The new Lens Auction area is super easy to navigate, has an RSS feed for lenses currently for sale, and the listing process has been streamlined so it only takes a minute or so to list your lens for sale.

I’ve also removed all fees associated with buying or selling lenses. There are no final value fees or listing fees. There are a few options to ‘upgrade’ your listing if you wish but right now there aren’t a ton of lenses listed so you can get a lot of visibility just by creating a standard listing.

Both Auction style formats and fixed priced listings are available as well as free image uploading for uploading screenshots or whatever you would like.

Check it out and let me know what you guys think.

As a little bonus to try it out, I’ve got a stack of squidoo stickers here that I’m looking for a use for. The first 10 lensmasters to list a lens for sale at Sell My Lens this week and email me their address will have a free sticker waiting in their mailbox one day soon...

Here’s a screenshot for you:

Sell My Lens is definitely still a big part of my Squidoo strategy. I think it’s a great resource and it is slowly building momentum. I’m going to add a ton of lenses for sale on there in the next few days so if you are looking for some cheap, optimized lenses, keep an eye out.

Squidoo HQ announced the release of their next front door : Hey MonkeyBrain. This is a debate themed site where the magic build lenses are designed around two sides to an argument. I thought something like this might have been in the works, but the actual product turned out awesome! Mashable and Digg agree.

Sell My Lens is gaining some steam. Fluffanutta sold a set of lenses for over $100 this week. Pot Pie Girl’s post on her Squidoo Lensmaking for clients reminded me – If you have a service like that, feel free to post it as a classified ad on Sell My Lens!

New site on my radar -

Hurox (pronounced ‘who rocks’) – Could be very similar to Squidoo, entirely built on Ajax and VERY fast. Still in early Beta.

Promotion idea -

Dosh Dosh wrote an article last month with 40 of the highest quality social networking sites. As usual, it’s great link bait so I’m biting.

That’s all for this week – More Piratey Squidoo News next week…

Just add the RSS feed to your favorite lenses, or your RSS Feed Reader and you can be instantly notified when new lenses are listed for sale. Pretty nifty, huh?

Don’t Know what Sell My Lens is? Check out the lens on Buying and Selling Squidoo Lenses.

-The Captain

How it works -

Very similar to eBay, you can place listings for sale, offer Squidoo related services via Classifieds, or buy lenses from other lensmasters. Fixed Price, Buy it Now, and different auction lengths are all supported.

I’ve also got Paypal integration and Google Checkout should be coming soon.

Listing Lenses on the auction house is 100% free. There are some fees for Classifieds and listing Upgrades (bold, featured, etc.) as well as a 2% final value fee (which is less than a third of what eBay charges last I checked..).

I’m planning on starting an Adwords campaign to drive traffic to the site, so get your lenses up quick!

Special for Captain Squid Readers -

If you haven’t signed up for my Newsletter yet, go over to Sell My Lens and sign up from there. I’ll deposit $5 in fee credit in your account to play around with.

If you already HAVE signed up for my email, contact me and let me know your login to Sell My Lens. I’ll give you $5 for free also!

Questions? Let me know. Also let me know what you think of the site design.

-The Captain

Here’s my top five in no particular order:

• Sell My Lens – This site is a fee free auction marketplace to buy and sell Squidoo Lenses and URLs. With the recent Giant Squid activity usage has been a little low, but I expect it to pick up as Squidoo grows.
• Lensroll – N376 (Glen) has created an excellent Digg-type website to help promote Squidoo Lenses. Submit only your best lenses here and you’ll see a bit of a traffic boost from other users looking for great lenses.
• Squidoo Utils - This is a very cool advanced Dashboard created by Fluffanutta. You can track all of your lenses Page Rank, mass bookmark, Add your lenses to your favorites quickly, and get RSS feeds for your lenses or of your lenses.
• Squidoo Cool - This is a Blog run by Lewis Smile, another prolific lensmaster. He offers some good tips on different Squidoo aspects. His focus is on Social Bookmarking and Lens Promotion, two important areas. Lewis also builds custom lenses at Build My Lens.
• Dashboard Extender - This is a firefox plugin for Squidoo that allows your dashboard to show total visitors, average visitors per lens, earnings history, ratings history, and more. A very useful plugin for tracking your Squidoo Empire. Written by Magicality.

That’s all for today! Stay tuned for more great tips.

- The Captain