John Dilbeck Musings

I am slowly making progress in converting all of my blogs over to WordPress (with the single exception of John Dilbeck And Friends which will continue to be powered by Manilla.)

The more I use WordPress, the better I like it.

One thing I’ve been doing is using categories rather extensively on several of my blogs.

On Syndicate Your Ad, I have a category for every state in the USA, all the provinces in Canada, and other countries as I need to create them. The reason for this is that each category has its own RSS feed and I syndicate those feeds on dozens of Squidoo lenses and other websites.

I’m way behind in blogging these offers, but I decided it was best to take the time I needed to create an infrastructure for promoting the offers. Now that I’ve almost completed that, I’ll get back to updating the blog this month or next. Then, it will be easy to update it every couple of days or so.

I’ve tested several other blogs to see how well they work when generating multiple RSS feeds based on category, and after several months of use, I’m going to convert all of them over to WordPress. As far as I’m concerned, it offers the best value in terms of power, flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use. So, the others will be ditched.

All of this takes time, but by the first of 2007, or so, I’ll have everything working as I want and can spend just a few hours a week keeping them updated.

So, now I have an easy way to generate information that flows from blog to lens, website, and other blog.

Now, I’m thinking about how I can complete the flow back to the originating blogs or if that is even something that needs doing.

I got the idea a few minutes ago when I was looking at my newest lens: Dolly Parton.

On the top right corner of the lens, there is the standard icon for RSS feeds. When I looked at it, the feed showed my description for the lens and it was repeated as a link item with the date of last updating.

As far as information is concerned, it doesn’t look too interesting to me, but it does look interesting in terms of the date of last update. I’m wondering if this is one of the mechanisms Squidoo uses to rank lenses in terms of “freshness” or recentness of update.

How can I use that for myself?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m going to be musing about it the next few days as I go about my marketing efforts.

Do you have any thoughts about it?

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:

So, who else has been creating new lenses?