My First Squidoo Lens

I feel like I have already won as a behind-the-scenes participant of the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest.  I have networked with many different agents and have been introduced to some very popular blogs that I had seen before but never went back to - until this contest.

Add to that Nick's submissions and this is the most fun contest I've participated in with the REW community.  The best REW contest was the one I won!

And one more thing this contest has done for me is finally getting me to create a Squidoo Lens, something I heard about since it's inception and kept wanting to do, but just never did.  Until last night.

I Had No Idea What I Was Doing

Oh sure, I could figure it out as it's a simple interface.  But I wanted to do it right, not just slap a lens together.  So I spent hours going back & forth viewing other's lenses and trying to get ideas.  I'm still not sure how some of them are so fancy looking and I don't know how to use  html on the, wait, what is it called - be right back,  oh yeah, module.

So I spent over an hour creating what Squidoo says should have taken me 5 minutes.  It took me longer than that just picking and choosing the Flickr photos I wanted to use because using their random function just pulled up a bunch of pics of people partying, which was not the focus of the lens.

And I Still Don't Know Why I Did It

I remember when a lens was a great way to bring traffic and possible rankings to your other websites.  I also remember when Squidoo was hit with a penalty by Google and the lenses suddenly lost all value.  I don't know where they stand today as I've never found a lens in any searches I've ever done.

Besides networking with my fellow contest members to try to get our submission to climb to the top of Google and stay there, I don't see any long-term effect this lens will have on my main website. 

I Don't Know if I Did It Correctly

I tried not to make my lens real estate oriented, but more just community information.  Then I introduced my real estate website and blog by putting links and my blog's rss feed in.  Was that a good idea?  Should I just have made it real estate specific?

I Can't Imagine Anyone Finding These Lenses All That Interesting

Unless you sell property in very interesting locales, I simply can't see people that are part of Squidoo (the same way I feel about most social bookmarking sites) having much of an interest in a small local area, whether it's real estate related or simply community info.

I wrote a page about a popular southwest Chicago suburb, Tinley Park, that I'm working on ranking better in Google.  I didn't create a lens about towns or keywords I rank well for already.  I would assume that would be a waste of time, or I'm just not seeing the value in a lens.

My point is, I would much rather have people find my website, not my lens page.  And there's a much better chance they will find my site first, so why did I spend time creating this lens?

Do people really have nothing better to do than sit on the Squidoo site all day and night looking through other people's lenses?  Have they been burnt out on infomercials that much? 

Creating the Lens Was Only Half the Battle

And now that I spent the time creating the dang thing, I have to promote it.  Social bookmarking, getting friends to rate and lensroll it, throwing it some links...

Wouldn't that time spent be more productive going completely towards my website?

Knock Me Over the Head, Please

Do I have a mental block towards Squidoo?  What am I not seeing?  Is there something wrong with me (OK, don't answer that).  Please help me justify all that time spent and the couple hours of less sleep I got last night because of it (as I had to get up early this morning).

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