Lens Stats Tell A Story

I'm sure we've all received a great pay this month as it relates to our December pay, traditionally the best pay of the year. Mine saw an increase of 150% on the previous year which is fantastic. In fact every month of 2010 saw great increases over the year before. I'm not saying this to brag, if you keep reading you'll see I have a point!

My January pay (due next month) does not look good though and although I'm expecting it to be up on the previous years, I don't think it will be such a big percentage increase.......my February pay also hasn't looked as good. Now luckily Squidoo isn't my only online income source and one of these is going to buck the trend.

Looking at my pending payment (due next month) for January at Zazzle my pay will be slightly up on my December payment.

Why am I telling you all of this? So that we can analyse why these things are happening.

 At the beginning of 2010 I realized that I'd effectively missed the boat with Valentine's Day traffic and extra lenses on Squidoo (luckily Hubpages performed well for me) and I was dangerously close to missing out on St Patrick's Day as well. I sat down and made plans to be organized for Halloween and Christmas months in advance and I also factored in a few other occasions. At the same time I was also looking at expanding my income stream.

I had a few problems in real life and made several trips backwards and forwards between Australia and New Zealand, but I stayed on track until October.

October was when I was due to start on my preparations for New Years and Valentines Day - I ended up getting about 4 hours total internet time during this month and most of that was in 10 minute lots!

I believe that this was a major reason why the beginning of 2011 hasn't seen the increase (percentage wise) that I had seen throughout 2010. The key here however is to look at what did work.

Planning ahead of time - magazine editors know to do this and will plan at least 6 months in advance and that's what we need to think about with Squidoo if we want to keep growing our income.

What About Zazzle?


When I got home and was settling back into my usual routine (in November) Zazzle introduced iphone and ipad cases.   I produced  a few of them, but the big thing that I did was to produce lots of Squidoo lenses on them.   Initially they didn't sell very well, but I had read in a couple of places that iphone cases were seen as fashion accessories, I had seen teens buying several cool designs at market stalls.

I also read that the ipad was the most requested gift for 2010 and even commented on a Rocket Mom's forum that I thought the sales of the cases would go up after Christmas.   I didn't manage to make as many lenses on the ipad cases (unfortunately), but I'm sure that if anyone did they would also have made a few sales during January.

I know a lot of people personally who were given iphones for Christmas including two of my friends (mid 30s and early 50s), and two teenagers.   All four have brought themselves iphone cases during January and they're not alone.

Should you all be making lenses on iphone cases?   No!   What you need to do in the lead up to Christmas 2011 is to pay attention to what is heralded as the hottest gift of the season and instead of trying to sell it (and going up against hoards of other people) focus on the accessories for it and aim for the post Christmas market especially on products aimed at teens who have often received money for Christmas and have disposable income.   This way you'll (hopefully) have less competition and will also not see such a huge drop in income between Dec/Jan.