Gift Ideas Social Marketing Community

Social Networking

Gift Ideas Community

A bunch of us from Squidoo and other places in the gift ideas niche have teamed up together to form a social marketing community to share our best gift ideas. Basically group HQ is our social hub that connects our outposts on G+, FB, Tumblr, Pinterest etc.

Because it's getting more and more difficult for the little guy to run with the big dogs online, there's more of a need than ever to form a tight active team to compete. Nowadays it's difficult to impossible for a single webmaster working on his/her own to rise to the top like cream.

Great gift ideas too!

Are you invested in the gift ideas niche? The Gift Metropolis Community just might be for you, and it's Squidoo friendly too! Join other good webmasters in getting more socially active and come share not only your resources but re-sharing, commenting on the best gift guides at the community from other members too, no schwag or spam please. Riff Raff spammers will be banned.

Once approved gift community members may share ideas with our gift ideas community on Google's new social network G+. Sharing gifts with the group may positively effect your Authorship authority at Google.  We also have an active gift ideas group community at Facebook and once approved for membership you can post your favorite gift ideas with the group. We also recommend sharing your gift ideas on our Tumblr featuring gifts for everybody. And of course we have a very nice gift ideas group over at Pinterest too.

Gift Ideas Community

Still reading? You must be interested, so please come over and take a look at our main base of operations which we call Gift Metropolis HQ. We have a nice gift ideas forum, cool social groups, and of course a gift ideas directory. I think your going to like it. If you decide you like it, and you agree to not only share your stuff but to generously share the gift ideas of other members also then please apply for membership, it's free.


Gift Metropolis

Evolution of a Lens: Deli Sandwiches

When I was asked to make a food lens during my one RocketMoms experience, I went into a panic. I'd never made a food lens before. In fact, I have a very spotty relationship with cooking issues as one might detect from reading my fear of cooking lens.

Making a lens about food sounded frightening, at best.

At the time I'd recently lost a restaurant job - one I'd been at for eighteen months. Though cooking at home had been problematic for me, especially in my early youth, I loved cooking at the restaurant. One thing I loved was the opportunity to work on deli sandwich making.

I decided to make my lens on how to create a great deli sandwich.

I wasn't expecting much to come of it.

The lens looked good, I passed that part of the Rocket Moms challenge, and pretty much forgot about it.

Months later I noticed the deli sandwich lens was rising in popularity and lensrank.

Who would have guessed?

The lens went live in August 2009. By September the lensrank was 25,081. I expected it to stay there and be a non-prospering lens, but no... it has never gone that low since then. Only a year later it had its highest lensrank ever: 665.

Since then the lens has floated around in lower-first tier or second tier. Usually second. I've tried to backlink it but so far my efforts haven't succeeded in making it a steady first tier lens.

So far this month it has been in first tier two out of twenty-seven days. It is a borderline lens I very much want to see do better.

With lifetime earnings, so far, of $452, I'm very grateful that I took that Rocket Moms challenge on, and made my first food lens. That's more than I could earn writing an article about deli sandwiches for a major New York women's magazine!

...

LindaJM is a Squidoo lensmaster and owner of The Squid Grotto.

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.

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!

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