John Dilbeck Musings

Are you a lensmaster on Squidoo?

If you are, I’m inviting you to join a new social networking site for Squidoo marketing, where our goal is to help each other do a better job of creating lenses that are used for marketing.

Want to increase the revenue you earn from your lenses? Come and talk about them. Attract new visitors. Learn new techniques and share your own.

Want to become a Squidoo lensmaster?

Everyone is an expert on something. Squidoo provides an easy way to build one-page websites called lenses that you can use to focus attention on a particular subject that you know and love.

It’s free, and Squidoo even shares any revenue they earn from your lens with you. There are many of us who get a monthly deposit from Squidoo into our PayPal accounts. I just got a deposit into mine a couple of days ago. You can, too.

Are you an expert on something?

Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, of course.

Then, come join us at the Squidoo marketing community.

We’ll help each other become better lensmasters.

Act on your dream!

JD

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?

A week ago, I didn’t know who Kimberly Dawn Wells was, and now I’m running across her lenses and groups everywhere I look!

That’s a good thing.

About Kimberly Dawn Wells

Kimberly is very active on Squidoo, CafePress, MySpace, and probably other places, but I’ve been concentrating on those three for the last couple of days. She has an outstanding lens about herself on Squidoo and an equally impressive page about herself on MySpace.

Activities on Squidoo

Kimberly is a Citizen Squid at Squidoo and has been creating groups on Squidoo to make it easier for lensmasters to group a bunch of lenses together on a common topic. While this is a pre-release feature at the moment, it looks like it won’t be too much longer before it becomes at least a beta release.

I’ve added a couple of my lenses to the Country Music Fan and Totally Awesome Tees groups, and I’ll be participating in more groups as they become available. I think this is going to be a very important addition to Squidoo.

She offers helpful advice

Kimberly is very helpful and offers her advice on a number of topics.

For example, she offers some very helpful tips on her MySpace Made Easy lens to help us improve our experiences at MySpace.

Activities on MySpace

Kimberly has several groups at MySpace, including Success with Squidoo and Success with CafePress. Groups on MySpace include the ability to discuss topics of interest on forums associated with the group and the optional ability to post bulletins which seem to be used to post news or ads.

I’m new to MySpace, so my limited knowledge of the community may not allow me to fully appreciate the nuances of membership and participation there. I’m open to being educated on the subject.

I created two groups at MySpace for Murphy NC Business and Site Build It Webmasters, which was an outgrowth of my Site Build It lens at Squidoo.

Free to participate

You can participate free at Squidoo and MySpace and I think both are great places to create content and tell about your activities and interests.

On MySpace, this is done through conversations on the forums, posting of bulletins, blogging, and leaving comments on your friends’ pages.

On Squidoo, you participate by creating lenses (one page keyword focused pages with out-pointing links) and joining the groups as they become available.

Both of these sites work well with other communities where I participate, including Ryze.com, PowerfulIntentions.com, AdlandPro.com, MySpace.com, and others.

I look forward to meeting you on one or more of these communities.

Feel free to tell me what you think. Correct me where I’m wrong and educate me where I’m ignorant.