Do You Squidboo?

Squidboo is a template designed for Halloween and if you’re still making your Halloween lenses there is actually a Get Cracking contest on Squidu at the moment for people to make Squidboo lenses this month. Now I think that your Halloween lenses should have already been made by now, but I haven’t been able to resist joining in :)

If you have a number of lenses on Halloween already, but didn’t remember/think of or even know that Squidboo existed it’s well worth doing a Halloween lensography using the Squidboo template and linking to your other Halloween lenses. It’s basically another ‘door’ into Squidoo with it’s own searchable Squidoo Halloween index (another backlink) and the possibility of Bonnie (who organizes Squidboo Blast) blogging and tweeting about it.

HIMYM Tee Update

Those of you who have been long time readers of this blog will probably remember that we did an experiment on a new lens – How I Met Your Mother Tees. At the time the search function in Squidoo wasn’t working correctly or I would probably have chosen a different idea. At the time it was a bit of a bust not ranking well in Google and certainly not showcasing a great result. However……

I ended up just leaving the lens to it’s own devices and then on the weekend I noticed that it had made a sale…….it was also showing visits in the double digits (the past week has had 39 visitors). I then decided to google it and these are the results –

How I Met Your Mother Tee #6
HIMYM Tee #3
How I Met Your Mother T-Shirt #11
HIMYM t-shirt #9

So there’s always hope if you’ve set your lens up and have directed some interlinking and backlinking time may be the missing link.

I must admit that this has happened with other lenses in the past where they will suddenly start to peak for no reason except that they are older so there’s always hope :)

How Can I Increase My Squidoo Income?

As I’ve stated I really want to increase my Squidoo income from 3 figures to 4 figures a month by the end of this year. I’m not talking about including other affiliate income, just straight from Squidoo alone. How can I do this? Well I’ve never been too hung up on lensrank in the past because I’ve had sales from lenses that are ranked in the 300k and I think position in google and targeted visits are much more important, however the tier payments keep adding up.

Tier one paid out $20.72 last payday and up to $27.68 if you had all of the ads enabled which means that if you didn’t make a sale, but just had 10 in the top tier you’d make between $207.72 and $276.80. Maybe I should try and do both – increase my lensrank and also make sales, but do sales lenses ‘make it’ into the top ranks of Squidoo?

There are so many factors that go into lensrank it can be a hard one to conquer. Traffic is one factor, but last year I found that I had a lens that was on the same subject as a fellow squidooer and they were quite alike (not copied, it was just a popular subject). I had over 5 times the traffic and was on the front page of google……I’m not sure where the other lens was on google, but it wasn’t on the front page. This increased to just short of 10 times the traffic when a few events occurred. I made a number of sales on this lens and considering the traffic and google positions of the lenses I would make an educated guess that the other lens could not have made as much in sales. It was ranked above me however!

What else can we look at? I had lots of clickouts, not sure how many the ‘opposition’ had had. Backlinks for my lens were way up on the competition and then I looked at the star ratings. This was my mistake, I hadn’t been promoting my lens within Squidoo because I was getting plenty of traffic outside. The ‘other lens’ had received 10 times as many ratings as mine which had to be the key to the higher ranking.

BTW - I’ve been particularly fuzzy over which lens because it involves someone elses as well, not because I’m trying to hide anything.

What does this say to me? As well as doing all the usual things I think I have to start implementing my squidcast calendar that I have thought about in the past. I also think that I may have to start commenting on more lenses again, despite what I’ve said in the past. I also always keep up to date on squidu, but don’t always comment on discussions, obviously I should raise my profile there.

Let’s see if I can increase tier payouts as well as sales on my lenses, not forgetting that sales are said to increase your lensranking as well.

If you’re wondering how I know the traffic, backlinks and ratings a lens by someone else has it’s because I used Squidaholic. This is a great site to keep an eye on. It has so much information on it and can really motivate you when you don’t feel like setting up backlinks – if someone with a competing lens has 100 backlinks and you only have 5 wouldn’t that motivate you?