Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Okay, so after spending all day on Sunday re-tagging over 70 lenses (thank my piratey stars that the keyboard shortcuts for fast tagging still work.) based on the results of a test I was running (more on that later..) I’ve come to some conclusions about labels.
1) They save you a lot of time if set up correctly. I thought that having 7-10 labels broken out into groups of 50-100 lenses would help a ton and it did. However, breaking the labels out even further into sub-genres of 10-20 lenses is going to work awesome. That’s going to be my next step.
2) Aggregate Performance #s rock - I care about how groups of lenses perform, not one lens in particular. So, when you can see if a group of lenses is rising or falling in traffic it is incredibly useful. Over time this will allow me to create better and better ‘groups’ of lenses based on the performance results of other groups.
3) A/B Testing - I’ll get into this a bit more tomorrow, but using labels to take a group of lenses and keep one as the control and the other as the experiment can be quite useful…
4) Tier Labeling - This is Huge! Label your lenses in each of the top two payout tiers so you can track them more closely and spend a little extra time on the ones that are slacking off and losing Lensrank. Play the ‘edges’ instead of the ‘middle’.
I don’t think I loaded my lens list that had all of my lenses yesterday except for maybe a handful of times to add labels to lenses.
Note: If you are coming into this little adventure late make sure and catch up with the first parts of my ebay squidoo challenge tips narrative: The Intro and Bonus offer, targeting ebay users, featuring fun products, building out an ebay niche.
I finished up my final submission for the Squidoo - Ebay Challenge contest. For the last lens I wanted to show how you could create an informative, educational, or ‘how-to’ lens and still promote eBay products.
Once again cruising Ebay Pulse, I went to the board game section and found that Monopoly of course dominates. As a kid I loved Monopoly so it was an easy sell to make a Monopoly lens. But what topic to cover? It’s not exactly easy to find something controversial about Monopoly… or is there? I ended up building the final lens on Monopoly House Rules.
Everyone who has ever played Monopoly knows that the rules can seem to change from person to person depending on what their ‘House Rules’ are. How to use this?
Create a Plexo - I put together a plexo with a pile of famous ‘House Rules’ in it and encouraged people to vote on their favorite rules as well as add their own. This really encourages interaction on the lens and it really is a topic that everyone has an opinion on.
Feature Unique Items - Since this lens is probably going to be found by people who either are Monopoly die-hards or friends and family of Monopoly die-hards I try to include rare, unique, or vintage items. Displaying things that you don’t really see anywhere else and you wouldn’t think of searching for if you just visited eBay works very well.
So now that I have all the lenses for the challenge I shot off an e-mail to ebayaward- at -squidoo.com to let them know I’m all set!
What’s next? I’ll add a little more content here and there to some of the lenses before the final judging and I may tweak my tags a bit more, but the lenses are basically done and ready to go.
I’ve decided to bring back the weekly Squidoo News Updates, at least for now. I find that it helps me keep track of all the great ideas I’m finding that people are writing about.
First, a shameless plug. I Answered a question over on the Giant Squid mentor Blog by a fantastic new lensmaster (JigsawForte) on how to expand a niche of lenses to reach a wider audience. If you are a webcomic fan, make sure and check out Jigsaw’s webcomic (It’s the Deadliest one around) at Last Resort.
SquidUber has a cool post on how someone contacted him through one of his lenses to write a paid review! Pretty Cool!
The Squidoo - Ebay Lensbuilding Challenge is in Full Swing! I’ve got 9 lenses done so far with one to go. Much Squid fame and glory awaits the winner, so if you haven’t started yet get to it! There’s still plenty of time to get your lenses done (You’ve got all the rest of this week plus the weekend!).
If you have a squidoo blog, let me know so I can swing by and check it out! I love seeing new lensmasters blogs. If not, why not head over to Squidtop and set up a squidoo blog? The community over there is growing quite nicely and it’s a blast to drop in on other Lensmasters to see what they are doing.
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