Cool New Plexo Tool on Squidoo

It's called an embeddable plexo, a tool that allows you to grab a plexo from your lens and share it on your blog or website.

Like this one (from this lens):

Add Your Romantic Valentine's Day Decorating Ideas for the Bedroom

Cool?  Yeh, I'd say so!

Read more about it right here then let me know how you might use this fun feature.

Ask and You Shall Receive

Thanks to the lensmasters who are making their intro pictures 250x250 square.

You make my life so much easier!

xoxo

February Greetings & Goal Review Time

Happy February everyone! 

I hope Punxsutawney Phil's forecast holds true for all of us and we have a nice, early Spring.  It's a beautiful day here today, nice and sunny with temps that aren't bad for February.  I don't mind winter when it looks this nice!

I just reviewed the list of goals that I wrote at the end of December.  Some are going well, but I'm behind on others and need to make some adjustments this month as well as do some catching up.  How about you?  Have you reviewed your goals for the month and year?  It's a good time to measure progress and re-focus if necessary.  I'd love to hear how others are doing.

If you have lenses that need some love, feel free to post them on my Facebook page. There's a thread started for helping WIP lenses get out of the basement so add yours anytime then visit someone else's to pay the love forward this month.

Time to update Spring lenses, too, and Squidoo has a pretty green theme for Gift Guide lenses categorized for St. Patrick's Day and Easter.

So, what's new with you this fine February?  Care to share?

Image Source

Squidoo Springs Into the Green

Just in time for Easter and St. Patrick's Day (not necessarily in that order - actually in just the opposite order) Squidoo has unwrapped a new cover for Celebrate magazine - and this time it's in the green!

For all of our St. Patrick's Day and Easter gift guide-categorized lenses, you'll now see those with a fresh and pretty green background (the picture here shows just a hint).

If you want your spring holiday-seasoned lenses to appear in Celebrate, just re-categorize them in a Gift Guide category for either of those two holidays and your lens will end up looking a whole lot like this one.  (Unless you opt out, which you can do in your lens workshop.)

Bet I can find a few more of my lenses that would fit into those categories.  How about you?  Feel free to drop a link in our comments section below!

Exploiting Shirley

I have a couple of Shirley Temple lenses on Squidoo so when I read late last week that 84-year-old Shirley Temple had just joined Twitter, I was thrilled!  I started following the account immediately.  Her posts so far were adorable and I was excited to be able to include them on a Twitter Follow module on one of my lenses.

Then, over the weekend, I (thankfully) happened to read that Twitter was duped.  Shirley Temple Black's spokesperson said she is not on Twitter.  I checked the account and, indeed, while the URL was the same and included Shirley's name, the identification and information on the account now belonged to a scumbag marketing company that shall remain nameless.

The great news is that today the Twitter account no longer exists.  But I'm still fuming, just a little, that someone would exploit a public figure the way they did.  I should have been suspicious (and I was, a little) that Shirley hadn't included her married name in the account.  She's gone by that name for many, many years and the "Shirley Temple" did have a slight exploitative ring to it.  The other good news is that the Twitter Follow module on the lens where I added it didn't work, and didn't display, so I wasn't responsible for leading any of its 10,000 or so followers to that bogus account.

As far as I'm concerned, Shirley Temple Black is a national treasure and I sincerely hope that the person who used her name will be caught and punished, but I can't imagine that will really happen. I'll just be even more cautious than usual in the future and not assume that just because a Twitter account says "verified," that makes it so.

Rant over.

Wow! It's Wednesday!

Just realized that it's Wednesday, halfway through the week already.  Wow, time flies when I'm having fun!

It's also the 16th of January, already halfway through the first month of the new year.  I started the year feeling very "up" and ambitious, ready to set goals and meet them head-on.  So, I just pulled up the notepad file I made titled "goal notes" to see how I'm doing.  (To be honest, I was a little bit afraid to look.)

Not bad, really.  A few extra-strong points and one or two weak ones, but overall not looking bad for 50 percent of the way through the month and 4 percent through the year.  I see how I need to adjust my focus and I'll be working on that.  Definitely see that if I'm going to finish them, I need to spend more time dispersing those lenses that have fallen so low in lensrank.  (Yep, one of those weak points.)

It really does pay to assess goals periodically.  Have you looked at yours lately?  How are you doing?

Squidoo is In the Pink!

Welcome to Valentine's Day on Squidoo!  Yep, no time like the first week of January to get started on those Valentine's lenses!  (Here's one of mine.)

Have Valentine pages to update?  When you do, consider adding them to the Gift Guide category and choosing a Valentine's Day topic.  That choice will give you the gorgeous pink and red Celebrate theme, just released for Valentine's Day.  I love seeing Squidoo in the pink!

Unsure about joining Celebrate magazine?  Would 3.7 million pageviews over Christmas sway you?  It's up to you, but there are advantages to including your lenses in the magazine.  When you do, make sure you've updated each Valentine's lens with a great, square intro photo as well as a nice, big picture in the body of the lens to give it a better chance of being featured on Celebrate's front page.

What's your favorite Valentine's Day lens?  Feel free to share it in a comment below or on Susan52 on Squidoo's Facebook page. 

XOXOXO, everyone!

Resolved: Become a Better Writer

Happy New Year!  Wow, seems like only yesterday we wondered if the power would still be on when we crossed over into the year 2000.  Now, going into 2013, all we have to worry about is falling off a fiscal cliff.  But that's a topic for another day (and another blog).

Did you read the Hello January post on SquidooHQ today?  In it I mentioned seven things to do this month and to keep in mind throughout the new year.  One of those things has to do with working outside your comfort zone in order to become a better writer.  A day or two after I wrote that, I happened upon this from the Writer's Don't Cry section of Amazon's Omnivoracious blog.   The article includes 10 resolutions for writers, things you can do this year to hone your craft. Idea number five, to exercise your writing, expands more on the practice of writing outside your comfort zone.  Looks like I was onto something with my similar suggestion!

If you're a writer (and if you're a lensmaster, you are a writer) and want to improve your writing skills, give that article a read.  The "comfort zone" topic really resonated with me and I'd love to know which of the 10 tips speak to you.  Would you let me know in a comment below?

Here's wishing each of us a happy, healthy, and productive 2013.  May each of our lenses be better written and more successful than the ones that came before!

Using the Black Box Themes on Squidoo

Want the "black box" modules on your lenses to coordinate with the lens's theme?  Now, in one simple step, it can!

Just edit your "black box" module and choose "theme" instead of a color.  When the lens is published, the black box background will coordinate with the lens theme itself. 

I've done this on several of my lenses and just love how it looks.  Today I updated a lens using the "clouds" theme and updated the black boxes on that lens.  Love how they look and wanted to share one here just in case you haven't tried doing this yet.  Isn't it pretty?  (You can see it on the lens here.)

Have you used the "theme" option for black boxes on your lenses?  Which is your favorite?

Merry Christmas from Susan52

Wishing all of my Squidoo friends a very Merry Christmas.

I hope your holiday is filled with fun and family - 

and Jesus, whose birth we celebrate!

Image Credit

New Year's Resolution: Re-Balance the Scale

It's really hard to believe that Christmas is just a few days away. It's been a nice holiday sales season and I'm not looking forward to watching the volume of Squidoo visits and sales start dropping like Santa's tired elves on December 26th.

I do have a couple of lenses that I'm counting on for after-Christmas shoppers, though, then there's the New Year's resolutions crowd and I'm hoping to profit from that as well. Valentine's Day will be next. After that, Easter will be here before we know it, then summer, then we'll start preparing for Christmas all over again. Say it with me: Time flies when you're having fun!

This year has been different for our family. We spent the first few months building a new house and the next several months getting it furnished and settling in. With all that we've had going on for the last year and a half, my concentration has been on family. And you know what? It's been nice! But now it's time to get back to business.

For me, it's time to re-balance the priority scale. Family will always be first, but I'm looking forward to having some time freed up again to dedicate to the online things that I love. Over the next several days I'll be reassessing, setting goals, and making lists and plans for 2013. It's been a very, very good year, but it's time to move on. I can hardly wait!

How about you? Have you made any New Year's resolutions? Feel free to share your thoughts and goals.

Image used via a Creative Commons license

25,000th Poll Response

I just got this message (along with 200 points) from Squidoo: "Someone just took the 25,000th poll created by you!"  Woo-hoo!

(Wish I'd have grabbed a screen shot of the message, but here's a screen shot of the poll.)

The poll that put me over the 25,000 mark is this one, on my popcorn popper reviews lens. What really impressed me when I took a look at the poll is that there are twice as many responses to the poll as there are Squidlikes on that lens. What does this tell me? A few things:

1. To Squidlike a lens, you have to be a Squidoo member. Any reader can participate in a poll - and in this case since there are far more poll responses than likes, it's clear that non-lensmaster readers are participating.

2. I wrote this poll to get an idea of why people are visiting the lens. Do they already know what popcorn popper they're looking for or do they want more general information? Nearly one-third of the visitors answer that they don't know what kind of popper they want yet (that's why they're on the lens) while just under 3% choose the "Just passing through" option. Not scientific, but rather interesting.

3. The poll is placed near the top of the lens, a place where you really can't miss it, but it isn't terribly intrusive or in the way of the main information. People do continue reading after they answer the poll (based on the fact that the lens does make sales). Had I put a "Did you find what you were looking for?" poll at the end, I wouldn't expect nearly as much participation.

4. The poll is worded well enough that people don't have a difficult time choosing an answer. Sometimes I see a poll on a lens and there's no clear choice for me or I have to think too hard to choose an answer, so I skip it. It's good to have a choice for everyone, even if the final choice is "Other."

It really is important to engage your readers and a poll is a good way to do that. I appreciate that readers take a minute or so to read the choices and register their vote. The lens does make sales, but I'd like to see the click-through rate go up a bit. I'll be watching to see how the stats change with the holiday shopping season getting into full swing.

How do you use polls? Do you think they add value to your lenses? I'd love some input on the subject.

Don't Forget Thanksgiving!

It's November 1st and already the online atmosphere has switched from the orange and black of Halloween to the red and green, chestnuts roasting on an open fire feel of Christmas.  Amazon has opened its Black Friday deals store.  Walmart has countered with its Gift of the Day and Ultimate Online Specials.  Gift shopping season is underway!

But don't forget Thanksgiving!

As you're creating your Celebrate gift guides (and I hope you're doing that) feel free to add a Thanksgiving-focused lens or two or three.  Thanksgiving may not be a huge money-maker, but there are plenty of people out there who need new turkey platters, table linens, fresh side dish recipes, cute Thanksgiving outfits for baby, and more. 

Think about how your family prepares for and celebrates Thanksgiving and turn some of those things into lens ideas.  Your audience may not be huge (although you might be surprised) but if it's targeted very specifically, your attention to this almost forgotten holiday may pay off for you in a good amount of traffic and hopefully even some nice Thanksgiving sales.

What comes to mind when you think of Thanksgiving?  Have you made a lens about it?

Spode turkey platter available here.

How to Lose Followers on Pinterest

Please don't hijack the Pinterest home page.  Sheesh!

I follow quite a few people on Pinterest, but how irritating when one of those people pins and pins and pins, taking nearly every spot on the home page.  It's easy to tell it's one person, too, just by the similarity of the pins.  Makes it very tempting - and quite easy - to click their "Unfollow all boards" link.

If you want to keep your Pinterest friends, just pin a little bit at a time.  Then go back later and pin a little more.  Be courteous!

Please? 

(Getting off the soapbox now.)

P.S.  Wondering how this is related to Squidoo?  Pinterest is a fabulous place for finding cool stuff, including cool lenses.  I hope you're (judiciously) pinning your best lenses there for others to find. 

Why It's Okay to Make a Sales Lens

It isn't unusual for new lensmasters to worry about making "sales" lenses.  I know because I was one of those people who just wasn't sure why anyone would want to listen to me telling them what's best to buy. 

But I was looking at the subject the wrong way.  When I turned it around and put myself in the position of the shopper rather than the seller, then I remembered how appreciative I am, when I'm shopping online, to find a legitimately good product review or gift guide. 

When my outlook changed, then I became comfortable recommending products to people.  While I've made my share of awful lenses with product after product (the type of lenses that don't deserve the trust of a shopper) I finally learned to be a product reviewer, a personal shopper, a gift guide author who provides great customer service - instead of a salesperson who really doesn't care.

So if you're worried about making a "sales" lens, make a gift guide lens instead.  Research the products you present, anticipate and answer shoppers' questions, and provide a much-needed service.  This year the number of online shoppers is projected to be even higher than last year's huge number.  No doubt many of those folks will be looking for information so they can make good buying decisions.  Be their personal shopper.  Write your gift guides with real people in mind.  Pretend you're shopping with your best friend, providing advice and expert information to help her choose the best gifts.  Picture her smiling in the checkout line knowing that you, the Gift Guide, helped make her shopping - and buying - experience a good one.

Now, isn't that a great feeling? 

For more information, read 5 Tips for Creating a Niche Gift Guide.