Lens Harbor

Four years ago today I discovered Squidoo via a CNN article. Squidoo was still in beta and I’d never heard of Seth Godin or cows with long purple tails before. It was an easy, free way to experiment with creating web sites and make a little money so I signed up.

I thought that maybe I’d come up with topics for 5-10 lenses total. Ha! I’m up to 73 published lenses with ideas for dozens more. The real challenge isn’t ideas, it’s balancing time between my family, full time job and other interests to turn those ideas into good lenses.

A lot’s happened on Squidoo since I joined. Mostly good (strong community, new modules & designs, improved stats, bigger pay outs) with some hurdles along the way (spam, one star bandits, one star vigilantes, rating exchanges). I’m excited about Squidoo’s future and the opportunities for lens masters…especially after yesterday’s payouts!

Creating lenses on many topics helped me figure out where my lens building interests and strengths are. I enjoy building “How To” and info consolidation lenses the most. My limited writing experience is mostly technical so these are a good fit for me. Whether it’s providing fantasy football tips or explaining how I get rid of hiccups, I like building lenses that are helpful to visitors.

Squid Achievements
It may be a short list but during my first 4 years I…

• Had one lens selected as LOTD
• Became a Giant Squid
• Received three Purple Stars
• Had one lens mentioned in a national weekly magazine (woohoo!)
• Received several blessings from Squid Angels (thank you!)
• Was interviewed and had a lens featured on Mimi’s excellent Squidoo Lens Review blog.
• Had a lens featured in a SquidU Review post
• Had a few lenses nominated for awards in different Squidoo contests
• Founded 3 groups

Possibly the best achievement is finding that someone’s posted a link to my lenses in a forum, blog, Facebook or Twitter as a reference. That’s when I know that my lenses are useful.

These modest achievements didn’t happen overnight. They required effort, learning and some good fortune. I’ve learned a lot from other lens masters via SquidU, lens master blogs, other lenses and some really helpful lenses on lens building. To everyone who’s ever rated, lens rolled, blessed, commented on or just visited one of my lenses…Thank You!

Goals for my 5th year (2010)
Enough rambling about the past, here are my goals for this year…

• Double Last Year’s Average Monthly Squidoo Earnings
  To justify the amount of time spent on Squidoo I need to focus on realizing my earning potential. This goal will drive the others for the year. I have some strategies in mind to reach it…doubling my number of lenses isn’t one of them. Adding a few new ones while improving the quality, cross linking and promotion of my existing lenses is. The increasing tier payouts are already helping towards this one.
• Write Things Down
  Ideas have been swimming around my head for years. Ideas for new lenses, improvements to existing lenses and blog posts to promote lenses. Time to get these out of my head, on paper, organized and into reality. I bought a notebook specifically for this goal and used it to draft this post.
• Make Better Use of My Online Time
  Yeah, this is a vague goal. I have limited time to spend online and I get distracted easily. Not a good combination. I’ll fire up the computer to work on a lens then get side tracked checking stats, email, watching funny YouTube videos or logging in to play an MMORPG “real quick”. The goal here is to have a purpose each time I log on and focus only on that.

So, what will I do to celebrate my Squidiversary? Well, I wrote a really long blog post. Tonight I’ll probably pop open a bottle of Yuengling and watch the season premiere of Survivor with my wife. During the commercials I might tell her about the cool use of the BlackBox module for displaying images I saw in a recent LOTD. That’ll get me a “You and your lenses” as she shakes her head. Eventually I might convince her to start building her own lenses…but that’s a goal for another year.

I’m very happy to announce that my wife and I are expecting another baby! Woohoo! We’re very excited and looking forward to the big day.

Now comes all the planning and preparation. It’s time to start getting the nursery ready, dust off our favorite baby gear (including the onesie extenders) and agree on some names. Lots to do but it’s all worth it.

Woohoo! This week the poll on my lens about the online game Fallen Sword got its one thousandth vote! That’s way more votes than any other lens poll I have.

It didn’t happen overnight, the lens will be 2 years old in a few weeks, but it’s cool to see a poll get that much interest. It’s also good to know people read down the lens at least as far as the poll module. Here’s a screen shot…

One thing that I think helped get this much participation (other than traffic) was offering more than 2 choices. When I see a poll where the only options are “It’s Great” and “It Sucks”, I’ll usually pass if my opinion isn’t at either extreme. But if there are some more moderate options to choose, I’ll probably vote.

Look at the results above…40% of the votes were for the middle three options. That’s 400 votes that might not have been cast if the only options were “Awesome” and “Complete Rubbish”.

Woohoo!! It took nearly 2 and a half years, but I published my 50th lens today!

Now I’m officially eligible to become a Giant Squid in September. I haven’t been this excited since I turned 35 and became eligible to run for US President! (hopefully I’ll have more success becoming a Giant Squid)

So what was the 50th lens? It’s my review of an excellent book called American Shaolin. The author took a break from college to study kungfu for two years with the Shaolin monks in China and wrote about his experience.