7 Things I Ask Myself Before Creating A Lens

Below are the 7 questions I asked myself before/while creating my lens, BEARS: The 8 Wonders of the World.

1. What am I hoping to accomplish?
Raise awareness of the world's 8 bear species and raise money for Wildlife SOS.

2. Am I focusing on a singular sub-topic or giving an overview?
A brief overview / introduction of the 8 species.

3. How can I organize it to make it easy to navigate?
With only 8 bear species, it seemed logical to put the bears in alphabetical order.

4. How can I make it interesting?
Most people don't know the 8 species so I included their aliases (Brown Bear / Grizzly), photos and conservation status. I also added a Flickr slideshow and videos.

5. What do I want to link to?
I had already created more in-depth lenses on each of the 8 bear species so I linked to each of them. I also linked to organizations saving bears.

6. What can I sell?
I added bear Wildlife SOS's CafePress and Amazon books and bear gifts.

7. How much royalty do I want to give to what charity?
100% of the royalties goes to Wildlife SOS so I make sure I added a Donation Module.

Adding a guest book, some featured lenses, and a link to the Save Our Bears (SOB) Group made this a 5 star lens (in my opinion) right from the get-go. I have, of course, continued to update and add new items often.

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Do you build lenses in series?

Hello Valley of the Giants readers! Thanks for coming by the blog today to read what we have to say! My name is ThomasC, I wanted to talk to you today about making a whole series of lenses based on one general topic. Every since I found Squidoo, I have built series of lenses. I have covered Martial Arts Masters, Recipes, Rock Bands from past and present, Song Lyrics and Music Videos, Hot rods and Muscle Cars, and my latest Playmates of the Year and Playboy Models!

Building lenses in series has lots of benefits. I always use "Featured Lens" modules to link back and forth to my other lenses in the series, plus I use anchor text links in my text. If someone is interested in the Playmate of the Year for 2006, they may also be interested in the Playmate of the Year for 2005!
Plus, there is always wiki modules, flickr modules, google blog modules, youtube videos, and tons more of the modules that can used on all your lenses in the series, making the lenses pretty quick to build!

A lensmaster once showed me this lens about Snakes of Louisiana, and she asked me what she could do to make it better. I suggested she make more lenses about the specific types of snakes in Louisiana. Thats exactly what she did!
Kingsnakes of Louisiana
Cottonmouth Moccasin Snake

So go ahead, make that lens a series! Several lenses is better than just one!
I have a blog going with some more Squidoo tips if you want to read!

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My 1st Squid Birthday

On the 30th of January I celebrated my one year birthday on Squidoo.com I came to Squidoo from the Cafepress forums. Originally I was after some free backlinks for my cafepress stores. I created my first Squidoo lens about my Hotrod and Muscle Car cafepress store. My next month I created another 23 lenses, and had found out about the Giants program. I figured having 50 lenses was better than having 23, so I kept busy making other lenses! I haven't looked back since! On my one year birthday, I had 351 lenses sitting in my account! I have covered topics that I am interested in, like recipes, since I have spent most of my life as a cook, Martial Arts, Muscle Cars, Coin Collecting, and other various topics along the way!
So what did I do on my one year birthday? I bought a domain name and set up a website! I want to introduce to you... SquidBuilders.com

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