Ramblin' About Lenses After the Community Music Event

I attended a local musical event yesterday - it was one of those community events I felt obligated to be part of. Maybe I'm a workaholic because I honestly don't like taking time off.

Nevertheless I enjoyed seeing my friends and being part of the general excitement of the day.

Perhaps I should write about it... we could use some buzz, for next year.

Today... 7/22/118 for a total of 147 lenses in payout tiers, out of a total of 233 lenses; average lensrank, 65,114 - which is better than a few days ago when it was about 75,000. Today the lowest lenrank is 203,619 and the highest is 36.

I've decided to rename my main writing blog from "Compassion Awareness" to "Linda Jo Martin, Content Writer, Novelist." For now. I tend to change that often. I considered calling myself a Writeaholic but felt that was too close to "alcoholic," which I am not.

This posting is somewhat rambling, and I don't know exactly where I'm going with it. Sorry not to be making a point. I think taking a day off at a community event does that to me. Now I'm trying to reorient myself to my business mindset.

Yesterday I had a table to try to sell some of my books but like... nobody was in the mood to buy books! I wasn't surprised. Really, books are a hard-sell these days. People want easy entertainment. Music. Video games. Videos. All that. I need to learn to make videos better - but then always think that nobody really wants to watch videos done by a sixty year old writer lady.

One day at a time.

I've decided to focus on promotion and improvement of ten lenses this month - and made a dashboard label to segregate them for easy recall.

One of those lenses is Best Flash Fiction. It tells what flash fiction is, where to get it published, and how to write it. The lens also gives links to samples of good flash fiction.

This lens sat in my WIP collection for a long time. June 2008 to August 2010. In the meantime several other flash fiction lenses were created... but still mine rose in lensrank, enough to be the first one visible when someone searches for flash fiction on Squidoo. For that I am grateful.

It used to be near the top of the third tier. I spent some time promoting it and now it is at the top of the second tier. Naturally I'd like to see it go a bit higher.

Have you noticed the phenomena of disappearing backlinks? I look at the "backlink score" provided by SquidUtils, and see that many of my backlinks on blogs disappear over time. I am wondering if the search engines discount older content. This would mean that steady fresh links would help whereas older ones will not be as good. I am a bit freaked out over that. It means I have a lot to do, to keep promoting my lenses.

Never a dull moment.