Give to get

Even though squidoo is mostly geared towards selling - after all, only the quixotic (like me) would lavish so much time on this with nothing to be gained - it's the personal lenses, and the personal connections, which keep people coming back.

When I saw all the work Jaguar Julie had put into her friends thank-you lens I decided to make my own - for each of the 120 or so people on my fan-club list I included their picture, name, and one of their lenses which I most enjoyed. Then I published, and went around to the guestbooks of the lenses I'd featured and said thank-you individually.

Well, I learned a lot in my travels through all those lens lists of my fans, but what I wanted to tell you now is that many of those fans have come back, looked at my lens and given it five stars, and said thank you right back at me! I think I made more friends in the course of this project... and those are people who are more likely to look at my other lenses.

I have two kinds of lenses: the kind related to my work and creations and those I made for the heck of it. The "heck of it" lenses include, for instance, more than a dozen on puppets, small and large. I'm not selling anything on them. They're just there.

Then there are the lenses about the things that matter to me in a more creative sense: showing off my paintings (see the latest images for my Zazzle store, Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart), my songbooks like the Solstice Assembly Songbook, etc. I take them much more personally and they get fewer visitors, but hopefully, a rising tide raises all boats, and if people are happy I've featured their lenses, maybe they'll visit my songbooks.