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Good evening,

TGIF! If you’re planning time this weekend to work on your lenses, take some hints from today’s lensmaster interview with David and Marta.

David and Marta are the team behind Rewards4life, and have been cranking out lenses about art, food, and nature for nearly two years. Get to know them, their passions, and learn how they’ve used Squidoo to express themselves.

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Squidoo: By reading your lenses, it’s obvious you’re not only knowledgeable, but passionate about teaching others. How did you take your “real life” passions and turn them into Squidoo lenses?

David and Marta: We both have a love for life, our work and also share many of the same interests (cooking, pets, writing, books and art, are but a few), which I think is one of the benefits we have, we can encourage each other to help them grow. When we discovered Squidoo we had initially wanted to use it for promoting our publishing business, but not long after creating our first couple of lenses we decided to use it to feature our other passions.

We are animal owners, food fanciers and nature lovers, so finding a place like Squidoo to express and share our knowledge in this way was perfect for us. Having interests which a lot of people enjoy too, helps us to continually look for ways and reasons to exploit our hobbies, now when we do things we plan how we can base a lens around it. We both share a love for Squidoo and have found it perfect for showcasing our real life passions as it has so many subject matters, you can create lenses on almost everything that interests you.

Squidoo: You sure can! We’ve seen such a variety of unique topics in your account. How have lenses helped you have more fun with these fav niches?

David and Marta: We founded our ebook business in Jan 2008, and not long after that we joined Squidoo. We were new to this social platform, and made every newbie mistake possible. But our goal was to share information on our business, and let people know who we were. Well, this is how it’s started. Thanks to Squidoo we managed to publish a few of our ebooks online, providing an ongoing “free read” for our customers.

Squidoo works so well with Google and other major search engines it has become our favourite and most powerful tool to use, it’s also the most enjoyable. It has such a versatile platform and gives you so much flexibility and control over your content and no real restrictions on topics. This means we can create lenses based on the products we sell as well as our other general interests. The keyword (tag) setting and discovery tool are paramount to anyone wanting to increase traffic to their lens and/or website, you can really target your audience and with the stats screen you can track how effective your lenses are.

When we learned more about Squidoo and it’s community, we decided to share our non-business interests with others. We have had fun with some of our hobby niches and created lenses on our pets, our holidays in Wales and as we love cooking we decided to create the Squidoo Recipe collection. This was a collaboration between us and other participating lensmasters to create the first Squidoo community cookbooks, which we published last year.

Squidoo: Ooh, we love freebies on Squidoo, and I heard the Community Cookbook was a hit!

Which are your favorite modules to use and why?

David and Marta: Here we are torn as we both love all and both favour different ones.
Marta loves the Text module, as it’s so versatile, it allows you to have complete control over how it looks and reads. You can add photos and links, format your text to the standard you wish it be. It’s just brilliant.

I (David) am a bit greedy as I can’t decide between the Text module (for the same reasons) or the promotional modules, Lulu and Zazzle are the ones we use most as they help to promote both of our stores. They are also customisable so you can select the content you want to display, this gives extra attention to detail so you can maintain the theme of your lens by displaying relevant content.

I also can’t wait until the music module is created as I write and produce my own music, this will give me the perfect excuse to share some of my songs.

Squidoo: Just in time for a cool surprise, we released the Yahoo music widget a few days ago. Many lensmasters want to know, “how are you successfully promoting your lenses?”

David and Marta: As we all know, social bookmaking and sharing sites are “a must”, we have profiles in Facebook, Myspace and Twitter as well as Tagfoot, Redgage and Gather. We have tried several places and do favour some over others depending on what we are promoting. We have found our niche groups, we participate in conversations and share our related Squidoo lenses.

We also use some free classifieds sites for our book promotion lenses. This gives us a broad range by covering many countries, cities and towns in a short space of time. We can then localise certain products by concentrating on areas which have shown previous interest.

Blogging is our other way of promoting lenses. You can share everything you create with all of your followers or you can create a specialised blog (like gardening or cooking) targeted to people with the same interests.

Squidoo: It sounds like you’re doing a lot of those authentic forms of promotion we love to hear about, including joining and actively participating in niche circles. What best tip do you have for other lensmasters building their niche lenses?

David and Marta: If you want to create a successful lens you first need to see how other people are doing it. And not only on Squidoo, everywhere on the web, there are so many professionals who will share their web design, web typography or SEO secrets for free. This is the best way to learn, you then need to find your own style. Be yourself and try to give your lens a personal, honest feel. We love to share and learn information about ourselves and others, when you read something it’s nice to see the affiliation between the information and the person writing it. It feels like you are sharing their experiences which makes what you are reading more believable, credible and enjoyable.

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You sure are right about that last statement. Thanks for all the work you do on Squidoo, David and Marta!

Be sure to visit their lenses to say hi and learn from their accomplishments. In fact, you can use this one to make a special Saturday morning breakfast treat.

Until next time…
~Kimberly Dawn Wells
YOUR Community & Charity Organizer

PS – want to be a SquidAngel?