What is Tweaking a Lens?

Squidoo Lensmasters should not go more than a few months without tweaking their lenses. Tweaking and full on updates keep the lens looking its best. I am always surprised what I missed when I go back with fresh eyes. Trust me, you will be too!

I have a weekly schedule of daily updates I do for fifty lenses. Every few months I rotate the lenses to a new group. I use Squidoo’s handy Label feature to sort the lenses by days but you could easily make up a checklist in Word with each day of the week and list the lenses to tweak under each day.

Here are the tweaks I do whether I think is is needed or not:

• Spelling and grammar are a must for everyone and it is incredibly easy to miss a word here and there no matter how many times I have read my writing. Trust when I say there is an error of some sort in your lenses right now.
• Capitalizing titles of modules: “See who is following Angie” becomes a sentence with no punctuation but by capitalizing, “See Who is Following Angie” makes it a proper title. Properly capitalized titles are more pleasing to the eye.
• Formatting paragraphs: I see this a lot on other lenses so I am always looking for it on my own. You cannot copy and paste your content from a Word (or other) document and expect the formatting to stay the same. Paste the work, save it in the module, look at your paragraphs, then open it up and edit out the extra spaces that divide lines at weird points within the sentence. Add space where it is needed between the paragraphs so one paragraph is not right on top of the other (one space between paragraphs).
• Play videos: I will play all videos for a few seconds even if it looks like it is still there. If a video has been removed I look for another and replace it. If I cannot find one in my theme I delete the module.
• Replace or fix missing images (or resize images — as per new Squidoo standards for intro — at least 250 x 250 pixels).
• Check all product links. I click on them to make sure they are still opening properly and product is still available. If the multi-amazon product module is showing a format irregularity because of a few missing images I reset the module to remove images to make it look cleaner.
• Check all outgoing links, delete dead links, add one or two new links.
• Check RSS, twitter, google feeds and change as necessary.

With a pen and notepad take a look at your five top lenses from top to bottom and make a list of tweaks you think would make these lenses better. Chances are this list can be applied to the rest of your lenses. Now you have a plan of attack.

Happy tweaking!