Laddoo is a Giant Squid

Yes. Finally. I have made it to Giant Squid.

What does Giant Squid mean to me?
Becoming a Giant was a massive inspiration towards building more and more lenses. Not just the number, but the quality of those lenses were important too. After a couple of gruelling months, with some excellent coaching from Team WiWon, I managed to complete those 50 lenses. It wasn't without any hiccups though. I had 34 lenses to build in those two months and I built only 10 in August. September however saw me through with as many of 19 of my lenses coming in the last week.

But all's well that ends well. The joy of seeing that mail in the Inbox at 5 am in the morning was even more exhilarating. I didn't think I would go for Club 100 in this quarter, but just seeing that purple badge make me want to do more. This will be tough quarter for me with my regular work peaking in December, but I am going to give my best shot.

Giant Squid Achieved. Time to go for Club 100!

How to Keep Visitors Glued to Your Squidoo Lens

 

One of the simplest tricks to keep visitors glued to your Squidoo Lens is to use beautiful pictures. Pictures not only draw attention to your lens but also help in breaking the monotony of the page. If you have too much text on the page, it helps if you could break down the text into separate text modules and insert a relevant image in between those modules.

Recent on WiWon team, we had some beautiful tutorials on how to use pictures in your lenses. Check out this lens by Lensmaster Stazjia on Using Pictures Effectively.

P.S - If you liked the above image, I've got to tell you this secret. I made that image in under 1 minute - online. Just visit http://www.imagechef.com and you can work up some beautiful images in a matter of seconds.

Wiwon Inter-group Olympics

This was a fun game before the Giant Challenge began. All groups on Wiwon were asked to add ideas for lenses to their team plexo. The team and the individual with the maximum ideas were to receive a wonderful badge.

I had a good time adding ideas to my team lens. That the last day of the challenge was a Saturday and I had nothing better to do at home did help a lot. In fact I added almost 700 ideas on the last day and bumped up my team score from just under 300 to just over a 1000.

Ofcourse, the timezone helped too. By the time, folks in the US got up to have their morning coffee and check the 8 am EST deadline, there was a gap of almost 500 ideas between my group and the group ranking second. Sure enough we won both the badges.

Here's my badge!

My Giant Squid Journey

I have finally decided to take the plunge seriously and go for Giant Status. In this quest I have joined this wonderful group led my one of my Mentor Lensmaster - Michelle Willow.

The name of this group is Willow's Wonder Squids and I am part of a subgroup - Mike's Maniacal Squids with Mike Moore as my Coach.

Its been only a couple of weeks and I have already built 5 new lenses, won two badges and got featured in Squidoo Spotlight.

Its been one hell of a joyride! I am proud to be one of Willow's Wonder Squids and I will surely make it to Giant by September 2009.