Squidoo News

Archive for September, 2009

‘Way back when I was working to become a member of the second-ever class of giant Squids, the only support we had was an occasional “You can do it!” on the SquidU forum. We supported each other, of course, but there were no small groups and no organization. Wow, has time changed things!

Now, with the help of the Giant Squid Organizers and an ever-growing team of Giant Squid Challenge Group Leaders, baby Squids have so much support! There’s a Ning group, countless challenges and competitions, and group chats. Now you can also subscribe to Giant Squid Tips on Twitter to get daily quick tips and assignments that will help you swim your way to Giant Squiddom in no time!

The new Giant Squid Challenge will be starting soon. Learn all about it on this lens and don’t be shy about getting involved no matter how many, or how few, lenses you have. I promise, you’ll be glad you did.

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The quarter will come to a close at midnight tomorrow, September 30, and so this is our very last post from the Giant Squid Greeter Team Challenge ending September 2009.

This week I asked the Greeter Team leaders to share two marvelous lenses each from their groups.  Please visit them all and wish the lensmasters luck as we approach this very important Giant Squid and 100 Club deadline for this round!

From Growwear’s team:

Lensmaster _Joan_  gives a passionate review of NPR’s Wait…Wait Don’t Tell Me!

Lensmaster BevsPaper artfully presents Bessie Pease Gutmann—an artist whose talent will warm your heart.

From a_willow’s team:

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Today we turn the Squidoo Spotlight on  Giant Squid lensmaster and 100 Club member Treasures-By-Brenda, who shares the story of how her wonderful Blu-Ray niche was born.  Read on to learn how you might create a successful niche of your own!

“My Giant Tip is that GOOGLE VISITS BLOGS. If you don’t have already one, start one soon! I post messages about most of my new lenses on Squidtop at Treasures By Brenda and I find that writing a post there helps the search engines (particularly Google) find my lenses quickly.

My lensmaking story? Well, those of you who know my work are aware of my many blu-ray lenses which evolved accidentally into a blu-ray niche. This niche is not an overly popular one here on Squidoo but it is apparently popular in the ‘real’ world.

To date, I have twelve blu-ray lenses. My latest one was created last week for the Rocket Moms’ About Me Challenge so it is the personal story of My Most Excellent Blu-ray Adventure. It was not meant to be a blu-ray lensography and it tells a bit about how I arrived in this blu-ray niche. While I cannot say that we have a blu-ray player because of Squidoo, I can say that Squidoo was definitely involved!

My first blu-ray lens was created after I read Sound & Vision Magazine’s list of best blu-ray movies in the summer of 2008. Research on Squidoo showed that there were few ‘blu-ray’ results and so I created my first blu-ray lens, Top 10 Blu-ray Movies, which immediately drew many visitors.

The volume of traffic and the click-outs to that lens inspired my second and most successful blu-ray lens, Top 10 Imax Blu-ray Movies.  It never received the volatile volume of the first blu-ray lens but it continues to receive a fairly steady stream of traffic that shops on Amazon because Imax movies are perfect for showing off your high definition television and blu-ray technology!

I find myself sliding sideways now, niche wise. I did do a few very focused blu-ray pages like  The Little Family’s Batman: The Dark Knight Blu-ray Review and Paul Newman’s Blu-ray Movies ~~ Classic Movies On Blu-ray however, they struggle for traffic.

I chanced upon Disney’s Earth Movie ~~ An Animal Nature Documentary and wound up with not one but three popular lenses devoted to the controversial movie. Earth works nicely with the Imax lens and with another new lens which I think has great potential — The Mountain Wildlife T-Shirts.  Anyone who loves wildlife cannot help but love these shirts and, as a bonus, they’re environmentally friendly and they’re affordable. Here’s hoping that The Mountain T-shirts lens enjoys some success from the popularity of the Earth and the Imax lenses.

So you can see that this niche evolved. It was definitely not planned at the beginning and now it is spreading. I would say my Best-Ever Recipes niche was a bit more planned, but that is another story for another day. Thanks for listening!”

This was written shortly after Treasures-by-Brenda became a 100 Club member.  She’s created even more wonderful lenses since.

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Our spotlight today is on Giant Squid and 100 club member Stazjia. Stazjia became a 100 Club member during our last round which ended on June 30, 2009.   This quarter’s deadline is September 30th.   Are you ready?

Why did I enter the Giant 100 Club Challenge?

Like many other things, there was a mixture of reasons. I was feeling burnt out from the effort to make Giant in September and hadn’t made many lenses between October 2008 and March 2009. Michelle (a_willow) invited me to join the Wiwon team and gave me a pep talk and a lot of encouragement.

Another reason is that I’m very competitive and I was ready to compete again!

Finally, I love writing for the web and I particularly like the way of doing it Squidoo provides.

My motivation – how did I keep myself going?

An important motivation was not letting down Michelle and the Wiwon team. Once I’d committed myself to the team, I had to make every effort I could to write as many good lenses as possible.

Because I’m very competitive, I would have hated not to exceed the 100 lens mark. That was what I set out to achieve and so that was what I had to do, come what may. When I make up my mind to do something, I focus on my goal. Of course, I had times when I thought it was impossible and I couldn’t do it. Then I thought about failing to achieve what I had set out to do and I’d push my doubts aside and do another lens, then another, then another.

The Wiwon team helped a lot with constant encouragement and when I had doubts, Michelle was there to help me put them aside. Even my usual iron determination would probably have failed me without Michelle and the rest of the team.

How long did it take me?

I believe I had 77 lenses when I joined the Wiwon team in mid April. I made my 108th lens on June 30. I found I could make Twttrlist lenses very quickly and I found them enjoyable to do. I only made a few, though, because I’m not sure they have much of a shelf life. I will continue to promote and update them and see if I’m wrong.

How do I update and care for so many lenses?

Every morning I spend an hour or two going through my lenses and update and improve them where possible. There’s usually something I see that can be added or removed. I particularly like to change pictures so they don’t look exactly the same all the time. I add news to topics like Dolphins Under Threat or the Glastonbury Music Festival, where there is genuine news from time to time.

I also re-read my lenses as I do this, from start to finish. Sometimes I decide that a sentence isn’t necessary or that it has words that are just padding and not doing a real job so I delete or rewrite it as appropriate.

And why Squidoo instead of maybe making 100 posts at my own blog or {shudder} another website?

Because of a health problem, I retired earlier than I expected. A friend and I had run a network of content sites for seven years during which time it had grown to the extent we had two dedicated servers. Not much in terms of Squidoo, but big enough for two people to manage who also worked at other things. We took the hard decision to tell our writers we could no longer run it as a network and we have just kept our own content on the original domain but moved it to a cheaper, shared server.

I lost enthusiasm for writing for that network as did my friend. We just keep it ticking over with a weekly article. I didn’t want to have my own largish site with 100+ pages and deal with server problems and management. I have some server space for my two blogs but I don’t need to worry about it.

I love the community on Squidoo and I really like the lens tools. I think the variety of modules are great and suit the way I write very well. It is so easy to make a lens look beautiful which is as important as it being well written. A lovely looking page is much more inviting to the casual visitor than a scruffy one, no matter how good the information or the writing.

Previous Experience

My background is in administration and selling for specialist UK newspapers and magazines for antiques dealers and collectors. I spent more than 25 years in and around the British antiques trade so acquired a lot of knowledge. Eventually I submitted articles to publications and they were accepted. It was easier for me because I knew all the editors – the antiques trade and publishing is a small world here. I was then commissioned by different magazines to write regular monthly articles and this continued until my health declined. I decided I could not commit myself to monthly deadlines so gave up writing for print. You cannot risk leaving an editor with two or three empty pages to fill when the magazine is going to press.

I’d been writing online content since early 1998, including a spell as a Guide for About.com of the Antiques UK. I left About and continued writing for our own network but expanded my subject base. I was so happy when I found Squidoo and have continued to write on a variety of topics.

Don’t miss these terrific lenses by Stazjia

I had a Mini Stroke and What Happened After

Classic Funny Poems for Kids

Who are London Cockneys?

Learn more about the Giant Squid 100 Club and how you can be in it HERE.

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To paraphrase a song, making your way on Squidoo today takes everything you’ve got. Well, maybe not everything, but it’s important to take a few minutes on a regular basis to keep updated with what’s happening with Squidoo and in the Squidoo community.

The place to visit if you want everyone on Squidoo to know your name is the SquidU.com forum, and the place to start is Kimberly’s Morning Coffee. It’s the newest section of the forum from which Squidoo’s Community & Charity Organizer SquidooKimberly (aka Kimberly Dawn Wells) plans to update the community on a daily-ish basis with the latest goings-on. The best part is that, unlike with the Squidoo blog, you can join in on the conversation and interact there with Kimberly and other members of the community.

If you have specific requests for lens reviews or you want to introduce yourself or if you need help with a problem you’re having with a module, or anything else of a specific nature, make sure to post in the proper area on SquidU, but make it a habit to join Kimberly sometime during the day to share her morning coffee.

Bring your own croissant.

Cheers!

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Calling All Lensmasters!

Follow Giant Squid Tips at Twitter.com.

https://twitter.com/GiantSquidTips

I’ll be dropping little suggestions, tips, and ideas, to help you keep your lenses fresh and up to date.

Kind of like the Fly Lady only more fun and no cleaning required!

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