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I have only had the module on three of my lenses, although earlier this year I had looked at putting it on a lot more of them. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be the images that came up in the Flickr module just weren't right for the lenses I wanted to use them on. I was after clickouts and the Flickr module was great for that.
What do I mean by taking advantage of Flickr's demise? Well there are a lot of people with well ranked lenses who suddenly find themselves possibly losing alot of clickouts which means there's opportunity for you to gain some lensranking juice.
Let me tell you a story which I'm sure is familiar to a few of you, I'll call it The Tale of Two Lenses. I have a couple of lenses that don't make sales (that's not their intent), one of them got 282 visits in the last week the other got 796 visits in the last week. One of them is in tier one and the other is in tier three (actually this morning he's visiting tier two, but his visits are usually very brief ones). Can you guess which is which? If you guessed that the lower visited lens was in the top tier you would be correct.
The Reason - clickouts! Yes the one with nearly 800 visits has only a 1% click-through rate which is something that I need to work on.
If you have some lenses that aren't performing as well as you think they should have a look in the traffic stats and see what the click-through rate is. You'll see the rate under the traffic stats of your lens -
As you can see this lens doesn't get a lot of traffic, but it does have a good click-through rate of 30% which sees it perform better than some lenses with double or triple the traffic.
Personally I want to get all of my lenses to have a click-through rate of over 20 (although the higher the better). Now is the time to start looking at your lenses and seeing how you can improve your click-through rates while some other lensmasters are scrambling to fix up their Flickr modules - it should pay great dividends for you.
How to improve your click-through rate - that is the question and it's really hard to know how to do it with some lenses, but here's a few ideas.
Make sure all of your images are linking out to somewhere - depending on where I've gotten the images from some people are happy to simply have the photo linked to their website other's want a text link, but even if I've given them a text link I'll also link the photo as well because it's amazing how many people will click on that which equals a clickout.
I use a number of posters to illustrate my lenses and these all link back to allposters or amazon (with my referral link of course) and whereas I don't expect to sell these posters they do give me clickout juice as well as nice images. On one of my lenses - Lady Gaga's Tattoos - I found a poster showing Lady Gaga's unicorn tattoo, but you could also see her bottom so I put a black box over her bottom uploaded the image (linking back to the amazon poster) and put in the text that you could see the poster without the 'blackbox' by clicking on the image. I think this is the biggest click out I get across all of my lenses!
What if you use your own images? Well one idea that I've just started for one of my niches is a photo blog on posterous. I started writing some wedding lenses this year and one of the fun things about them was making my own inspiration boards - I started the photo blog this week and it's called Wedding Bells - it's basically so that I can link all of my inspiration boards back to it and hopefully get some clickout juice.
It's not just images that get clicked on! Last year I made some Google docs with printable recipes of some of my cocktails/mocktails and even a party planner - checking through stats on one of my lenses this week I've found that this is responsible for quite a few clickouts which tells me I must definitely work on getting the other recipes onto Google docs as well!
Videos also count as clickouts, although directing traffic to other lenses does not. If you write on other sites then I think it's time to write complimentary articles that you can link out to as these also work well with the added bonus that you're not just sending people to a different site away from your work.
Of course the best thing for people to clickout of your lens on is a product because not only is that a clickout, but it could also result in a sale which is a win/win scenario.
How are you going to try and increase your click-through rate on your lenses?
Great post. That is a good way of looking at Flickr's loss. Those text modules have the clickable images. And in text links can work well too. Choosing awesome attractive Amazon items in the 3 Widgets spots works too.
ReplyDeleteI find using buyer keywords (search phrases with buyer intent) for lenses along with great content that helps shoppers is the fastest way to higher clickouts. Some of my lenses are over 60% ctr, though most are in the 20 to 40% range. They are different styles of lenses too the two click out levels! I have posted about exactly this on my Skeffling's Make Money Online blog, it's so great to see your post on this today!
Giving them link options and info that matches their search query/keywords works well, so trying to figure out what your readers want is the best way and what it comes down to.