Making Sales With Amazon

How do you make sales?   This is a question that I get asked quite often and in particular I've had a spate of queries about it recently.   It's actually not an easy question to answer because it's not a straight forward formula, but I'll try and give you a few ideas.

The most important thing you have to do is find your voice.   This is really important, even though it may not seem it.   I worked in sales for quite a while and I remember going to a seminar that the company paid for and I took lots of notes and decided to try and sell the way the speaker had told us.    The manager asked to speak to me on the Friday...............she wasn't very happy (although I didn't realize it at the time).

So we have a chat and she's asking how things are going with me and what I thought of the seminar etc and then came the zinger - what's been going on with your sales this week?   I explained I was following what the speaker had said, but I obviously needed to work on it because the results weren't showing.   Then she asked me the simple question well what did you do before?   It turns out that I had been converting the most sales of anyone (even the guy who used to make out he was the best - I loved that feeling!) and she wanted me to go back to that.

I couldn't actually give her an exact answer as to what I did before for the same reason that years later I had problems role-playing how to handle complaints, despite handling them really well in a work environment.   I don't use a stock standard method.   Everyone is different so how I would handle sales would depend on the person, it's called active listening when you're face to face combined with body language.   This is a lot harder to do online, but it boils down to this -

You need to know your audience.

My way of selling is totally different depending on who my audience is, if you're not sure who your audience is then you will have problems selling anything.

Finding your own voice is all about how you communicate with your writing so the first thing you should do is look around at something that you use at home and would recommend to your best friend.   Check it's available on Amazon and then sit down and talk about it as though your best friend was sitting opposite you - what do you like about it, why it would be ideal for her/him.   If you haven't figured it out yet - your best friend is your audience!

Now you've talked it out sit down and write a lens on that one product (but finish reading this post first) - use an Amazon spotlight review module or your own associate link and only promote that one product unless you've told your friend in your imaginary conversation that you find it even better when combined with something else.

Depending on what it is you may feel you need to add some product details and that's okay, if you're not feeling qualified to talk about the technical side of things just (staying in your own voice) say something like for those of you who want the technical mumbo jumbo here's what the website has to say about it, but for me it's all about ...................

Now, how are you going to get the traffic if no one can find your product?   Obviously most of the time we hear keyword research should be done first and that's true once you've found your voice.   It's no good doing all of the keyword research if you can't write a good review that will sell.

Now hopefully you haven't actually written the lens yet, because you're still reading this post - I would suggest writing it all into word first so you just have to cut and paste it into Squidoo when we're ready.   Now  do some keyword research and make sure that you use keywords in your url and in your titles and/or subtitles.    Now read it through - sometimes you'll find you've added the keywords naturally without thinking which is awesome.   If you haven't that's okay too.

Have you used the word the when talking about the product?   If so add your keyword in it's place and read it back - does it still sound like you or does it sound weird/stilted/not quite right?   If it sounds okay leave it in otherwise out it goes.   The word the is the one I most often convert to a keyword in the final edit as it can often be naturally converted without sounding forced.

Now, how did you start your introduction?   You want to make sure that you use the keyword in the first couple of sentences so let's say you've been talking about a blender, start with something like this - Are you looking for the best ever blender?   I wouldn't be without my xxx blender and use it constantly in the kitchen for things such as xxx and xxx.   Read on to find out why this blender is the one I would recommend to my best friend.

Another type of lens that will convert well is a how to lens, many people want to learn how to make something ie how to make the best xxxx costume for Halloween.   They'll feel quite good learning how to make their own outfit, but then they realize that either time is running out or it seems harder to make than they realize or it's not such a big monetary saving after all.   What do they do?   Buy the product already made!    It's true, honestly, so if you're making a how to lens remember to have a module after the instructions with a ............or you could just buy it here type of comment.

There are other tips that I'll talk about in the future, but I really believe that finding your voice is one of the best things you can do if you want to convert your readers to buyers.

Let's Talk Niche

Why am I not making any sales?   How often do we hear this question, there are often several different answers, but one common one is that your lens is too broad in scope.   In my experience my biggest amount of sales have come from having very niche lenses.

How niche should your lenses be?   As niche as you can get!

For a Rocketmom's assignment last year I wrote a lens on The Best Purple Computer Mouse, now I look at this lens and I can see a lot of room for improvement in the introduction, but it makes sales - why?   It's about one thing.

I do have some other computer mouses at the bottom of the lens, but they're all purple so they still all count as purple computer mouses/mice (I still don't have an answer to that question!).   When the side bar Amazon modules were introduced I added other purple computer accessories because I didn't feel it would 'dilute' the lens too much.

Now I don't get a lot of traffic, but the traffic I get is very targeted, let's face it if you search for 'computer mouse' you may be after reviews, but if you're searching for 'purple computer mouse' you are usually looking to buy.  

This all means that the amount of traffic that converts to sales is a lot more targeted.

Talking niche is often the opposite of talking keyword research.   When you do keyword research you're often told to look for something that has at least 5,000 monthly searches with low competition etc.   When it comes to niche I will often look at keywords that only have 100 or so monthly visits if the competition is low that is.   Why?  Because if I can get just 10 visitors a week to a targeted lens that converts 4% of visitors then I consider that to be good use of my time.

I'll talk about assessing competition for keyword phrases in my next post and let you know what I do when researching.

Titles Are Important - Make Them Count

I often think of pithy newspaper type of headline that would suit my lenses, but I don't use them!   Well maybe on some of my older ones that I really should change, but it is the one small change that you can often make to your lenses in order to rank better.

Since I have started to take more care of all of my titles, not just the main one, I have found that it's far easier to rank well in Google.   Of course not just titles are going to do the job, but if you have a lens which seems pretty good for content and yet it's getting no traffic because it's just not ranking well then revisiting the titles may be a great idea.

Look at your keywords or keyword phrase - is it highlighted in your titles?   Now obviously you can't always have your main keywords in the title of each section especially if your keywords are something like The Lego Architecture Series and so you want your different titles to reflect each of the sets in the series such as The White House and Fallingwater, what you can do is add Lego Architecture Series to the sub-heading.

The biggest mistake people use is with their Guestbooks - we all know not to leave the generic New Guestbook as the title, but what do we put instead?   Use your keywords in the title in the form of a question.   Why, well two reasons really -

• It adds your keywords into your title easily.
• It makes it more likely that you'll get commenters to use keywords in their comments.

If you're thinking, but I like pithy headlines - you can still use them if you want to, but as sub-headings.   Make the main title one of your keywords and have your subheading as something fun.   If you're not sure what I mean then check out Funky Chic and Cool Laptop Bags - this lens has been in the Top 100 for as long as I've been on Squidoo.   Kate highlights the bag she's reviewing in the title because that's one of her keywords ie - The Allie Laptop Tote Bag by Rainbrooke - and then adds a pithy sub-title ie - Get in touch with your inner Elle Woods.   


Now stay tuned for next time as I've started a new project which I'll be revealing to you and hopefully it'll be a really interesting journey that we can take together.   Also as the year is coming to a close I'll be looking back and updating you on some of the experiments we've tried this year.

Plexos - More Easy Backlinks for Squidoo Lenses

The Link Lock by TekF
Large format poster

Now there's always a big discussion about the value of backlinks - do follow versus no follow etc. Now I seriously believe that organic backlinks from reputable sites on the same subject as your lens are the best ones to get, but they don't just appear. The right people have to 'find' your lens in order to link to it and how can they do this?
Obviously if you manage your on page optimization well and get ranked on the front page of google they will be able to find you easily - this is how I've managed to get a number of my organic backlinks, but what if you're not on the front page of google - is there any hope?

This is why I think there is a value in any backlink you can get so if there's a way of obtaining quick and easy backlinks then I say why not. We discussed Squidoo directories on a previous post as one way of getting backlinks, but plexos are good as well.

I used to love coming across plexos when looking at lenses and I would eagerly add my lens, but I used to think to myself how can I find which lenses have plexos that I can add to without just visiting them when someone posts a link on Squidu??   Well spammers always seem to find these plexo and I found out a black hat seo trick for us to use for good instead of spam!!

Now I'm going to assume that you're all writing in a niche now?   This means that you'll have a keyword  or keyphrase that you're targeting so here's what you do.

• Go to google
• Type in KEYWORD + site:squidoo.com + "0 points"
• Press enter and visit the lenses that show up

This gives you all of the lenses with a plexo that covers your keyword or keyphrase, now the only drawback is it doesn't distinguish between amazon plexos and link plexos, but it's surprisingly quick to scroll through these lenses.

It's a great idea to check out these lenses as well because they are your competition so see what you like about the lens, are they worth linking to or lensrolling with your lenses?   I'm very gradually going through my niches and adding links to plexos with keywords or phrases that I'm targeting.

Now you're probably thinking, but are they worth anything?   All I can say is I look upon backlinks as breadcrumbs that can lead people to your lens.   You don't know who is going to see your lens on a plexo, in a squidoo directory, from a tweet and think hey that's really good before favoriting it for their one million facebook friends!   We can't always predict where our traffic is going to come from, but with enough enticing breadcrumbs we can hope that it comes.

About 18 months ago one of my seasonal lenses started to get a lot of hits......but it was the wrong season!   It went from a handful of hits weekly to hundreds.   I looked at the stats and found that a single blog had linked to me highlighting one module of that lens - turns out that the heading on that lens was what they had typed into google and I actually ranked for that long tail keyword phrase without realizing it.   The person was obviously a successful blogger and liked my lens - she's linked to it twice since.   The reason for this story is that you never know who is going to find your lens and link to it - it could be through google, plexos, squidoo directories, xomba, best reviewer or just about anywhere.

Allposters and Squidoo

Now when I first joined Allposters it was mainly as a way to legally use the picture! Then, somehow I made a sale, I was over the moon….it only took me about 2 years to get a sale so I was doing the happy dance. I’ve since discovered that if you use posters as a keyword and also include it in your url it seems to help. I have increased the number of clickouts to Allposters by doing this as well as increasing sales.

A number of people have left Allposters as they have changed the rules and now you have to make a min amount each year in order to be paid out. I’m not sure if you’d want to do this or just use Amazon and Zazzle instead. Personally I think it’s worth it now (the commissions are better for one), however a couple of years ago it wouldn’t have been worth it for me.

One of my fellow Antipodean Lensmasters has actually made a lens for people to help with formatting Allposters - Formatting AllPosters on Squidoo.

Do you use Allposters?

Squidoo and Amazon

Amazon has to be my best affiliate program bar none! I think a lot of it is because people trust the name so if you have a link to some affiliate company selling a product and you have another link to Amazon then I believe you’ll probably make more sales on the Amazon link. Unfortunately Amazon don’t pay as much as some of the other companies, but if you can make sales then that’s great.

Obviously Squidoo isn’t the only way I use my Amazon link because as I said yesterday I also hub and Hubpages is probably responsible for well over half of my Amazon income. The reason for that is that I use a lot of the Squidoo Amazon modules and I don’t always use my own link on my lenses. I still see plenty of sales coming through, but the mix between Squidoo and Amazon keeps me happy. A real drawback for me with Amazon is that I live overseas so they’ll only pay me by check and it costs a bit for me to bank that check and it also takes a fair while for it to clear. This is why getting a lot of my Amazon commissions paid via the Squidoo spotlight module makes my life a little easier because I can access my income quicker – it also increases my lensrank which equals more money again!

Amazon can also be used on blogs and you can Tweet products…..I’ve tried this twice and the first time I sold a Kindle that way, back when you got 10% for selling them :) I haven’t done this since as I’ve gotten out of the habit of Tweeting over the last few months with all of my traveling, but it’s good to know that it can work.

How do I incorporate my own associate link into my lenses? Well I do it in a couple of different ways and each of my lenses are different. I use text links throughout including in the Amazon Spotlight module. It’s amazing how some people will click on the text link instead of the picture or the buy now button that’s in the module.

Sometimes I’ll upload the picture to a text or text with big picture module. When using the text with big picture module I’ll also include the text link underneath the picture inside p tags to centralize the text and b tags to bold the link. This is a lot easier than it used to be before they made the pictures clickable and is an absolute godsend.

Altogether I believe that Squidoo and Amazon work really well together – what do you think?

Oh I did write a lens on using Amazon and Squidoo together, must admit I haven't looked at in a while, but the info is still pretty good - Make Money with Amazon and Squidoo.

Hubpages and Squidoo

I joined Hubpages around the same time as Squidoo, but didn’t know what to do and at that time the forum was pretty non-existent whereas Squidoo had lots of forum activity where I could learn a lot as a quiet ‘stalker’!!! As you can gather I left hubpages alone and focused all of my attention onto Squidoo. I went back to hubpages last year, but it has really been since the beginning of this year that most of my hubs have started to come together.

I started off by trying out a couple of topics that were very different to the ones I do on Squidoo, but I’ve since started to supplement them with lenses. I found an unexpected niche that has been doing really well for me and I had a couple of lenses on that niche already so I have built links between the two and I’m seeing some great results.

My amazon payments are snowballing as I use both Squidoo and Hubpages to promote products and my Google payments are increasing every day (this is how you earn on Hubpages) and I’ve made a few notes as to what you should write about on which site. Because Squidoo pay you tier payments you should write lenses that are likely to receive a lot of hits, but pay nothing on Squidoo. If you have a niche that pays well, but doesn’t necessary have a lot of hits then you should write it on Hubpages.

This is just my theory at the moment and it doesn’t always work as I’ve received a high payout for clicks that should have paid next to nothing and a miniscule amount paid for a click that should have paid well………I think I’ll throw my hands up in the air and say I don’t understand how Google calculates anything!!

If you belong to hubpages leave a link here and I’ll pop by and read some of your hubs.

Other Places to Earn Online

This blog is about how to earn money with squidoo, but there are other places to earn money online and some of them fit really well with squidoo. Diversity is also a good idea, as my Nan always said ‘don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.’ So where else do you earn money and are you using squidoo to maximize these earnings? I use Zazzle, Hubpages, Bukisa, Amazon, Shareasale, Linkshare, Allposters and Clickbank.

I’m going to go through each of these and explain how I incorporate them with Squidoo in order to increase my online income.

I Zazzle and I really enjoy it having recently sold 100 copies of one of my postcards I’m rapt with the response, but the most money I have made has been with referrals. As you know one of my niches on Squidoo is t-shirts and I often use Zazzle to find some really great designs. As people clickout on the Zazzle link it counts as a clickout to my lens which is part of the secret algorithm for lensrank. Hopefully they also buy the product which means that I can get a payment from Zazzle as well as Squidoo – win/win!

On one particular lens that I created on February 27th 2010 I have had 222 visits since the lens was published and I have had 16 sales on Zazzle (totaling $43.65) directly from that lens. To me this is a great indication that the partnership is working really well. As a side note I’ve also had 4 sales from Amazon totaling $1.16 on my dashboard. I should also add that this lens has not had any promotion at all as it kind of slipped through the cracks……it’s now on my to do list however.

You should always make sure that both entities can stand on their own however and I have to say that every sale of my own product that I’ve made have not come through me promoting them as I haven’t received the referral. This means that I will still make sales from Zazzle if Squidoo wasn’t around. However it also means that I need to promote Zazzle a bit more in other places and it is something that I’ve been a little ‘slack’ about, but we’re talking about Squidoo here so I won’t carry on about my Zazzle plans!

Let me know if you use Zazzle and leave a link, I’ll be sure to check if you have any products I can use on any of my lenses.

Did You Miss Me?

Well my blog hasn’t been updated for quite a while as I’ve been traveling backwards and forwards between Australia (my home) and New Zealand (where my parents live). We got some bad news about my dad’s health a couple of months ago and I’ve been popping over to help out. He’s not out of the woods yet, but the prognosis is good.

The great thing about this is that I’m still getting paid by Squidoo and affiliates – woo hoo! I don’t know of a job that would continue to pay you when you weren’t working (not counting sick and holiday leave), so setting up lenses on Squidoo is definitely a great idea – I would like to think of it as a retirement fund as well, but one that I pay into with time instead of money!

I haven’t made huge amounts, but I’ve stayed in 3 figures with hardly any work and to me that is awesome because it shows that I’ve set some of my lenses up correctly and they don’t need me to coax them along.

Now I’m back at home for a couple of months so I’ll be posting regularly again and hopefully I can get back on track for my target of 4 figures a month from Squidoo before the end of the year ...... some people have already achieved this so it’s not impossible.

When Should You Start A Seasonal Lens?

When do you start work on your Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day lenses etc? Some people have said that they start work a couple of months out others say 6 months. What about the day after an event or in the week after the event? After Valentine’s Day there was a forum post (at a place other than Squidoo!) that said the person was working on some Valentine’s Day ‘lenses’ while Valentine’s Day was fresh in her mind. She could see what had worked for her this year and what happened and she had seen what had happened in the real world. The idea sounded great to me – what do you think?

I have to say that being prepared early is definitely a great idea, last year was my best Christmas sales ever. I started my first Christmas lens at the end of Jun/beginning of July and the niche I developed started selling in September and continued into February. My lenses had had enough time to be seen as established and they were also interlinked well so that they feed each other. I was extremely happy.

Now that’s not to say last minute lenses can’t do well. During September one of my popular lenses started to get a lot of hits for people looking for Halloween lenses in this niche. I set up a lens in response thinking that I’d left it a little late……every day except one (and I think there may have been problems with reporting on that day) I made a sale throughout October and that lens continues to have made me the most money out of any of my other lenses.

I guess what this means is that there’s no clear ‘best time’ to write any lens. Personally the last few weeks I’ve been (in what time I’ve managed to find) alternating between Halloween, Christmas and evergreen lenses. What that means is that I’ve been juggling so many ideas I was shocked to discover it was April!!

Good luck with whatever kind of lenses you’re working on at the moment and remember if you have a lens that offers help with Squidoo or lens promotion then drop me a line and I may just feature you here.

Make Money While You Sleep!

You’ve seen the ads for $xx you can spend 10 minutes and make money while you sleep..... it’s the get rich quick schemes that people are constantly running. Squidoo, as most of you will know, is definitely not a get rich quick scheme HOWEVER once you’ve spent time and set your lens up properly then you may be surprised as to how much you can make when you take time off.

Updated content is great and with some lenses it is more important than with others, but if you’ve set your lens up well to start with then should things happen in ‘the real world’ as they have with me for the last few weeks then you can continue to earn money. Yet another reason to love Squidoo!

Payday has just happened again on Squidoo and I hope you’re happy with your payout. Mine is still in the 3 figures, but my goal for 2010 is to lift it into 4 figures a month....unfortunately my time has been caught up with other things causing my plan to turn into a train wreck! It is important to make a plan though, just don’t get hung up if you don’t manage everything on your plan – I look at mine as a map, if you take a wrong turn you just find a new route to get to your destination.

I’ve actually received $11 less than last month which was a surprise to me as I thought it was going to be much less than that as I was busy with other things and had ‘abandoned’ Squidoo a little during February. I always find paydays inspiring these days, but my first payday didn’t even make enough for my $1 threshold payment – it was 68c. It has taken a couple of years and over 100 lenses before I started to get some really good paydays – the key really is perseverance. Now I’m not saying you need to wait for as long as I did, because I really knew absolutely nothing when I started and I didn’t pay enough attention to what people were telling me to do. I wanted to do my own thing, which is fine, but if you want to make money you need to mix in a little of what others want as well as your own thing :)

Now my daughter’s off sick from school today so I’m going to go and give her a cuddle because, luckily, I know this great way of making money while I live my life my way :D

Are You Earning With Your Guest Book?

I’ve talked about how your introduction is a great place to add text links that help you sell, today I want to talk about the guest book. There are a couple of different type of visitor that you get to your web page – one will click off quickly hence the introduction text links, the other will read all the way down to the bottom which is why the guest book can make you money.

Now I’m generalizing here because obviously there are always going to be people who click away at other points on your lens, but it has long been said that the most profitable areas are at the top and at the bottom of a lens. Now I used to often just put a product or featured lens underneath the guest book as a way to use this idea, but the guest book makes even more sense.

Now I bet you’re asking why it makes more sense aren’t you? Well another piece of research shows that text links are more effective at selling than banner adds so if you add a text link in the guest book the odds are that people will click on it. I have just started to implement this idea on a few of my lenses so I’ll report back with my findings.

Super Niche Niche Lenses

I’ll say it again you need to not just do a niche on say board games, but narrow it down to Monopoly or Scrabble for example. I did a lens on Trivial Pursuit for a Rocket Moms assignment last year, I haven’t really followed a lot of my advice for promoting it so it gets very little traffic, but if someone is interested in buying monopoly or snakes and ladders they won’t be visiting my lens. Only if they’re interested in Trivial Pursuit will they land up on my I Love Trivial Pusuit lens.

Why have I mentioned this lens? I was checking my stats a couple of days ago and I’d had 3 visits in a week, 1 clickout and what do you know $1.43 on my dashboard :D Now $1.43 isn’t going to buy me a latte let alone pay my mortgage, but what if I had 100 or 1000 of these types of lenses?

It’s not the traffic to the lens that counts, but the targeted traffic to the lens, the type of traffic that is already sold on the product. Think about how you can narrow your niche lenses down even further and start seeing the money come in.

If you already have a lens on board games (for sake of an example) then keep it, but use it more as a lensography and make your individual lenses all of which link back to your main one. If people like the info you’ve provided them on scrabble they might want to see what other games you’ve written about.

Is Your Introduction Earning You Enough?

The introduction of your lens is probably one of the highest converting parts of your lens so do you have it working best for you? According to a recent discussion on squidu these things are important –

200-500 words in the introduction
2 text links in the introduction
keywords bolded in the introduction
keywords used in title of introduction

Now I find the 200-500 words in the introduction interesting because earlier this week I read something elsewhere (and I can’t for the life of me think where) about hubs. (I’m trying to build an income on hubpages as well as squidoo.) This article/post/whatever suggested that high paying hubs should contain at least 400 words in the introduction. Does this mean that it’s correct? I really don’t know, but I’m willing to test it out.

Text links in the introduction are a great idea as a lot of people won’t scroll down any further so I am a big believer in their power – reducing them to no more than two does make sense in part of my brain. More could appear (to Google) as spam.

I decided to do a review on my camera and used all of these techniques in the introduction – I’ll let you know how I go. Of course I didn’t bother with keyword searches to see if anyone is even searching for this camera so the results may not be that great. I’m basically just using a product that I’m familiar with and use.

I’ve been a bit slack with posting this week as I was thinking about (and planning) a series of lenses to compliment this blog, but the job just kept getting bigger so I’m not sure if I’ll go ahead with this or not. Thoughts would be appreciated, it would basically be about how to make money on Squidoo.

Squidoo Tools - Part 3

Squidcasts – how many of you use them? I must admit this is an area that I need to improve upon. I try and squidcast regularly and I do get visitors to my lens when I squidcast which is always good. I think it would be a great idea to squidcast a lens once a day for maximum success, I’d be interested in your feedback about this.

Squidcasts do get overused however and if I get 20 squidcasts all at once from one person I won’t be checking out their lenses. I do go into the my favorites tag everyday to view my squidcasts so I’m sure other people do as well.

Now you can get an rss feed of your squidcasts from squidutils and I’ve actually added this to my lensography so that it keeps that updated regularly. Now apparently Google looks at your squidcasts as well so it’s a good idea to add keywords into the title and body of your squidcasts…..this is another failure of mine, but we can (hopefully) all learn from it.

In a nutshell think of your squidcasts as blogs and post small, but good seo based, posts everyday.

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.

Squidoo Tools- Part 1

When you first start doing things online it’s hard to know where to start there’s SEO, backlinks, social bookmarking – arrrghhh! Then, just when you think you’ve got a handle on what you’re doing, something else pops up. Welcome to the fast paced world of the Internet. So what should you do when you’re first on Squidoo? Use the tools they give you first.

Squidoo have a number of great tools which will help you to become a success they include the discovery module, squidcasts, squidu and stats. Today I want to discuss stats because I think that what you find there and how you use it is very important.

Stats

If you don’t know where to find your stats then go to your dashboard and as you hover over a lens title you’ll see options underneath them like edit, label, stats, cast, health – probably not in that order, but you’ll get the idea. You just need to click on stats this will take you to your summary page. This shows you how many people have rated you, when the lens was created, current lensrank and highest lensrank achieved and how many days spent in the top 100.

It also mentions a few other things like clickouts and amount of times favorited and shows you a graph. Honestly I don’t spend much time on the summary page as I want to look at the lens in a little more detail.

There are four tabs on your summary page – summary, traffic, earnings and royalties. The one I want to take you to is the traffic one, this page is a huge help.

Traffic Sources

Looking under here you can see where your external traffic came from which is excellent

Traffic Sources
Source Visits
Google 10912
Referral 2879
Bing 1091
Direct 988
Yahoo 672
Discovery 161
Ask 46
MSN 43
AOL 9
AltaVista 1
AlltheWeb 1

This is an example and as you can see I’ve got traffic from a few search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Now when you get traffic from search engines you’ll see that next to it are the keywords and number of people who found you from those keywords.

Keywords

Now I used to add these as tags, but don’t do it! We’ll talk about tags in another post. I read somewhere on a lens or in Squidu that you should add these terms as keywords in your lens.....I don’t see why you need to as you’ve already been found from these terms. However what you could do (I haven’t, but it’s a good idea) is to open google and type these keywords in and see how high your lens ranks. Depending on where you are you could add them or not.

What do I see as important with these figures? What people are interested in. I look at my lens and think okay if I wanted to know about widgets and this lens came up would it answer the question. If it doesn’t you have a couple of options – change it so that it does address it or write another lens. To give you an example of mine, I wrote my Lady Gaga lens and after a while I was getting a lot of hits using the term Lady Gaga Tattoos in fact my lens was ranked higher for this term than it was for Lady Gaga alone. What did I do? Well if you’ve looked at my lenses already you can probably guess. I created a Lady Gaga’s Tattoos lens and linked from what I already had written in my Lady Gaga lens to this new lens. This new lens also linked back to my original.

I increased one top tier lens to two top tier lenses in this niche.

Referrers

Underneath this you have a list of Referrers which can also be illuminating – although to be honest these can sometimes be frustrating. I don’t belong to facebook so if someone links to me from there I can’t read what they’re saying. I’ve also been linked to from non-English written sites and again I don’t know what they’re saying.

If you come across a site/blog post that links to your lens and you like it then you can tweet it, stumble it or dig it and hopefully that will lead to more visits for you (but you’re not digging or stumbling a squidoo lens!). I think Greekgeek mentioned that on the forum one day and I’ve done it a few times since. Now don’t do that if you don’t really like the site that your link is on or your followers may think – what the??

Discovery Tool

Underneath this you get to the Discovery Tool and you can see where your internal traffic has come from……now there’s been some heated debate about the Discovery module since the lens design has changed and I’m going to address this in another post because I think it deserves it’s own discussion. It is very enlightening to see these stats though.

Clickouts

At the bottom are your clickouts. These will really help you to identify with your audience, you can see if they’re interested in buying (clicking on products) or if they’re after information (clicking on links) and they can also provide ideas for more lenses.

Another example is when a product was being clicked on by about 10% of my visitors to one of my lenses and yet other things were being clicked on by 1% or less. I created a new lens focusing more tightly on the product and a link for people to click on. Now the number of clicks to this product hasn’t noticeable decreased, but I am getting 4% clicking through to the other lens which has sold more of the product.

If you find that a number of people are clicking through to another site, check it out and see if you can add your link to that site as they obviously have something in common. This won’t always be possible, but I found that there have been some where I’ve been able to add a link on certain parts of the site for example I added a link to the NY Times which is a nice backlink to have even if it’s just for hubby to see and be impressed by (I didn’t tell him I’d manually added it, he thinks they found me!).

This lens is getting soooooo long I may have to stop there and discuss other benefits of the stats in another post. The long post will hopefully make up for the fact that after the excitement of the purple star yesterday I forgot to post then! But talking of purple stars (did you see how I did that, man I’m good :D ) if you’ve been lucky enough to get one then add a link to my plexo at Lou’s Purple Stars.