Valley Of The Giants

Are you a Giant Squid? Are you looking for a new way to promote your lens and to participate in the Squidoo community?

You can contact me and apply to become a member of the Valley of the Giants Blog. Membership is limited. Only 100 Giant Squids can participate. For more information read below.

The Vision

It is easy to create a blog. It not so easy to create a successful blog, that is, a blog that brings ongoing value to its authors and to its readers. You have to promote your blog to build the PR. But even more challenging you have to constantly feed it fresh, unique and valuable content to keep your readers interested and coming back for more. If you get very busy and there is a long break in your posting, you risk losing your readers.

The idea behind Valley of the Giants, is in a way, similar to the idea of Squidoo; that is to harness the power of the community. If we can motivate a large group of very talented, and committed people to write about their passions and ideas, it will be useful for its readers and become a success.

Since Valley of the Giants will be co-authored by many Giant Squids, it will offer our readers the shared wisdom of a number of people who have been successful in the Squidoo community. This blog will be a valuable resource both for the Squidoo community at large and for us the blog contributors as well.

* By having many, quality contributors the blog will be more interesting for readers. It should have more subscribers. Thus more traffic.

* By being innovative and authorative, it should get links from authors, other bloggers and Squidoo, etc. Thus a higher PR.

* More posts and frequent content will bring search traffic.

* By having multiple authors and ongoing content, it will not die when an author is unable to post. But it will still fresh and active when we do post.

If you are a Giant Squid, you can post about your blog, Squidoo, your philosophy on life, (almost) anything you want. Get a link and traffic to your Squidoo Lenses. And it is all free.

Contact Me and get started.

1. You get free traffic to your lenses. Compared to most types of links you can get (directories, social networks, bookmarking sites, etc) blogs usually get well indexed by search engines and will bring traffic to your lens. This won't happen from the start. But it will happen.
2. You get free quality direct backlinks to your lenses, your blog and your website. Even if you already have a blog, it is good to get links from other IP Addresses.
3. You do not have to promote it. But if you can make some links to it (from your blog, from your lens from your Squidoo profile, etc), it will be helpful for all of us.
4. You do not have to post daily or even weekly. Normally, a blog requires frequent updates. If you do not post, it will die. But if we have several people posting here, there will be no shortage of content. More content will bring more traffic to all of us, but YOU do not have to be constantly writing. The blog should always appear to be fresh no matter how often you post. If you want to have on-going athorship rights (contributing authorship) you should post at least once per month. But other than that, you can post when you want.
5. Get in on the ground floor. Be one of the first authors.
6. If you have never had a blog, you can see what blogging is all about. If you have already got a blog, you can post to your blog and to your Squidoo lenses. Give yourself more traffic and more PR.
7. No waiting right now. Blogger allows me to give permission to only 100 authors. When (if) we reach 100, I will create a waiting list for new participants.
8. You can be part of a select community. Remember, only Giant Squids can be authors and only 100 people can participate.
9. Imagine the potential! If a large group of pre-selected (they are all Giant Squid's right?), highly motivated people are contributing content and blogging about this, the PR and the traffic should be very high. Don't you want to make sure you are part of it?
10. Did I mention that it is free? What have you got to lose?

How it all began

I have been thinking about creating a Squidoo Blog for sometime. But there are hundreds of Squidoo Blogs out there, many of them written by people who know more about Squidoo than I do. I worried that my blog risked getting lost amongst the rest. I also noticed that there are alot of blogs that started out well, but got abandoned. Perhaps people abandon their blogs due to low traffic and the fact that no one is listening?

Then I remembered that many of the top non-Squidoo blogs have multiple contributors. By having many contributors, there are lots of people to share the work of posting and to share knowledge. But also, visitors have the pleasure of reading from more than just one author. Different authors give a blog variety and depth.

What if I could create a blog that was authored by a multiple number of Top Squidooers? It would turn the blog into an authorative source on a variety of Squidoo related topics. It would offer its readers, Giants and non-Giants alike a one-stop-shop about Squidoo from the point of view of Lens Masters who have been selected by Squidoo for their quality work. By opening up Valley of The Giants to other Giant Squids, this blog will offer unique advantages both to its authors and to its readers.

On January 3 2009, Valley Of The Giants was born. I made a cautious first post A New Beginning and I made my friend Chef Keem a co-adminstrator to the blog.

1. If you are a Squid Giant, Contact Me.
2. Let me know you Squidoo name and what type of authorship you would be interested in (see Types of Authorship below)
3. I will verify that you are a Squid Giant. If you are, I will email you an invitation to become an author on the blog
4. Make posts whenever you want, about what you want. But please post at least once per month if you plan to be a contributing author.
5. Follow "The Rules". No spam posts (eg 3 words and a link), no adult stuff, no flamming, be nice, etc).
6. Please post the same number of links outside of Squidoo as you post to Squidoo sites. This means if you post a link to your lens, also post a link to another site, like your blog, Wikipedia, etc. Why? If we only post to Squidoo lenses, Blogger may see our blog as Spammy and close us down.
7. If you can give the blog a link (from your blog, from your lens, from your profile, etc) please do so, it will help us all.
8. Share your thoughts and ideas about how to make this successful

Only 100 Authorships Available

Blogger allows us to have a maximum of 100 Authors. I forsee a day when we may reach that number. Therefore, I would like to make sure that all authors are active on the blog. So we have created two types of Authorships:

* Contributing: You get on-going rights to post to the blog. But you are expected to make a minimum of 1 post per month. You can post every day if you like, but please make at least one post every month.

* Temporary: You can make 1 or more posts, but we disable your authorship privleges after a pre-determined time.

Please let me know from the beginning which type of Authorship you prefer.