Zazzle & Squidoo - A Match Made in Heaven

Are you using Zazzle products on your Squidoo lens?   If not you're missing out on an opportunity to make some extra money and I think we'd all like some of that :D

There are lots of different places that we can promote on our lenses to get extra money and at different times of the year different affiliates really seem to stand out to me, however Zazzle is great for consistent referrals which is why I think it's a great program for everyone to use.

Head on over and join Zazzle now and then visit this lens to learn How to Make Money on Zazzle Through Referrals.   I've put as much information as I could think of on this lens and I think you'll find it very valuable.

Now I'll admit some of my Zazzle income is from sales as I have a number of Zazzle stores, but the referral income used to be my main source of Zazzle income and is still going up so even if you have no artistic bone in your body Zazzle is worth joining.

Another cool thing about Zazzle is that they have square shaped stickers and square shaped posters which you can use for your introduction image as long as you have a clickable link underneath the image.   I use this code on my lens - 

<p style="width: 250px; float: left; clear: left;"><b> HERE PLACE THE A HREF LINK TO ZAZZLE </b></p>

This lines the text up underneath the image if you place it between your first and second paragraphs in the introduction text.

I've used some square Zazzle images on a few of my lenses to see how they go and although none of them have made the front page of Squidoo :( they have all shown sales of the items pictured so I'm really happy about that.

Now a quick note to apologize for not posting very regularly any more - personally a lot of different things have been happening in my life and Squidoo-wise ....... well I have felt a little disconnected from HQ for a while. 

Initially I couldn't log in to the official forum since they shut down Squidu and since the log in issue has been fixed I've looked in on occasion and even added a few comments, but it just doesn't feel like a good fit for me right now.   If you need advice from some long term lensmasters who will treat you with respect you might be interested in an alternative forum that I visit every day - http://squidu.yuku.com/ 

I'm not suggesting that you choose one forum over the other I'm just showing you an alternative so that you can see which is the best fit for you.   The best forum I ever found for Squidoo (Rocketmoms) no longer exists, but it just felt like home for the time it was around and I found I learned a lot from it which is why I think it's important for everyone to find the forum that feels right to them - no one can tell you which is best because we all learn differently.

I will try and start posting more regularly again as we head towards 2013 as long as the world doesn't really end on Dec 21st that is!

Farewell Zazzle Module & Lou's Purple Star Lensography

RIP Zazzle module - I must say that I'm quite happy that this module is gone as too many people were unaware that they didn't make any money with it.   It is a much better idea to use a text module for Zazzle products that way you can also earn a referral.

Think about this - someone likes the look of one of your products enough to click through to Zazzle, but once there decides to have a look around as it's not quite what they were after and what do you know they find the perfect item and purchase it from a different Zazzle store.

If they had clicked through the Zazzle module you wouldn't have made anything, however if they clicked through one of your links (that has your referral code in it) you would've just made yourself 15% commission - awesome!

While on the subject of farewells I've decided that it's time to say goodbye to my Purple Star Lensography - at one stage everyone seemed to have a purple star lensography (if they'd received a few of these awards), but I don't think that mine has any real value any more so I've decided to delete it.

Having decided to delete this lensography I thought I would just showcase my purple stars here kind of like their farewell tour!

I've been lucky enough to 8 purple stars and 4 of them were assignments from when I belonged to the now defunct RocketMoms.   Those four were -

Celebrity Ebayers - a funny lens written to showcase the caption module.

Pac Man Baking - I think the name says it all, I had been thinking about writing a lens like this for a little while and when we got given an assignment to write a decade's lens I knew it was time to make it!

Asian Inspired Cocktails - this was an assignment to write a beverage lens and the rest is purple star history!

The Devils Marbles - this is a lens about a place in Australia and surprisingly it wasn't written for a travel assignment!   We all had to submit an introduction to get everyone's juices flowing before writing the rest of the lens - lots of fun.

My other four purple star awards were for these lenses -

How to Earn Money on Squidoo - a how to lens that I think is pretty good and the purple star givers obviously agree!

Mocktails - a beverage lens and one of my earliest ones.

Barney Stinson for President - this was a funny lens that I wrote mainly to link to my HIMYM T-Shirt lens.

Lady Gaga Costumes - this lens says it all and was ranked number one on Google for over 2 years - now that scroogle is no longer around I'm not sure where it's ranking, but it did drop to number 2 just before scroogle shut down.

Thank you for letting me farewell my purple star lensography, I'll be back with some tips next week :)

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 -

New Tools For Me - Amplify & More Blogs!

Well I'm back in Australia and I've finished the A-Z Blogging Challenge on two of my other blogs so it's back to trying to get on track with earning money.   How are you all going with your targets for your income?

I have to say that my targets are not co-operating as they should, not because of Squidoo as much as my other online income.   My Google income was really building via my Hubpages, but it has taken something of a nose dive since the Panda Update.

Squidoo is still going well, although I haven't got as far with updating as I probably should have by now I really don't know where this year has got to - we're in May already!   It's time to revise what I need to do and get more organized again as I've been flitting from one thing to another this week and not really making the most of my time.

I did discover a lens by Word Custard called How To Use Amplify - I have ended up joining Amplify and I think it's a great tool to use, because it's so easy.    I'm not sure if I would've found it so easy had it not been for the great step by step instructions in the lens though.   This is great to promote any site you're using and I've been using it on Squidoo, Hubpages, Zazzle and even some blog posts.   Check out the lens first and then join up.

I've also finally looked at Posterous which I joined when Correen (clouda9) first mentioned it in July 2010.   There are so many sites that it really is impossible to keep track of everything :(   I have heard great things about this site, however, across a number of different sites so I decided to start using it - Lou16's Posterous - I'm basically just linking new things to it across all of my different endeavors as a way to build backlinks.   It's not very exciting, but it does provide you an insight into what I'm up to (if you're interested) as I do like to keep this site to Squidoo and not talk (too much) about other places where I am earning money.

If you Zazzle as well as Squidoo you may be interested in another site of mine - I've started up a Zazzle blog which also includes links to some of my Zazzle lenses.   Again this is still new so I'm not sure how it will evolve, but if you'd like to check it out it's Lou165 on Zazzle.

So there you have it, not alot of Squidoo tips today, but I did want to touch base with everyone and let you know what I've been doing

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.

Updating Lenses

How was your weekend? I seemed to be quite busy and yet still didn’t get everything done! We decided to get up and go to a Sunday market that we haven’t been to since I held a market stall there with my friend (we were making jewelry before Christmas 2008). Well it’s probably been the first time that we haven’t watched the news in a couple of days – there was a king tide due that morning and with a bit of a storm (thanks to Olga who was further up the coast) the sea was up onto the road in places and the market was closed! I did take my camera, but hubby was reluctant to stop until the rain stopped so I only got a couple of snaps :(

The most exciting part of the weekend occurred on the Saturday night however, my dd had been playing at the next door neighbors when she came running up our steps calling out something…..it turned out there was a baby koala in the tree outside of our houses. I took heaps of snaps – a couple of them are in my Zazzle store. We had to call the Wildlife Rescue team though because there was no sign of his/her mother. S/he was remarkably calm though merrily chomping her way through the ‘wrong’ leaves off of the ‘wrong’ tree. I don’t know if s/he was going through a rebellious stage or they’ve had to adapt their diet because of the change in habitat.

Now back to Squidoo. How often do you update lenses? There has been a discussion on Squidu about which lens was the oldest to be updated and mine has been a while, although not nearly as bad as if the question had been asked a month ago.

Now I don’t really know how often you should update them because when I update some it seems to give them a new lease of life, however others can tick along with nice traffic and only get updated a few times a year! During January, however, I was making a concerted effort to work my way through my lenses, just updating the tags and anything that was glaringly obvious. I was about a week into it when I realized that a number of my discovery tools were empty! There must’ve been a bug at some stage so I started checking those too.

When I do something little like that I also have a notebook and write down the lenses that need major work done – I do it that way so that I can keep working through my lenses and leave those until I can schedule enough time. The last time I totally revamped a lens it took me all day (and that was after I had made lots of notes in longhand as well and knew what I was planning). It was worth it however and I’m much happier promoting it.

The last week I’ve been spending a lot more time on Zazzle and Hubpages than on Squidoo because I’m trying to diversify my online income streams. I am working on a big project however which involves t-shirts. I have published a couple and have one in WIP, but I haven’t promoted them yet. I sometimes have an idea for a lens and I realize that I really need to break it up – once I’ve decided on how to break it up I work on the off-shoot lenses first – publish them, but don’t do any promotion until the whole thing is finished.

I promise I’ll reveal all later on this week, it’s just been really busy with pretty mundane ‘real life’ things getting in the way.

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?