This one is a little bit less demanding than the eBay contest. Simply build 5 lenses about regular everyday superheroes that you know who make a difference. I believe the deadline is June 30 (?).  SuperGiant Squid Jeff Wend has already got his SuperHero Squidoo Project off to a great start and the Giant Squids Mentor Blog has some more information on the SuperHero Project as well.

Seth Godin defines what a true SuperHero is in his mind. Pretty interesting paradox of impatience and patience..

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.

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.

If you would like to get Captain Squid Updates for free in your inbox or RSS reader, snag my RSS feed.

Unfortunately the niche got a little carried away with me and here I am… 36 hours and 7 lenses later.

Yep, 7.

Here’s How:

I noticed that Star Wars Legos are big on eBay… really big. It seems like darn near every auction has a ton of bids on it.  ‘ Sweet!’ I thought to myself, let me narrow this down and I’ll just do a lens on selling the little lego figures that were custom made for Star Wars. Oops.

It turns out that each movie has a HUGE list of custom made Lego Characters. So, I had to make a lens highlighting all the custom characters for each movie (6 lenses) as well as an over-arching lens about all the custom lego figures ever made for Star Wars.

How did I tie the 6 lenses on each individual movie into each other as well as a lens that acts as an ‘umbrella’ or guide to the topic?

1) Use the ‘Featured Lens’ Module to highlight ALL the lenses in the series on the lens. Find it by doing a search for ‘Featured’ in the Module Directory.  As each Featured Lens Module can only hold 5 lenses, I broke it up into Lego characters from Star Wars Episode 1-3 and Episode 4-6.

2) Plexify! - Create one link list plexo (voting list) on the main lens and then simply copy/publish it to all the other lenses in the series. It shows up on the bottom of a lens giving visitors some great suggestion of where they can look next for more information.

With 5 days to go, we now have 9 lenses done for the challenge!

Bonus Ideas: After the contest is over I’ll probably go back and link all of the sets listed in each ebay module to search pages for that set on eBay using my eBay Affiliate ID (Since Squidoo doesn’t provide this functionality).

Make sure and stop by the Challenge Lens and check out that plexo for  some of your favorites and vote for them.

How is your guys and gals Challenge building going?

For my second lens in the contest I chose to do a product based lens, specifically Rubik’s Cubes and Variants.

Good tips from this lens:

• Less can be more - Notice how I use fewer than the standard 3 listings in the ebay modules. This cuts down on choice but really cleans the look up. In situations like this where I’m featuring different kinds of similar products I’ve found I get better CTRs with this method.
• Use the Description Area of Ebay Modules – Since google will not index the actual auctions pulled in the module any information you can give to the spiders to tell them more about what’s going on helps a ton. Plus, it looks better.
• Picture Poll – I don’t use these very often but this was a perfect situation for it. Instead of a guestbook module I chose to use a poll with images. How did I do it? some simple HTML code with the <image> tag. I have a lens on HTML for Images, and I’m sure there’s a bunch more that describe the process even better (if you know one, post it in the comments!).
• Have fun – Since I am a huge nerd at heart, I love topics like this. It makes it easier to make the lens when you like the topic.
• Don’t be afraid of competition – I didn’t even look to see if there were other Rubik’s Cube lenses on squidoo when I made the lens. After I hit publish, it appears there are a few other lenses on it. That’s fine, more places for my link to hang out in discovery tools .  The more coverage there is on topics like Rubik’s cubes, the more that squidoo can build its reputation as a reliable place to go to find good information. And that’s better for everyone.

Comments or thoughts?

The Rubik’s Cube Lens can be found here.

If you are feeling really excitable you can even go to the main contest page and vote for the Captain in the plexo!

The first lens by the good ole Captain for the Ebay – Squidoo 10 Day Challenge is live and ready for action.

The first topic I chose to cover was eBay shipping and postage scales.  I chose it for several reasons:

1. I know the topic – I’ve got an eBay feedback rating in the 300 range and so I’ve shipped my fair share of items. Getting a shipping scale helped so much I can’t even begin to describe it. Therefore, it was an easy write.
2. It’s got a built in audience – People in the competition are ebay sellers. By providing valuable information to them it creates a win win for everyone.

Key design points:

1. Use keyword rich and descriptive module titles – no default module titles…ever. NO, not even the guestbook. And taking the time to fill out the subtitles can really help.
2. Relevant Products – Instead of a long list of products, use multiple product modules with only a few listings in each that are more targeted.
3. Images in text areas – on the text/write modules I used images I uploaded myself, NOT through the upload utility. this allows me to add in relevant ALT text in the HTML which helps with indexing and ranking.
4. Multiple Interactive Modules – The Guestbook and Poll get users used to clicking on your lens and makes them less afraid to check out a listing.
5. Thoughtful tagging - every tag used is used on at least 10 other lenses giving me maximum discovery tool exposure.

Please feel free to check out the eBay shipping tips lens and let me know what you think or ask any questions.

Are you not an eBay powerseller? Don’t be discouraged! If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on eBay you are eligible to attempt the Challenge. Not an eBay member yet? Sign Up, look around and start creating lenses based on your first eBay experiences!

This is a fantastic opportunity to show users how to build high quality lenses reasonably quickly. I’ve decided that I’m going to participate in the challenge as well. Not only am I going to make the 10 lenses, I’m going to break down each lens every day and talk about the little things I do to help lenses get more traffic and succeed.

Hopefully this way I can give you folks some good tips to use with other eBay lenses or with your own affiliate programs.

You aren’t going to want to miss a single one of these so make sure and subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail is available as well) here or by clicking the huge orange button at the top of the blog.

The Captain has decided that he is going to make a special offer to everyone that participates and completes the 10 day challenge.

Are you working on becoming a Giant Squid? Would you like to? Want some help getting there?

1. Follow along in the ten day challenge by building your own lenses each day.
2. Leave a comment here to say you are following along (and on each post each day with a link to your new lens if you wish).
3. I will personally mentor each lensmaster who completes the 10 day challenge for the next ten days, helping them to build 10 more ultra high quality lenses (that can make piles of $$ as well!).

Prediction

I bet there are less than 10 people that will take me up on this offer and be able to complete the initial 10 ebay lenses. However, for those that make it and what to learn exactly what it is I do, I’ll show you some extra sneaky tricks I’ve used to go from $300 a month from Squidoo to $2,000 a month since January .

Oh yea, and each person that makes it through building all 20 lenses over the next 20 days, I will write a personal letter of recommendation on your behalf to HQ to get you Giant Squid status.

Who’s in?