Lensographies for Squidaholics

Every Squidoo lensmaster has a lens list included on their Squidoo Profile page; mine is located here. As you can see, I have a total of 186 lenses at this time. They are all listed under the heading of "My Lenses" and they are listed there in lensrank order. However, if you were looking for one specific lens of mine, and didn't have the correct URL or title, trying to find one lens among that long list would involve a lot of scrolling and reading. Not very efficient, is it?

However, by creating a lensography, I have created something similar to the card catalog you would find at the library. What I have done is take my 186 lenses and organized them into various categories of like-topic lenses, so that if you wanted to see all of my Music lenses, you could find them in one section of my lensography, and skip over the Pokemon lenses that you weren't so interested in. This allows me to more efficiently get you to the content you are seeking, and by saving you time; hopefully you'll have a little more time to enjoy my lenses.

Additionally, I now have a unique URL available to market all of my Squidoo lenses. I use it as a signature line in various forums that I use, to bring new users over to Squidoo and show them the variety of ways that I'm using Squidoo.

As an extension of that, this also allows me to do targeted marketing for a GROUP of lenses by directing outside users to a specific category of lenses within my lensography. The URL can be modified to go directly to a specific module within my lens, so if I was posting in a music forum, I could modify the signature URL to go directly to my music oriented lenses.

My lensography is organized by category, and I have included a table of contents at the very top of the page. This allows the user to see all of my available categories, and then click on a topic to go directly to that section of lenses that they are interested in looking at in more detail.

Categories are a totally optional approach to your lensography, you could just provide links to all of your lenses if you'd prefer. I recommend categories because I think they provide a much better viewer experience, and that first impression can mean so much!

The easiest place to start planning out your categories is your Squidoo Dashboard, where you have all of your lenses listed. Start by scrolling up and down the list of lenses, and looking for any common themes or topics for which you have created multiple lenses. Write these categories down on a piece of scratch paper to start.

These categories can be as broad or as specific as you want - the more specific the categories you choose to work with, the smaller each group of lenses will be, and you'll probably have lots of small modules in your lensography. If you go with very broad categories, you'll have less total modules, but each module will be longer with a lot more lenses in each one.

Don't worry that you have to get everything perfect right at the start. Over time, as you continue to create new lenses and add them to your lensography, you might find that a category that is getting large could be broken up into two smaller categories. This is easily done by just inserting a new module and transferring the lenses from the old module to the new module, and deleting them from the old module.

Thinking in terms of the library card catalog, you could have just two categories : Fiction and Non-Fiction, but you'd be breaking your long list into two smaller, but still pretty long lists if you have a lot of lenses already. To be more organized and effective, I would suggest trying to go down at least one more level, and have a Miscellaneous category for any lenses that just don't quite fit in any of the categories you have written down.

You'll want to make sure that when you're finished building your lensography that it is complete, and the total number of lenses you have included in your modules equals the number of lenses on your dashboard.

For my lensography, I have broken my lenses down into the following categories:

Lenses to promote my business
My hobbies & interests
Books, Authors, and Literary Characters
TV Shows, actors, and characters
Business Tips and Tricks
The Sounds of Music
Sports Themed Lenses
Historical Lenses
Miscellaneous
Personal Lenses

Since I started my lensography, I've already taken some large categories and splintered them off into their own sub-sections. Sports and Music both used to fall under the "My Hobbies and Interests" section, until I had created enough lenses in those categories that I felt they deserved their own section.

I currently am planning on moving my Pokemon Checklist lenses out of the "Promoting my Business" section and into their own section within my lensography.

I think it's important to remember that your lensography is a constantly evolving creation - as you build more lenses, you'll add them to your lensography, and you'll probably also find that the categories you started out with need to be refined a little bit more. Over time, you'll create a more organized, effective, and efficient lensography.

If you're still stuck on what kind of categories to use for your lenses, check out my Lensography Library and see how other lensmasters have approached their lensographies.

Thank you to everyone for visiting - this was my first ever LOTD and it was an honor :)