I think I am falling out of love with Squidoo, at least a little

[John Dilbeck]

I just realized that I haven't updated any of my lenses in awhile.

Part of the reason is that I'm busy planning a new marketing site to promote local businesses in Murphy, NC, and it's taking a lot of time.

Part of the reason is that I'm seeing other lensmasters who have been having problems with their lenses after publishing an update and tripping one of Squidoo's filters. I think this has been resolved now, but it still made me do other things than work on any of my lenses.

Part of the reason is that lenses are getting longer and more complex and are taking much more time to load. Now, you may be on broadband Internet access, but some of us are still on slow dial-up connections. Recently, I have gone to some lenses that take more than ten minutes to load - if they ever finish loading, at all.

I believe that one of the reasons for this increasing complexity is that we want to use as many modules as we can to make our lenses more interactive and profitable. Squidoo even encourages a certain level of complexity by encouraging us to use several modules on a lens.

I know of quite a few topics where one text module would be sufficient to cover the material at hand, yet I feel obligated to add other modules in an attempt to rank higher.

I'm happy to see new tools added to the mix and new modules being introduced, but I'm not happy to see so many lenses that are getting more and more complex as a result.

I think one of the reasons I haven't updated a couple of my lenses is because it just takes so much time, now. As I have added more modules and more people have participated in the duels and plexo lists, the lenses load ever slower and it takes more time to update.

When I first started with Squidoo, I was able to update a lens in a few minutes. Now, it sometimes takes a half-hour or more, and I could have spent that time writing a blog post, buying an ad, or updating one of my other sites.

If you're on broadband, you probably haven't noticed this as much as I have.

I still plan on creating quite a few Squidoo lenses this year, but I'm going to make it a point to make them simpler than most of the ones I've built recently. That means that I'll be using fewer modules per lens, even if it means that it doesn't rank as well as it might if I'd used more modules and added more content.

I'm going to move away from using the Amazon.com modules, since I'm earning practically nothing from them, now.

What do you think?

Are you liking Squidoo more or less than you did a year ago?

What are you going to do as a result?

Act on your dream!

JD

[Janelle Kleppin]

I'm on a broadband line, but I notice that sometimes lenses take longer to load, so I imagine it's magnified tremendously by the use of dial-up. I can certainly understand why that would be disenchanting.

I've only been in Squidoo since the middle of September, 2008, so I don't have a full year under my belt to answer the question, but I do have some opinions.

Other than selling my husband's cutting boards via Etsy, I have not sold anything via a lens except for the time a friend bought a mug my son designed. So my only Squidoo earnings have been lens rank related, and I'm about to get my first payout next month because I set my threshold at $50.

Squidoo is the most fun I've had on the web, and even though the payout is tiny in comparison to the time I've spent crafting lenses, I still enjoy it. However, I recognize that in order to make any real income from Squidoo, I've got to do something a little differently - although I'm not sure yet exactly WHAT I need to be doing.

[Lynn]

Well, I wasn't here a year ago so I can not compare, but 10 minutes to load would really stink!! I think if I was on dial- up, I would tone it down too.