When to split a lens
I’ve been toying with the idea of splitting my Nintendo DS Skins lens into multiple parts for a couple of weeks now. The whole goal of this lens is to make the eBay shopping experience more manageable and as of this morning I have 27 categories of DS Skins on this lens which has made it become quite unmanageable when loading. My biggest fear with splitting this lens is that I’ll be competing with the main lens which is ranked pretty well in Google right now. I think I can overcome this by placing a link for the Pokemon Nintendo DS Skins lens in the table of contents for visitors to click on. If this goes well, I may split the DS Skins lens further, but for now I’m going to experiment with just one new lens and see what pans out. I’ll keep you posted with the results.
Let me know what you think, when do you decide to split a lens?
| 3.2 |
September 10th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I’ve done this several times and my main motivator has always been the length of the lens. And it always seems to be with shops! Basically, I end up with something where there are just too many items, so I end up taking a category out and making it its own lens. I then tie everything back together using the Featured Lens module to list all the similar shops. If you have 27 categories - wow - that could be 27 separate lenses. And I wouldn’t worry about competition because really, is someone who is specifically looking for a Pokemon skin going to care about ones with Tinkerbell? Probably not. But if you have a lens that’s just Pokemon, the odds are better someone looking specifically for Pokemon is going to find you. And that becomes 27 ways for you to dominate Google.
I’d suggest one lens just on DS skins - explain why you want a skin, include that video you have, maybe offer some that are just solid colors, then use the featured lens module to include the 27 specific types. You could even create some intermediate categories like skins for girls (Bratz, Disney, etc.) and boys.
Also, it looks like the only sales offerings you have on there are for eBay. Is that working for you? Some reason you don’t want to include Amazon offerings? I like to balance the two because there are people who don’t want to buy from the other for whatever reason.
Sorry for the long-winded comment!!
September 13th, 2008 at 5:01 am
When I first built this lens I had a difficult time finding DS skins on Amazon which is why I didn’t include them. I have also found that the Amazon prices are quite a bit more. This particular item has a low enough price that I don’t think people are worried about getting scammed on eBay and you really won’t find a lot of scammers in this category due to the price point as well. I also find that I have a difficult time converting with Amazon links possibly because of the 1 day cookie duration. My pink NFL jerseys lens gets tons of traffic, but makes very little money.