Sunday, August 1, 2010

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?

2 comments:

  1. interesting post, thanks for the little push ;)

    got a question though, how likely do you feel it is to get 10 lenses in the tier One?

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  2. Interesting thoughts about commenting within Squidoo. I usually do comment to people that comment on my lenses. I guess it does pay. : )

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