Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

The easiest way I can figure to build a lens like this with multiple lens authors and only a single lensmaster logging into the account is by using plexos.

Each other creates a plexo with the information they are responsible for on an existing lens or on a new ‘throwaway’ type lens.

From there the lensmaster that actually owns the account for the group lens can add each plexo to the lens.

By doing this, the ‘author’ of each individual plexo has control over their content and can change it whenever they need to but only one person has access to the Squidoo account.

Thoughts? This is a bit of a work in progress but I like the possibilities…

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.

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?

The Real Facts about Plexo Modules:

1. Votes are pooled across all versions of the plexo. If you grab a plexo module from one lens and drop it on another, votes on either lens will add to the vote count on every lens that plexo is on.
2. The Lens Owner earns Plexo Revenue. After checking and double checking the Amazon Associates IDs on the plexos, I’m almost positive that the owner of the lens that the plexo sits on generates the Amazon revenue.
3. Plexo Modules are Evergreen. Plexo Modules are indexable by the Search Engines.

Now, for a long time I thought that Plexos could be useful on Squidoo if you had a really viral list or something but for the average user they just didn’t have the user base to really do anything cool. In fact, I often see Plexo modules out there in Squid Land all by themselves looking lonely. Unless those lonely plexos are on a superstar lens getting thousands of hits a week (and some are) there simply are not enough visitors, much less other squidoo users who are going to come ‘grab’ your plexo. This method of ‘build a plexo and leave’ just doesn’t work that well. Sure, you get some benefit from it, but it’s not super duper cool.

However, unlike most of Squidoo that pulls data from other sources for the visitor to read, Plexos both pull (from Amazon, your list, YouTube, etc.) as well as push (votes, links to your lensmaster page) data around Squidoo.

I can think of a few ways that this can actually be super powerful and has been way under-utilized. I think I’ll save some of my thoughts for my next issue of the Captain Squid Newsletter

Plexos: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em ?

It basically pulls a 5 item plexo list from Amazon with items that are ‘related’ to the item you give the module to start with.

Why this is awesome:

• More SE friendly instant generated content.
• Adds a great ‘exit path’ for visitors to your product themed lenses that may want to look at something else.
• They round off the end of a lens well.
• I think they are easier to edit than the classic Amazon Plexo module

Throw some up on your lenses and let me know how they do!

-The Captain

Here are the Captain’s Top 3 Tips for Plexos:

1. The YouTube Plexo can hold up to five full length videos. (a’la SquidVids) This means there is absolutely no reason you should send visitors away from your lens to watch a video anymore. Let them watch the videos on your lens and save the clickout for something that could make $$$.
2. The Amazon and YouTube Plexos will Auto Populate. This is a huge improvement over prior builds. Now you can auto populate a list to get it started and let it take on a life of its own.
3. You can use other people’s Plexos as your own. I’m debating grabbing some of my favorite SquidVids lens video Plexos to create my own lenses of unique video combinations. (ex. Nickelback + Hinder + Finger 11 = Alternative Rock Videos Lens – Instantly! Just add Money Makers… )

The Two things you should Not do with Plexos:

1. Plexos let you create short bursts of focused content instantly. Don’t ruin it by having plexos with more than 5-10 items in them. If the entire screen is full of plexo, I’ll usually just move on and stop reading the lens.
2. �Don’t forget you can add content in the box in the plexo. I see a text/write module lead into a plexo all to often. By adding the content to the body of the plexo, it separates the listing from the title, giving it a little more emphasis. Plus, it’s different than what everyone else does so it catches your eye-patch.

-The Captain