Squidoo and Zazzle

The tax year in Australia (where I live) runs from July 1st to June 30th, now you might wonder why I'm telling you this.   The answer is because I'm busy preparing my tax return and I've discovered that Zazzle was my third highest income earner for the year which is great - what does Zazzle have to do with Squidoo?   One word - referrals.

At the beginning of the year I re-assessed my income streams and I realized that Zazzle was becoming a bigger part of my income and yet when I looked at where I was making my Zazzle income it was quite an eye-opener - 15% royalties, 85% referrals.

My biggest method of getting referral earnings is through Squidoo - for some reason Squidoo and Zazzle combined just work.   There's a lot of people complaining about lack of referrals through Squidoo both on the Squidu forum and on the Zazzle forum, but I have to say that my income shows the two still work well together.

Now my last post was about taking advantage of the Flickr module demise and increasing clickouts on your lenses and a recent post by Greekgeek on her blog has given some more really interesting food for thought that concerns Zazzle and Squidoo.   Ellen's blog is a really good one to subscribe to by the way, anyway she says that on one of her lenses she includes posters -

....whose spoof punchlines are a little too small to read, so visitors tend to click on them to view the posters on Zazzle. 

Now she goes on to say that she doesn't sell many, but this is definitely something to think about when looking at increasing the click through rate.

I mentioned a lens in my last post that was getting a lot of traffic, but only had a 1% click through rate well that lens was my 10 Delicious Blue Curacao Cocktails and I increased the clickout rate to 3% after adding the recipes on Google Docs and then linking to the document as a printable version.   The traffic has also increased (as it does in the lead up to and throughout summer) and this lens is now firmly in tier 2 and even seems to be knocking on the tier 1 door.    It has never been this close to tier one in it's life!

What did I do?   I added some Zazzle products to the lens only a couple of days ago.   There's a Zazzler called the Martini Diva who makes cocktail recipe cards so I found 6 recipe cards that included blue curacao and popped them into a text module adjusting the size so that if people want to actually see the recipe they will have to click on the product as well!

Another great thing about joining Zazzle and adding the products to your lenses is that there are a number of licensed products that Zazzle make including Disney, Marvel and Harry Potter.   The referral rate is 15% so selling some of their posters, mugs, iphone cases etc can really add up.

If you're working on your Christmas lenses then why not add a few Zazzle products to them like these -