Learn. Work. Scale. Repeat.

Small words, big meaning. People get caught up a lot in ‘Squidoo is going to make me rich’ or ‘my blogs are going to make me rich’ or ‘my favorite GPT site / survey / ebook is going to make me rich’.

So far I’ve only found one thing that really set me firmly on the road to succeeding with anything in life.

Myself.

I think Squidoo is an equalizer and a differentiator at the same time. There are some lensmasters that build hundreds and hundreds of lenses with nothing but default settings and no unique content or insight of any kind and expect Squidoo to do all the work for them. There are others that spend all of their time on one or two lenses and expect to make wild fame, fortune, and riches off of 2 pieces of content that they constantly tweak.

Learn to build good lenses. This is done by building lenses. A lot of them. However, if you keep repeating the same thing over and over and over you aren’t learning anything. You have to try different techniques, topics, angles, etc. to find what works. I have probably 100+ lenses that get no traffic at all. none. zip. Were those lenses a waste of my time? Not at all. In fact, those are probably some of the most valuable lenses I have built because each one of them taught me something new. Without all those stubbed toes, I wouldn’t be getting ever closer to finding the right module combinations, topics, promotion methods, and little tricks and tweaks that work best for me.

Work. This is the difference between mindless repetition of anything you do and truly putting forth an effort worth talking about. Work is often associated with a negative connotation but that’s probably a result of people associating what they do every day when they go to ‘work’. Work is not a place, it is an action. A good action because it means you are putting forth effort. Effort + Knowledge = results. Every Time.

Scale. Perhaps another good name for this would be Focus. If you find something that works, figure out ways to duplicate that success. This can be the most challenging part of succeeding at anything (Squidoo or not) but I think it’s almost the most rewarding. You don’t achieve Scale when you can achieve excellence on demand. You achieve scale when you can help others achieve excellence on demand in ways that help everyone succeed.

Repeat. Once you conquer one mountain, it becomes a mole hill. One lens is a triumphant accomplishment when you have only one. Your first penny earned. Your first comment. Your first rating. Your first visit from google. Then it becomes the first 50 lenses, the first 100 visitors, the first $10 or $100 you make. It doesn’t ‘end’, it just changes.

I meet lensmasters all the time that say ‘i cant <insert thing here usually relating to traffic or ranking>’. I ask them how many lenses they have built and what is working on the others. Virtually every time, the answers are not very many and nothing is working because they are all the same. I’ll then tell them to go try and build a lens a day for a week, even give them ideas and module templates and affiliate program recommendations. Sometimes they do it and come back for more but usually i never hear from them again.

The ones that do return have usually learned something incredibly important. They’ve learned that challenging yourself to learn new things isn’t as bad as you remembered it in school and in fact it’s pretty rewarding.

I’ll admit it’s an imperfect world and it’s never the right time to start. But until you put your imperfect butt into imperfect gear and get the party rolling, it’s going to be hard to effect change for yourself or your cause.

oh, and I have a secret tip that if you just repeat it over and over and don’t even think about changing anything it will make you $47,000 a second. While I’m at it I’ve got some houses that you can buy for zero money down and never make a payment ever and you will be able to flip for millions in days. Check out my new site on all these great deals.