Lens Launch: Fantasy Baseball T-Shirts

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Buy at Art.comOpening day of baseball season is just over a month away. That means fantasy baseball players have started joining leagues and preparing for their drafts. A fun way to impress your league-mates is with a fantasy baseball t-shirt.

I searched through lots of different baseball shirts. This lens features the best and funniest that I found, including some shirts and onesies for the kids so they can share the fun with their parents. These t-shirts also make a cool gift for your favorite fantasy baseball player.

Image: “Mickey Mantle, 1956″, available at Art.com

Celebrating Six Years On Squidoo

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My Squidoo TrophiesYesterday was my 6th Squidiversary on Squidoo! Here’s a pic of the new 6 year trophy that appeared on my Squidoo bio page last night. I’m not sure if that’s a cake or a cupcake.

My Squidoo journey started as an experiment. I had no idea that I’d stick with it for six years. But I’ve had fun building lenses and learned a lot along the way. Making a little money helps, too. I wouldn’t have been able to invest this much of my time on Squidoo if not for the money.

Speaking of money, did you know that when Squidoo came out of beta, lenses made about 25 cents per month from the ad pool?

That was before the pay tiers were added. Now, a top tier lens gets over $50 from the ad pool payout. So Squidoo has grown at a strong rate. I’m looking forward to being part of Squidoo’s continued growth for (hopefully) many more years.

I was also reminded yesterday of how strong and helpful the Squidoo community is. That’s something that I’m glad has been a part of Squidoo since the early days.

To everyone who’s ever rated, liked, lens rolled, blessed, commented on, shared or just visited one of my lenses in the last six years…Thank You!

Catch of the Month: Toads in the Garden

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Each month I’ll feature a lens that I discovered while exploring Squidoo.

Toad in a potWinter is a good time to start planning your garden. There’s a long list of things to decide. What kind of flowers or vegetables to plant, where to plant them, when to plant them and where the toads will live are a few.

You read that last one right. Toads like to eat critters that eat your plants, so encourage them to hang out in your garden. How do you do that?

Read AnthonyAltorenna‘s DIY lens on how to build a toad house. It covers all the steps and material needed to build one for your garden. He’s included photos of his own toad houses and helpful info about toads. I think it’s also the first lens I’ve seen that mentions using wampum.

It’s a good, easy to follow how to guide on an unusual topic. Perfect combination for a Squidoo lens.

Making one of these sounds like a good project for the kids, too. I’ve got an old cracked terracotta pot that I’m sure my kids would love to decorate and turn into a toad house. Thanks for the idea and info, Anthony!

Image credit: champmankj75, used under Creative Commons License.

Plotting A Course For 2012

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USS McFaul transits through the Turkish Straits to Georgian aidIt’s a new year and time to plan where I want my Squidoo career to go in 2012. Every journey has an origin, so let’s start by reviewing my performance in 2011:

New lens production was way down last year with only 8 new lenses. That’s not good and well below my career average of 1.5 new lenses per month.

My Squidoo revenue grew 31% in 2011. Nothing like the 150% revenue growth in 2010, but still healthy. That figure only includes payouts from Squidoo, not outside affiliate programs (which are also growing).

I started Lens Harbor, the blog you’re reading now, to share my Squidoo experiences and knowledge. This is my first self hosted blog and I’m excited about it. I hope you find it helpful in your Squidoo journey.

Along with many other Giant Squids, I also became a Squid Angel, covering the Fantasy Sports neighborhood. A nice surprise at the end of 2011 was learning that one of my lenses was mentioned in a New York Times blog post! Never underestimate the value of writing good content.

While 2011 was a good year, the lens building and money making lost speed. To correct for this I’m setting some goals to keep me on course. Here are my Squidoo goals for 2012:

1. Have a total of 120 lenses by end of the year.
I’m at 96 now so this means an average of two new lenses per month. It’ll be a challenge but it’s realistic and necessary to kickstart my lens building. A by product of this goal should also be earning Giant Squid 100 status during the year.

2. Grow Squidoo revenue by at least 50 percent over last year.
Higher than last year’s growth but lower than my best year. It’s a reasonable growth target that I’ll hopefully exceed through a combination of more lenses, better promotion, overhauling some old neglected lenses and focused selling.

3. Maintain a consistent posting schedule on Lens Harbor.
When I started this blog, my plan was a post a week, not counting lens launches. That’s only happened in the first month. So two posts a month may be a more realistic goal for me since I also want to crank up my lens building. I have some cool ideas for this site and I’m looking forward to making them happen!

Have a fun and prosperous 2012!

Image Credit: simminch, used under Creative Commons License.

Lens Launch: Jet Age Review and Fantasy Football Trophies

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Two new lenses launched from the harbor in time to catch the last tide of 2011.

Buy at Art.comThe first is a book review of Jet Age: The Comet, the 707 and the Race to Shrink the World. The book covers the true story of the race to start flying jet powered airliners after World War II. It’s a great overview of the history of commercial aviation up to the early part of the Jet Age.

For readers who want to learn more, the lens includes some cool old videos I found featuring the Comet and 707, the two main aircraft in the book.

This season I won my second fantasy football championship! Unfortunately, that league doesn’t give its winner a trophy. For fantasy leagues that do, I put together a selection of fantasy football trophies. There are even some funny gag trophies for the losingest team.

These two bring my total to 96 featured lenses. I’m slowly getting to 100.

Have a happy New Year!

Benefits of Writing Good Content: It Gets Shared

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One benefit of writing good content is that your readers may want to share it. They’ll email it, like it on Facebook, Tweet it, or post a link to it somewhere. This has happened to several of my lenses and I’m always thrilled to see a new site show up in my Referrer stats. Usually, it’s from a forum or personal blog.

Other people sharing a link to your lens is good. It can generate traffic and helps you build credibility with the search engines. It’s even better when the link comes from a well known site.

This week I was surprised to find visitors coming to my how to play fantasy football lens from the NY Times website! It was an article on their Education blog about using fantasy football to teach quantitative analysis. They mentioned my lens as a good site for students to learn the basics of fantasy football. How cool is that?

That lens is nearly 6 years old and is one of my better lenses (my only LOTD). I invested a lot of time developing and writing the original content for it. And I continue to update it regularly. It’s cool to see that other people consider it helpful and worth sharing.

My lens building philosophy has long been to “build good quality lenses that interest you and that readers will find helpful and/or entertaining.” If a lens doesn’t inform, help or entertain a visitor, there’s no reason for them to share it.

So write good stuff.

Rethinking Costume Lens Strategy

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Costume lenses are popular on Squidoo…they’re fun to build and it’s rumored that they can make money. There are over 2,300 lenses with the tag “costumes” and probably many more that don’t use that tag. Only 7 of them are mine.

There are two styles of costume lenses:
1. Costume Catalog – A pictorial list of Amazon or affiliate links to costumes and accessories.
2. How To Make Your Own Costume – Step by step instructions and tips to craft a homemade costume.

Many costume lenses are a hybrid of the two styles. They offer a mix of how to info with costumes and accessories featured for sale.

Each style serves a different audience. Some people want to buy a costume and have no interest in making one. They’re looking for a catalog. Other people are do-it-yourself types, like to save money or want something unique. They want to build their own costume and are looking for instructions and tips.

My costume lenses so far are all in the catalog style. The only how to stuff is a few accessory ideas. Most were built to complement an existing non-costume lens. Colonial costumes for a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, caroling costumes for people planning a Christmas caroling party and so on. The others are costume genres I thought were cool.

I had fun searching for good costumes to feature on these lenses, but I didn’t enjoy writing them. It felt like writing a sales pitch vs. providing helpful info to readers. Writing helpful stuff is more fun. My costume lens ideas list is growing but I delay starting any more because I dread writing them.

This Halloween season I stumbled across a couple good how to costume lenses that got me rethinking my costume strategy. They are artvixn‘s Steampunk Costumes Made Easy (a former LOTD) and Nerd Costume Ideas by emmalarkins. Both offer quality tips based on personal experience (with photos to prove it). And they blend in Amazon modules where it makes sense. Now I’m inspired to think of how to build how to costume lenses.

Side note: If you were playing a variation of “Hi, Bob!” called “how to” when you started reading this post…you’d have a good buzz right now.

My wife and I do make costumes so I have experience. And I enjoy writing how to lenses. The challenge is the costume photos. Most costumes we make are for our kids and I don’t publish photos of my family on Squidoo. So I’d be making costume lenses without photos. Not a recipe for success.

How can I make my costume lenses more “how to” without posting photos of my family? A few ideas (please let me know if you have others) are:

  • Use a mannequin for pictures of the costume. I could probably find one on Craigslist. Not sure how readers would like pics of a costumed mannequin.
  • Take photos of the costume laid out on a table. Won’t pack the same punch as on a person but could be useful in small doses.
  • Add more ideas on personalizing store bought costumes. This could be a good starting point and improve the quality of my existing costume lenses.
  • Use Flickr pics of people in similar costumes. Might be tough to find good shots and I don’t like using close up pictures of people. Yeah, they’ve posted it online for all to see and granted CC license, but I don’t know if they really want to be a model on my lens.

Hopefully this will get me back into the costume lens making spirit. Eventually, I’d like to have a good mix of catalog and how to style costume lenses. There are people searching for both.

What are your thoughts on costume lens strategies?

Image Credit: zol87, used under Creative Commons License.

Catch of the Month: Delicious Dump Cake Recipe

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Each month I’ll feature a lens that I discovered while exploring Squidoo.

This month’s catch was discovered by my wife (who is not a lensmaster, despite my best efforts). She was recently at an event where she tried dump cake for the first time and loved it. Last week she went online, found the recipe and made one.

As we were enjoying the delicious cake she made, my wife told me there was a Squidoo lens on page one of the recipe search results that she visited and liked. Naturally, I was curious to see it…right after a 2nd serving of cake. The lens she found was Delicious Dump Cake Recipe by Susan52. It’s a good one and worthy of representing Squidoo on page one.

Susan does a nice job of providing the right amount of recipe related info. There are tips on making a bigger or smaller cake, ideas for recipe variations, a video and links to helpful products. My favorites were the apron and refrigerator magnets with the dump cake recipe on them. Brilliant idea.

This was the first time I’ve seen the recipe module in action (I haven’t visited many recipe lenses). The module looks clean and professional with a pic of Susan’s dump cake and a link to the printable version. Definitely make use of it for your recipe lenses.

Susan’s recipe is almost identical to the one my wife used. The key difference was shredded coconut…the dump cake my wife first tried had coconut and she wanted a recipe with it (maybe Susan will add it as a variation). We learned after making the first dump cake with 1 stick of butter that Susan’s recommendation to use 1 1/2 sticks is better. That’s how much we’ll use next time. Recommendations based on personal experience like that will help any lens stand out and add value for the reader.

The cake is delicious and the kids loved it. Maybe now I can convince my wife to build her own recipe lenses…

Image by Mac33

Lens Launch: Graveyard Ghoul Costumes

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BOO!

Did I scare you? Probably not.

Grave Ghoul Adult CostumeBut if I was haunting a graveyard on Halloween in a graveyard ghoul costume like this one, you’d be scared.

There are lots of costume lenses on Squidoo so it helps to put your own spin on a genre. Otherwise your lens gets lost in the crowd.

I chose graveyard ghouls because it complements my existing Halloween graveyard decoration lenses.

Add An FAQ Section To Your Lens

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One way to add more on topic content to your Squidoo lens is with a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. Providing an FAQ helps visitors who may be looking for the answer to a specific question on your topic.

Where can I get ideas for FAQ questions?
Watch your lens stats for questions in the search terms. If someone is looking for an answer, it’s likely that others are, too. Adding the question to your lens helps the search engines know you have the answer. All of the questions in the FAQ section at the bottom of my fantasy football commissioner guide lens came from search stats. (A bonus of doing this is that you may find search terms that spawn ideas for new lenses to build.)

You might also find questions in your guestbook comments. Another way is to look at the lens from a visitor’s perspective and think of questions you would have about the subject. The cool thing is that you can add to the FAQ over time as you brainstorm or find new questions.

Where do I get the answers for these questions?
Write your own original answers. You’re the expert that wrote the lens so this should be the easy part.

What Squidoo modules are good for an FAQ?
The Text List and Text modules are naturals for an FAQ. They look good, the content gets crawled by the search engines and you have formatting options. When using either module, I like to put each question in bold so it stands out.

What types of questions should I add?
Only feature questions that complement your lens topic. If the FAQ list gets too long, consider building a new lens that covers a subset of the questions and point readers to it.

Any other FAQ tips or ideas?
Another option is to write most of your lens content in a natural question and answer format. Phrase the module title in the form of a question then answer it in the body.

If you have a lot of lenses in a niche, you could build one lens that’s the FAQ for all of them. Each lens in the niche would link to it and the FAQ lens would link back to the other lenses in its answers.

Experiment with different formats and have fun adding an FAQ to your lens! Let me know what you discover.

Image credit: Steve, used under Creative Commons License