HIMYM Tees Update

Okay so I’ve left this lens alone to see how it would cope in the big wide internet all alone and this is what I’ve found…..it got lost:(

I searched google for How I Met Your Mother Tees and went through the first 100 results and this is what I found –

Xomba link to lens #8
She Told Me link to lens #10
Another Squidoo lens on the show (not one of mine) #15
One of the posts on this blog #16
She Told Me link to lens (again!) #30
Another post from this blog #50
My Barney Stinson lens #55
Xomba link to my Barney Stinson lens #62
Twitter link to site # 84
Twitter link to site #90

Yes the poor lens is lost, but at least it has friends pointing the way in Google and a great reason to be using Xomba and She Told Me if you don’t already.

Now I looked at this weeks stats and the lens has had a total of 5 visits this week – oops!

3 from Xomba
1 from She Told Me
1 from Google (someone managed to find it!!)

Doesn’t sound too good does it? However it has had one clickout onto a tee (unfortunately this didn’t result in a sale) which means that the click-through rate is at 20% and that is good.

Now I just need to get more visibility to the lens which will hopefully lead to more traffic, but let’s hope that the click-through rate doesn’t drop. Now the competitor’s lens that shows up at number 15 got 119 visits this week (you can check this out on Squidaholic). If we could get to 100 and maintain a 20% click-through rate we should start seeing some sales.

Time to make some changes to the lens, and this is what I’ve done –

I’ve added the words How I Met Your Mother to the introduction in a couple of places (the phrase wasn’t in there originally) and I changed the intro heading to How I Met Your Mother T-Shirts instead of How I Met Your Mother.

I added the phrase How I Met Your Mother tee to the text above Barney’s Suit Up tee. Under the heading Barney’s Bro Code I added the sub-heading A Classic How I Met Your Mother Tee. In the ebay module I changed the word tee to read How I Met Your Mother tee.

Next I moved on to the tags. I took out the tags barney stinson and how I met your mother and left in the primary tag of how I met your mother tees along with these tags – barney stinson tees, suit up, the bro code, lou16. In the discovery module I only had two lenses listed – Barney Stinson and Barney Stinson for President, so I added Lou’s Tee-Ography.

I then pinged the lens via squidutils.

I’ll also promote it on a few other sites (probably on Monday, although I may get to it this weekend) and evaluate it’s performance later in the week.

How I Met Your Mother Part 3

After I had finished my lens I would normally do the discovery tool, tags and lensrolling, but I don’t actually have other related lenses at the moment so all I did was twittered it and posted it on Rocket Moms. If you’re new to Squidoo you could post it on the Squidu forum under Critique Me and you should get some great feedback. It you’ve already done a few lenses and have decided that you want to aim for Giant Squid status then you’ll be able to list your new lenses in the So You Want To Be A Giant Squid part of the forum.

Now it’s great to get the traffic from fellow Squidooers, but they won’t be buying so don’t worry too much. Do you belong to any social networking groups such as Facebook? I don’t belong to Facebook so I’m not sure how you list your lenses, but apparently you can – I have had traffic from Facebook where someone must’ve listed one of my lenses so I know it can work. Obviously the best traffic would be from a forum that is interested in what you’re writing about so if you belong to an Elvis online appreciation forum and you write a lens on collectible Elvis plates then you should post your link there…….hmmm not a bad idea(!)

Now what we’re really after is search engine traffic to help us make sales so one thing that I can control is creating more links and one of the things that I’m going to do is create another lens that I can interlink with this one. Another is to list it on a few sites that also make me (a little) money.

Redgage – I don’t do much on this site, so I haven’t made much money (under a dollar I believe), but it does give me a backlink and (sometimes) traffic.

Xomba – I joined this a while ago and didn’t do much with it, I’ve just decided I really have to promote more so I’m adding a link in here.

She told me – when I first trailed this site I had a lot of success with traffic, but no money…..now the traffic has dwindled, but Google still seems to like it and the money has started to come my way through both Google and Chitika (I received my first payment from them in December – and all I’ve done is put them on She Told Me).

Then there are Squidcasts – you will have to wait until you have a green tick next to your lens before you can send a squidcast which is usually after it updates when you’re first starting. I’m guilty of not using squidcasts as often as I should and yet I get good feedback when I do use them DOH!

I have been told that you should email five of your friends when you make a new lens…..I’ve never done that, but if you want to try it go for it. Unfortunately my friends don’t really ‘get’ my online activities, even when they’re trying to be supportive!

Tomorrow I’ll take you through the next steps, if you’re following along with your own lenses please list them in the comments and let me know how you’re going. I’d love to see your work.