Take Advantage of the Flickr Module's Demise

As you're probably all well aware Squidoo's Flickr module has bit the dust.   Now if you have been using a lot of Flickr modules on your lenses then I'm sure you've been following some of the suggestions on Squidu about the changes and ideas for dealing with it.

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?

Sometimes it’s Good to Leave Squidooland!

I took my daughter out today and after the donut decorating (school holiday activity) we wandered around the mall killing time before our movie started. Just browsing at what was first and foremost in the stores was really good and gave me two different ideas for Squidoo lenses. The only problem now is finding time to do these!

I’m guilty of being tied to the computer like a clingy child is to their mother, unless Dexter’s on that is :) Sometimes it’s when you’ve had a day or even (dare I say it) a weekend away you can get your best ideas and inspiration. It’s also a great way to get photos.

I carry my digital camera everywhere with me now (since we brought this new one just before Christmas anyway) because I was sick of seeing awesome things and not having a camera handy. I just click away and if the photo’s no good I can delete it.

It means that I have a lot of photos ready to go onto Squidoo whenever I get around to writing particular lenses, but could they be earning in the mean time? I remember my Nan always telling my not to put all my eggs in one basket so I’ve been uploading a few of my photos to Zazzle. Today I sold my first actual product (I’ve only got referrals until now) which was a birthday card that featured a photo of a white pony I took while out on a Sunday drive with my family.

Will you be stepping away from the computer this weekend?

How I Met Your Mother - Part 1

I was watching How I Met Your Mother re-runs the other night and I thought I need a t-shirt that says Suit Up for my hubby. I decided to look and see if I could find any such tee and yes there one was, along with others. Then I had a look on Squidoo to see if anyone else had made a lens on this – no!

My current mission is to release the How I Met Your Mother Tees lens and then to make some more lenses to interlink and share the traffic love between them. Interlinking lenses can be great. I have some that share a lot of traffic backwards and forwards – just make sure that each lens can stand on its own.

My early lenses (and some of them are still guilty of this) were very broad, the most profitable ones are much more narrow in focus. Search google for How I Met Your Mother and you get 52,300,000 results, search for How I Met Your Mother Tees and you get 581,000. This means that it will probably be easier to get onto the first page of google. What about traffic? I hear what you’re saying, but you want people poised to buy coming to your lens as opposed to people after information don’t you?

I made a very focused ‘niche, niche’ lens which barely makes double figures every day, but the visits that it gets are people ready to buy and the ratio of visitors to buyers is really high – I’d rather have 100 of these lenses than 100 of my high traffic lenses. My high traffic lenses which get tens of thousands or thousands of hits every week actually have very few people who purchase and so the visitor/buyer ratio is low.

Does this mean you shouldn’t chase traffic? Not necessarily, you may manage to get a high visitor/buyer ratio on a lens that gets tens of thousands of hits a day in which case you’ll be rolling in it. What I have done with my high traffic lenses is watch the stats and based on the stats I have made new lenses with a more narrow focus – one of these has made an amazing number of sales.

Come back tomorrow (or subscribe to my rss feed) to see my lens and I’ll take you through what I’m going to do with it and my stats as they occur.

Welcome to Swimming With Giant Squids

I am a Giant Squid 100 club member and also a Rocket Mom. During 2009 I managed to achieve a number of my goals for Squidoo and I am now bringing home 3 figures a month…..let’s hope it continues or grows :)

A lot of people seem to be blogging about their Squidoo activities, I always felt that I wasn’t an expert, but you know what? I’m doing something right so I may as well tell you all my ‘secrets’ as someone referred to them as.

First of all I’m assuming that you all know what Squidoo is. Squidoo is a place where you can share information online for free and make some money in the process. Check out my profile if you like and you’ll see that you really can write about a wide range of things. There are some squid-don’ts however and they include porn and gambling and spam-saturated products.

I am going to take you through my Squidoo day and offer tips and advice along the way so if you want to come along for the journey then subscribe today!