Writing up a project for squidoo: The Day of the Deerfence

I've been thinking about writing about my marathon couple of days erecting a deer fence around 1550 feet of my property, but I finally got to it yesterday and finished at 2:30 am! Here it is: Build your own deer fence.

It was fun re-living the experience, going back in my mind and remembering what tools and equipment I needed and how I'd researched the project. Research wasn't quite as easy eight years ago. Now practically everything you need is on Amazon so I loaded the lens with Amazon spotlight modules and used the "description" text box to describe the way I made the fence.

Do you have deer problems? Maybe this would help!

Footed Pajamas For Adults: Now a Website!

Dear Fellow Squid Giants: Are you still focusing all of your time making Squidoo Lenses? Have you thought about creating your own websites to market your products?

As some of my fellow squidooers know, I have a popular lens about footed pajamas for adults. My Footed Pajamas For Adults Lens has been quite successful, selected as lens of the day and voted by my fellow squidooers as best marketing lens of 2008.

Recently I have taken the next step and have created a website, The Footed Pajamas Shop, dedicated entirely to footed pajamas. The new Footed Pajamas Shop has not only footed pajamas for adults but also footed pajamas for the entire family. The new Footed Pajamas Shop is still in its early days, but I can tell you it was REALLY easy to make it; just as easy as making a Squidoo Lens. I plan to tell you all about it soon.

I have many plans for developing the Footed Pajamas Shop. And in the days ahead, I will be posting about my experiences of creating and developing my new footed pajamas website. I will tell you what is working and what is not working. I also hope that you will give feedback concerning my footed pajamas website with ideas about how to improve it.

Do I plan to stop making Squidoo Lenses?? No way. Squidoo will always be a part of my online marketing campaigns. In the days ahead, I will tell you why.

What can you do?
* Have a look at The Footed Pajamas Shop and make suggestions for improvement
* Ask questions about developing The Footed Pajamas Shop which I can address in my upcoming posts
* Post about websites that you are creating and what you have learned
* Post about how Squidoo is fitting into your online marketing plans.

More SEO and Marketing advice

I have been outgrowing my blog at squidtop for a while, but it took someone asking me to create an e-book to go and create my own blog about SEO and online marketing. The result is my Marketing Spiritual a blog about Online marketing with spiritual integrity.

The most popular posts there so far are:

• What I just did to get 5% more traffic to my squidoo lenses... 
• Search Engine Marketing Basics - 5 SEO Techniques 
• and the controversial: Tweaking the title tag for SEO 

The free online marketing e-book itself has also been downloaded a whole lot already. 

The e-book is basically the information from my SEO and Keyword research lenses, plus the most important content of my blogposts about SEO and online marketing, plus the basics about online publishing in general.

A great to use Squidoo: learn as you go, and document.

Here's another reason I love Squidoo: it gives me a second motivation when I'm thinking about launching a project.

For instance, not too long ago I got very interested in giant puppets, and went to see a local show given by the Paperhand Puppet Intervention troupe, and thought it would be a fun thing to do with my young friend Jeimy (I'm a mentor through the Blue Ribbon Mentor Advocate Program: here's a lens about mentoring).

It seemed like a lot of work, though, and I might have sighed and not done it, but then I thought: "Oh, I could take photos of the process and make some lenses!" and so I did.

While I was on that kick, I thought about the song I sing with my musical partner Bob Vasile (we're the Pratie Heads British Isles fiddle tunes and songs duo). The song is about that blood-thirsty villanous puppet Punch and his antics; I made a lens about Punch and Judy so I could put our song on it and that got me started learning how to cast a plaster mold for paper-mache heads. I love paper mache. And that got me into a series of paper-mache heads for Halloween!

One more example... about twenty years ago when I was just starting to direct an a cappella vocal ensemble (the Solstice Assembly), we made a Skylark Productions recording called Three Log Night: Uncommon Music for the Holiday Season. I made a songbook to go with it. Twenty years later, I still get emails ordering the cd and songbook! So I decided to re-issue both, mainly because I could also make a lens about them: A Christmas Songbook.

Sometimes - you need a reason to get up and do something. The happy prospect of making a lens has often spurred me to get something done.

New blogger says hello, and: Why *I* love Squidoo (part one)

Hello friends (taps microphone to see if sound system is working) -

Thanks, Gene, for inviting me to join your Valley here... here's one of the reasons I love Squidoo:

I'm using Squidoo as a filing cabinet of my interests. And when I learn something new, I make a lens about it.

So, now, when I'm trying to remember how to use Yahoo pipes to format an rss feed - instead of digging around my messy desk for the notes I took when I first figured it out, I just look at the lens I compiled as I was learning!...

Same with using the "Wimpy Player" to put music on a lens. It takes about 17 clicks to do it, and I'd have forgotten how by now - except I wrote it up in a lens, so now I can look it up any time I forget ...

I was given a miniature horse in partial exchange for building a website for the best divorce mediator in Greensboro, NC - and people kept asking me about him (the horse, not the divorce mediator) and wondering if he's actually a Shetland Pony - so I looked the matter up online and wrote a lens about it!

I loved the wattle-and-daub houses I saw in Bulgaria and England and wondered about them, so I looked them up and found a bunch of good pictures - and wrote a lens about them. Now, everything I know about wattle and daub is in one place.

Do you use Squidoo this way?

I'm Chapel Hill fiddler, and you can see all my Squidoo lenses here.

Your Ten Most Recent Lenses

I'm issuing a challenge to all lensmasters. I would like to see lenses that list your ten most recent lenses.

The reason for this is simple. I often look through the lensmaster bio pages, trying to figure out what lenses are new. As of today, there's no way to tell. However... if you make a lens that lists only your newest lenses, and list that as one of your "Featured Lenses" on your bio page, then it will be easy for others to find them.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I make a new lens, I want the world to know! Sometimes it takes days for those new lenses to get any attention at all. Well, having a list of ten new lenses would make it easier for people to find your fledgling creations.

Today I created Ten New Lenses by LindaJM, and wrote about it in SquidU, asking people to make a similar lens then leave their link on that thread. I also offered use of my graphic, included here. You can use it at will, or create another that is more to your liking.

Places to blog about squidoo

Blogging about squidoo on a free blog usually has this disadvantage: you may get your blog removed for linking only to one domain. For about a year there has been squidtop. Now there's also crabbysbeach.

So far some familiar people are blogging at crabbysbeach: AJ blogs about green lenses, luvmyludwig blogs about squidoo anniversaries, I'm doing more tributes to squidoo lensmasters and calendars.