Duel Lenses and Why You Should Make One

If you ever run out of ideas for Squidoo lenses, you can always make a duel lens. These are lenses for arguing about anything in the world - movies, cars, gadgets, food...

Squidoo has this wonderful thing called the Duel module which sorts the comments from both sides of the argument into two columns. It's a very simple concept, but something I haven't seen anywhere else on the internet. If you're creating a duel lens, you'll probably want to include the Duel module.

Here are some advantages of duel lenses:

• People love arguing. They are also often looking for comparisons between two products (or ideas) to help them decide which one is better. Chances are, you will get lots of organic traffic and comments on your lens. 
• There's a lot of "A versus B" type of phrases with lots of searches, but relatively little competition. Look for some that match your niche and area of expertise.
• These lenses are fairly easy to make, and user input in the duel module can make up the most of your lens content.
• All these comments mean your lens will be updated with fresh, relevant content without your input! Perfect for lazy people like me.
• It also means your lensrank will rise (assuming comments affect the lensrank).
  

There are some downsides, too:

• If your lens is successful, you'll have to deal with high volumes of comments - some of them will be spam or contain profanity. I highly recommend to check "Strip HTML" in all your Guestbook and Duel modules.
• On the other hand, if your lens doesn't become popular, it won't look very nice or useful (after all, an active discussion and lots of opinions from different people is what we want in a duel lens, and what your visitors are looking for).
• They seem to be hard to monetize - I don't have a duel lens which would make consistent sales (you can see some of my stats below). It's likely that I'm just bad at monetizing my lenses though, or my topics don't attract buyers.

 I have 23 published Duel lenses at the moment, with 6,236 total weekly visits. Here you can see the stats of the top 10:

I'm slacking. I should really make more :)

Here are some tips and other things to consider when making a duel lens:

• If you have avatars enabled in the Duel module, it leaves very little space for the actual comment. As a result, long comments will take up lots of vertical space. However, with avatars disabled the comments don't look as friendly or personal. I recommend disabling them if you are mostly getting feedback from anonymous visitors with the default avatar.
• It seems that Google only indexes the first page of the Duel module comments, so make sure you display plenty of them per page (20 or more) - especially if the Duel module is the biggest part of your lens.
• Google is smart - it treats "A versus B" and "B versus A" as the same thing. You get traffic from both searches. Sweet.
• Squidoo has a special theme for duel lenses called Hey MonkeyBrain. The advantage is getting listed on the MonkeyBrain HQ (PR5) if your LR is high enough. However, not everyone likes the look of the MonkeyBrain theme with its all-caps titles. If you don't, just start a regular lens and add the duel module to it.

That about sums up my experience with duel lenses. If you want to see an example, visit my new McDonald's vs Starbucks lens. Just like I said, it looks pretty sad without a large amount of visitor comments, but hopefully it will pick up in the future.