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.

Do You Ping?

I ping every time I update a lens (well only once a day not if I’ve updated it several times in a row!!). A ping is the way you let search engines know you’re there it’s the equivalent of leaving your business card in someone’s letterbox when you call and they’re not home.

Sending out pings does help you to get your lenses indexed by google, but what about other sites?

I use squidutils to ping my lenses, but if I’ve done a blog post I often used to ‘forget’ to ping it, the same with my hubs and articles that I’ve written. The solution is to use another ping tool and the one I generally use is pingomatic. I’m not sure if it’s the best, but it was one I was recommended and I’ve found it works well.

I have seen pingoat recommended on squidu, but I haven’t tried it. So don’t just ping your lenses, ping everything :)

My Favorite Lens for Fresh Squid

When I first came to Squidoo I knew nothing about HTML or SEO or anything like that .....and you could tell! The lens that I would constantly refer to was Basic HTML for Squidoo, it’s one that I am constantly recommending to people and to be honest I still refer to it to this day. Now I’m pretty handy with my HTML these days, but sometimes I just can’t think how to do something that I haven’t done in a while so I pop over to Glen’s lens and if this one doesn’t have the answer his advanced or color one will do.

What has been your favorite lens since you began your Squidoo journey?

How Many Lensographies?

A while ago someone asked in Squidu whether they had enough lenses for a lensography and it got to making me feel guilty – I’m never up to date with my main lensography! I don’t think it’s ever to early to start one and that way you’ll get into the habit of updating it every time you make a new lens. My main lensography doesn’t have all of my lenses on it however, I am nudging 300 lenses so it would be quite an ask. What I have done is created several different lensographies and linked to them as well as some ‘lonely’ lenses.

How many lensographies do I have? Well to be completely honest I can’t remember as I’m writing this!! I just realized how many Hannah Montana lenses I had so I created a lensography for Hannah Montana as well which also included my hubs on Hannah Montana bedrooms. This is the key to interlinking when it comes to lensographies do not stick to just squidoo…..

One of my bigger lensographies is Lou’s Cocktail Lounge and this includes links to two different article sites, a blog, hubs as well as all of my Squidoo lenses. It’s great to link out to several different places and to have a home for everything cocktail related that I’ve done online.

I’ve quickly counted up at least 8 lensographies in my head and I know I need to do a few more. Once you have about 5 lenses in a particular niche I think it’s time to make a lensography to keep them all together. Using the interlinking lenses techniques that we’ve talked about before you can add your lensography to each of the lenses within that niche and you’ll find that you will increase your internal traffic within that niche.

How many lensographies should you have? There is no answer, have as many different lensographies as you have niches and you’ll find it a lot easier to promote your lenses in various different places.