Take Time to Save Time
Jenny Abney
Product Manager, Titus
Plano, Texas
Squidoo: How did you decide what to make your lenses about?
Jenny: I read about Squidoo on Seth's blog and signed up at the begining of the year. It took weeks to figure out what my lens would be. I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what I was an "expert" about. I was originally going to claim a lens, so I was searching through Squidoo looking up lens topics I am interested in when I came to tea. It's something I like and know about and seemed like it would be a good "starter" lens for me.
S: Do you maintain a web site or blog otherwise?
J: I created a blog on Typepad after I signed up on Squidoo, but I posted my first posting a couple days before I created Tea Junkie. The blog talks about my lens and vice versa. I recently started The Fake Stat lens and have seen a lot of hits to my blog come from the lens.
S: What have you done with your lenses that you can't do elsewhere?
J: The Uncommon Wisdom for Women lens is exactly what I think Squidoo does that I could not do anywhere else. I am interested in women's health, safety, etc. I volunteered in the past, but just don't have time to do that anymore. Women's health information can be found all over the web, but not in one place. You had to go to one site for heart disease information, another for cancer, another for safety, etc. Other sites are too broad in scope. I like iVillage, but you can get information overload there.
Squidoo allowed me to put all of the topics in one area without the clutter of other topics (makeup tips, etc). Plus, the built-in community of lensmasters would give the lens much more traffic then I could get on my blog.
S: Have you taken any cues from other lenses so far?
J: I think that I have taken something (either learned something or gotten an idea about a module) from most of the lenses I have visited. The One lens is what got me thinking about doing a women's issues lens.
S: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?
J: Keep the lens current. If you don't show interest in your lens, others won't either. My friends think I scour the web for tea news, but I actually use Google news alerts and RSS to bring news to me (now everyone knows my secret). These types of tools save time.
Try different modules and use descriptions and images when you can. I got two friends into Squidoo and we learn from each other now. We also talk about the lenses with our friends all the time. My friends will say, "Hey, you're number 6!" Keep it on people's minds and market your site.
It would be very helpful if Squidoo had a spell checker. I am always fixing typos, so I recommend that people write the text offline and spell check before posting.
