John Dilbeck Musings
Whatever strange and wonderful ideas tickle this big brain of mine

John Dilbeck Musings


4
October

Squidoo Groups are Inspiring New Lenses

posted October 4th, 2006 posted posted by John Dilbeck

Now that Groups are active on Squidoo, I have been inspired to start some new lenses.

For the Country Music Fans group, I just created a new Dolly Parton lens. Pigeon Forge is only a couple of hours from here and I’ve been a Dolly Parton fan for decades, so it seemed like a good lens to build.

For the Addicted to Squidoo group, I started a Marketing With Squidoo lens. I have some ideas for more content on that lens, but I’ve run out of time today to work on it.

I plan to start a new group that I’ll announce in a few days. I created a couple of lenses for adding to the group when it is created. They include:
Success With Power Blog and Success With Blogging. They may fit into groups that also include Home Businesses and Marketing. I have an idea that we’re going to see a lot of overlap in groups since anyone can start whatever group they want.

In fact, I plan to create a few more groups to cross promote lenses I’ve already created.

With the groups I’ve created at MySpace and Squidoo, I’m starting to think that I don’t want to over-extend into another direction! It’s a lot easier to join a group and let someone else manage it than it is to find the time to visit all the groups and forums I’ve started here and there every day. Some days I have other priorities and just don’t have the time and energy to visit all those sites to make sure things are staying on track.

I just added another 17 lenses i want to create to the file where I keep all my information about my existing lenses. I found I wanted a comprehensive list of all the lenses, their URLs, RSS feeds they publish, and any notes for further development. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with all of them and what I want to do, even if the Squidoo Dashboard does keep a list of all our lenses.

By the way, I just discovered a neat tool for promoting your lenses. On the bottom right of your Squidoo lenses dashboard, there is a section called Lensmaster Tools. At the bottom of that column is a link to Spread The Word. On that page, there is a nice tool that helps you create image links to your lenses. An example is shown below:

Check out my marketing with Squidoo lens

So, who else has been creating new lenses?