Be the Reader

Mike Goelzer
Entrepreneur
Palo Alto, California

Squidoo: How did you decide what to make your lens about?

Mike: I chose a topic that I believe many people might like to read a quick primer on, but for which there is currently no good starting point or introductory site. I have a theory that a lot of people hear financial terms like “exchange-traded fund” from their financial advisor or broker and don’t fully understand the term, but feel shy about asking. So they go home and go to Google and do a search, but right now what comes up is far too detailed for a normal person who just wants a straightforward introduction. Even the Wikipedia entry on “ETF” is very technical.

S: Do you maintain a web site or blog otherwise?

M: No, I don’t, actually. This gets into one of the things I really like about the Squidoo concept. To do a blog–a good one, anyway–would require an hour or more of work daily to keep churning out fresh material. In this case, I am more interested in publishing reference information to help investors learn about exchange-traded funds; because the basics don’t change frequently, this doesn’t quite fit with the blogging paradigm. Squidoo provides the perfect platform for what I want to do. I can maintain an up-to-date reference mini-site without the time burden associated with trying to blog about the topic.

S: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?

M: I found Seth’s advice about chunking and storytelling to be very useful. After I read that post, I completely deleted all of my lens modules and started over again from scratch. The second time around, I put myself in the shoes of my target reader–an individual investor who has heard the term “ETF” a few times but is still unsure about what it really means–and I thought carefully about (1) what information that person wants and (2) in what order she would want the story to unfold.