Image courtesy Noadi—noadi.net through Creative Commons License.
The Squidoo Greetbox is one of the latest features introduced by Squidoo. This is what I love about Squidoo- their NSI approach - Never Stop Innovating. They are on the constant lookout to make Squidoo better and better each day.
The Squidoo Greetbox is another of its masterstrokes to combat spammers or irrelevant content. The way this is going to work is - visitors who are not logged on to Squidoo will be shown 3 related lenses that they could visit if the lens that showed up was not relevant. This could be both a boon and a bane to lensmasters. If the lens in the greetbox is more visually appealing - the user might click onto that lens, while I have done all the SEO hardwork to bring the user to my lens. It probably means that we as lensmasters will have to be more careful about both the content and the look of our lenses to keep visitor stay put on our page.
But ofcourse, if you participate in the venture - (oh yes, you have to opt-in on the Discovery Tab in the Intro Module), you can potentially benefit from having your lens featured on other related lenses.
To sum up, I think it is atleast worthwhile to explore and start experimenting whether this is working for your lenses.
So while I am off to switching on the Discovery feature on my lenses, you can go and check out the original post on the Official Squidoo Blog
I'm very interested to see how this goes. I've actually had a few visitors to one of my lenses through the Discovery tool lately that actually clicked on affiliate links. Almost better results than my lens gets on its own! But I probably have lenses on the other side of the fence, too. Eek...going to watch intently. :)
ReplyDeleteWell I guess, the key here is to experiment and see what lenses this might work well for. Tracking and analysing the stats is going to be of paramount importance. Good luck to you!
ReplyDeleteI dislike that feature strongly and yet I like it. It would have been better if those discovery things were to the side so that if the lens the visitor is reading is not catchy enough to hold their interest in the beginning then the visitor have the option of scanning the page and clicking the other lenses. But where it is to the top..ugh..
ReplyDeleteI got my first surprise today from a visitor on another affiliate lens but today was also when I discovered the discovery tool.
I wanted to see how my lens looked and could you imagine the surprise I got? Seeing all those lenses above my lenses made me start hating Squidoo right away but thanks to you I know how to turn it off before I stormed off to squidoo with my complaint