I recently made a post about my first ever Squidoo lens I created on a popular village in my area, Tinley Park.  At the time I worked on the lens I wasn't quite sure what Squidoo was about.  But I went on to make a second non-real estate related lens.

Squidoo is just another community on the Internet where people congregate to create and share "lenses" or pages of anything that interests them.  Some people make very basic pages and some put a lot of time into them.  Others even create mini-sites with their separate lenses - something that could easily be done with real estate.  There are also groups you can join with lenses of the same interest you have.

About a week after I created my lens it rose to the #1 spot for the "Local" section on Squidoo.  I don't know why, but I checked keywords on Google and was shocked to see my Tinley Park lens on the 1st page.  But I should have known better.  Google tends to take new sites or pages and gives them high rankings but once the dust settles the page/site starts to sink.  Last time I checked it was on the 3rd page which is still good since there were over 4 million results.

But unless I spend time and effort on that single page trying to get "the word out" it will probably fall into oblivion.  I wasn't trying to get this page on the lst page of Google since I was just trying things out over at Squidoo.  I'm just happy Google indexed the page since I do have rss feeds from two of my other websites on it.  So if the page stays indexed by Google (which will be questionable) it should help my other sites a little bit.

Will I continue creating lenses?  I'm not sure.  It's kind of fun once you get the hang of it but I think my time would be better spent working on my main websites.  The way I look at Squidoo lenses is that they're great for subjects that don't require an entire website - something about an interest you have or a hobby.

If it's a topic that is interesting enough, the people who "live" reading through Squidoo lenses might find your page worthy enough to continue reading and bookmark.  There is adsense on it so you could earn a few bucks if you create a really popular lens.

I don't think local real estate is an interesting enough subject to create a lot of buzz on.  But you never know, in the ever widening world of real estate 2.0, I guess we need to get our name out there as much as we can.  You never know where your next client might come from.