We Love Holidays Every Day - A Lensmaster Joint Venture on Squidoo

What do you get when you take a handful of Giant Squids, add a community blogging platform, and sprinkle liberally with a dose of holiday fun? The answer? Lots of great holiday blogs, more than a few gift review lenses, and a fair amount of internet marketing success. So far. Let me explain.

About a year ago, a small group of Giant Squids decided to create a gifts blog. Our goal was that each would contribute a post on a regular basis to the blog, offering the best top-rated gift ideas that we could find, in essence doing our readers' pre-shopping research for them. The result was what we call the Top-Rated Gifts blog which, I am happy to report, now contains nearly 300 posts. TRG receives regular search engine traffic which sometimes actually results in sales. (We're keeping our stats private for now.) The blog was started at the end of September 2009 and performed decently over that year's holiday shopping season. This year we're looking forward to great results since the blog will have had a whole year to establish itself online.

During summer 2010, the topic of what else we could do to generate holiday sales came up as we started thinking in the "Christmas in July" vein. We decided that a blog dedicated to Christmas might be a good idea. There is no doubt that people shop for Christmas-related items throughout the year, so we wanted to be able to provide ideas for Christmas every day of the year. Thus, the Christmas Every Day blog was born. We liked the idea so much that we decided that if someone wasn't thinking about Christmas every day, perhaps they were thinking about Halloween or Valentine's Day. And our "empire" began to grow.

It's too early to tell exactly what's going to happen with our mini gifts-and-holiday-blogs project, but we are looking forward to great results. Keep reading to see what we're up to and who "we" are.