my team logo on it. (Like my garden gnomes. Not something you’d see in the catalog, so people go looking for them.)