Squidoo Lens Dance – When Your Lens Goes WiP

At the moment, I’m aiming at creating one new Squidoo Lens a day, and I’ve noticed something strange that terrified me to begin with.

Everytime, I’ve finished a lens, and I looked at it and felt proud, the next day, it would be back in Work-in-Progress mode.

Why, oh, why?

When a lens is in WiP (Work-in-Progress), it does not show up in Google, and if you plan to make money with Squidoo lenses, this is a very bad thing. No search engine indexing = almost no money.

A few hours later, to my great relief, I could see my lens back in shape. But what happens? Why this Squidoo Lens Dance?

Squidoo Lens Dance

As you can see above, my latest lens, Battery Operated Alarm Clock, has had 2 likes and 8 visits. That is because it has been live and kicking. Actually, it still was, when I went to bed last night. And this morning when I looked back?

CRY!

Lens in WiP.

Red “No Entry” sign.

When this happened to me the first couple of times, I almost went into a state of panic. What had I done wrong? Why was my lens rejected?

Then I noticed that it happened every time I made a new lens.

I decided to find out what happened and asked at Tiffany Dow’s blog. I got a really good answer from one of her other readers.

Squidoo Work-in-Progress for New Lenses

Paul Duxbury, aka Squid Angel pkmcr, wrote this wise answer to me about the Squidoo Dance:

You will find that a lens will go into WIP at midnight on the day you create it (it’s actually 6am in the UK) and then will generally come out of WIP (go from red to black on your dashboard) after the next lensrank update which is typically about 2pm in the UK so that’s probably about 7am in the US. It can be confusing but just seems to be the way Squidoo operates.

Okay, good to know. There’s no reason to panic, then.

Thanks, Paul!

I’m pretty much new to Squidoo, but I must confess that it’s addicting.