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What to do if your lens is 'Work in Progress' on Squidoo

SquidTeam by SquidTeam
Last updated: 01/23/2012

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"Work in Progress" lenses aren't featured on Squidoo. But you can get them there!

Work In Progress is a phase that all lenses go through, even the greats! Most simply put, a lens is a work in progress when it needs a little more love and attention before we think it is ready for prime time. Usually this means that the lens needs some more content, or it needs freshening up, or it needs to be getting more than 0 visits day in and day out.

Read on to find out what WIP status means (for new lenses and older lenses alike), how to get through it and how to get the lens Featured on Squidoo and beyond.

Contents at a Glance

What is a "Featured" lens and...
What causes a lens to be Work in Progres...
It's easy to spruce up a WIP lens
Five tips for getting a NEW lens feature...
Five tips for getting an existing lens o...
Seasonal lenses falling into WIP?
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What is a "Featured" lens and what is a "Work in Progress" lens?

There are two states: Featured and Work in Progress. First, let's look at what Featured means.

Featured lenses are the ones with little green check marks next to them on your Dashboard. Congrats! A featured lens has earned the privilege of being promoted within Squidoo at that moment. A featured lens is included in Squidoo search results and any appropriate top 100 lists, and is indexable by search engines like Google and Yahoo and Bing. If your lens isn't featured right now, people can still see it and of course your direct URL will still work. The idea of having featured and non-featured (we call them Work-in-Progress lenses, more on that below) is that it gives you a sense of what lenses are "working" and which are perhaps stale, or not getting a whole lot of traffic, or need a little touching up.

Work-in-Progress lenses have the little red minus signs next to them on your Dashboard. A Work-in-Progress lens is something that our algorithm thinks isn't worth promoting in the site today. Similar to how Google's algorithm is always changing and the pages that get "featured" on the first few pages of Google results change all the time.

WIP lenses don't get featured within Squidoo search results, on Squidoo profile pages, or to outside search engines like Google. If you've published them, these lenses are still visible via a direct visit, like if you email someone your lens or post it on a blog or Facebook or Twitter.

Okay, so what's the point of having WIP lenses? Well, sometimes lenses truly are Works-in-Progress, and aren't ready for primetime. We all have lenses that are half-baked, waiting until we can find 10 more minutes to work on them. Everyone on the SquidTeam has them too!

But other times, I know, lenses that are rather robust and good and well done can fall into WIP, and that's probably frustrating. But here's why. A lens might not be worth promoting in Squidoo if it's stale (ie, you haven't updated it in months) and if no one is visiting your lens right now, and if you haven't shared your lens on blogs or with friends or in social networks lately. And so on. The good news is that it's not hard to get a lens featured again -- update it, talk about it, share it.

What causes a lens to be Work in Progress?

Technically, a lens in considered 'Work in Progress' (WIP) if it:

1. The lens is new and has never ever been published. When your lens is ready for the world, make sure you publish it! If you never publish the lens, it will look like this to the world and will also show up on your Work in Progress lens list.

2. The lens has been published BUT it has fewer than five modules, or has an incomplete Introduction or no Intro image. If you try to Publish a lens with those conditions you will see a warning like this. If you choose to Publish anyway without fixing those conditions, your lens will be a Work in Progress.

3. The lens has been published and has plenty of content, but it has a very low LensRank and therefore is considered a Work in Progress. Please note: New lenses that have just been published will show as a WIP at least until LensRank updates, which usually takes a day. Once LensRank refreshes and looks at your lens, you'll see it with a more normal ranking and most likely a Featured status.

Important!

It's easy to spruce up a WIP lens

"My lens was WIP and invisible to most readers. So I spruced it up with some fresh content. I tried a whole new approach to the Title of the lens so that it was more obvious what my lens was about. I added some social modules to the lens. When I republished, I shared the lens with 5 people and invited them to take the Poll I had just added to it. The next day, my lens was Featured and was back in the spotlight."

Five tips for getting a NEW lens featured (and out of Work in Progress!)

1Publish the lens when you're ready for it to go live. An unpublished lens will always be Work in Progress.
2Make sure the lens has more than 4 modules filled with content (original content that you wrote, please!). Most importantly, it requires an Introduction containing at least 200 characters and an image. The intro module should explain what your lens is about and make your reader want to learn more. This is the first impression readers will get of your lens, and you want it to be great. Check out these tips for writing a great Intro.
3Wait a day. Brand new lenses that get published, and meet the criteria above, will be 'indexed' by Squidoo when LensRank updates, usually the next morning.
4Once your lens is published and ready for the world, share the link with a few friends. Show it off. When your lens starts getting visits, it will start climbing in LensRank (which helps keep the lens Featured). Why wait (im)patiently for a third party search engine to find your lens -- get the word out now when it's fresh in your brain!
5Make sure your lens is filled with useful, interesting content that you've written yourself. Read the Squidoo Originality Pact for a terrific overview (and reminder) about what kinds of lenses thrive on our site.

Five tips for getting an existing lens out of Work in Progress

Quick and easy!

Here are some suggestions to help your lens emerge from WIP status.

1Update the lens and re-publish it. A stale lens is an unhappy lens. And usually, a WIP lens. Lensmaster Waxing-Lyrical writes: "If the lens has been sitting around for a long time without fresh content, this is a good opportunity to remedy that. Make sure you have a great intro to draw in your visitors. Add some new modules, such as a poll or duel, so you can involve your readers with your subject. Change your pictures, or add new ones, ensuring you have permission to use them. Add some new sales modules, such as the Amazon Spotlight. Hopefully, these will promote extra clicks on your lens. Always a good thing!"
2Shortcut! Update your intro and republish the lens. This is the easiest way to keep the lens relevant and feeling fresh for your visitors. This also gives you a chance to make sure the lens meets our content requirements for Featured lenses, which includes an Introduction containing at least 200 characters and an image.
3Check in to Squidoo at least once a week and see which lenses are Work in Progress. Set aside 10 minutes to update the ones that need it, and you'll be well on your way to a full host of Featured lenses.
4Did you have a seasonal lens from 2009, 2010, 2011? Give it a facelift for the new year and republish.
5This is probably the best tip: Keep your lens in front of interested readers. If a lens is getting 0 visits, it will probably fall to Work in Progress. It doesn't take a lot of traffic to boost the lens back up, so make sure whenever you update your lens you share it with people who really dig your topic. Think Twitter, Facebook, your blog, email, whatever you use to share your activities without spamming strangers.

Adding social interactive modules to your lens is a terrific way to keep it relevant and shareable with friends. Post a Poll module, a Guestbook module, a Quiz module, a Duel module and invite people to sound off!

Seasonal lenses falling into WIP?

Evergreen lenses vs. Seasonal lenses. Sometimes, seasonal lenses fall into WIP. That doesn't mean you should stop making them! Let's imagine a few examples of seasonal lenses, then talk about how these compare to evergreen lenses. A great lens on Funny Santa Costumes, for instance, might get featured in Squidoo and really spike around November and December. I bet it was a top moneymaker for you that season, too. But, come Summer, it probably goes WIP. Well, that's probably because no one on the web was looking for Santa stuff at that time, or because you weren't investing much time spreading it to the outside world (and why would you, in July?), or maybe because hadn't been updated in a while. It makes sense for that lens to take a back seat for a little while in favor of your lenses that people (and you) are more actively engaging with right now. But I bet it will be back in action and earning money for you when Christmas rolls around again! Seems like that lens was worth building, to me.

Evergreen lenses are also very much worth building. Lenses that don't fluctuate by season or target hot or ephemeral trends, but rather mirror YOU and your passions and topics, regardless of the environment around them. These lenses aren't guaranteed to be featured all the time either, and their status and LensRank probably matches your enthusiasm for the topic and lens, and the conversations you're running about that topic elsewhere on the web.

Important!

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