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!
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.
Sorry for the lack of Ebay Challenge Updates folks, I got a little carried away. On Saturday morning I found a niche on eBay Pulse and was going to create a second ‘product’ lens to show you folks a few other little tricks.
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?
On to Day two of the Ebay Squidoo Challenge and I’m starting to pick up a little steam.
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!
