Let's Talk Lensographies!

Apologies for the long wait between posts, life getting in the way again and in a couple of weeks I'll be jetting back across the Tasmin to help out when dad get's out of hospital, but for now let's look at lensographies.

Fellow squidmaster Fluff coined the term lensography to mean a collection of one's squidoo lenses, but they've really taken on a life of their own since and can really help with increasing your income. Yes you heard right, increasing your income. Now I'm not talking directly here, rather indirectly because a lensography helps you to link together all of the lenses in a particular niche.

Basically you're providing backlinks to each of your individual lenses when you include them in a lensography. Now there's a lot of debate about the value of internal versus external backlinks, but these are so easy to produce why wouldn't you?? I also like the fact that if you're setting up a profile or a forum signature where you want to promote one of your niches you can just use your niche lensography - how simple??

I have a lot of lensographies which is why I've just published my Lensography of Lensographies and it's a great way to see the different ways in which I've approached making my lensographies. If you want to look at my feelings behind lensographies and why I believe that lensographies are such a good idea then you really should check out Why Should You Have a Lensography?

So how many lensographies do you have?

Do You Squidboo?

Squidboo is a template designed for Halloween and if you’re still making your Halloween lenses there is actually a Get Cracking contest on Squidu at the moment for people to make Squidboo lenses this month. Now I think that your Halloween lenses should have already been made by now, but I haven’t been able to resist joining in :)

If you have a number of lenses on Halloween already, but didn’t remember/think of or even know that Squidboo existed it’s well worth doing a Halloween lensography using the Squidboo template and linking to your other Halloween lenses. It’s basically another ‘door’ into Squidoo with it’s own searchable Squidoo Halloween index (another backlink) and the possibility of Bonnie (who organizes Squidboo Blast) blogging and tweeting about it.

HIMYM Tee Update

Those of you who have been long time readers of this blog will probably remember that we did an experiment on a new lens – How I Met Your Mother Tees. At the time the search function in Squidoo wasn’t working correctly or I would probably have chosen a different idea. At the time it was a bit of a bust not ranking well in Google and certainly not showcasing a great result. However……

I ended up just leaving the lens to it’s own devices and then on the weekend I noticed that it had made a sale…….it was also showing visits in the double digits (the past week has had 39 visitors). I then decided to google it and these are the results –

How I Met Your Mother Tee #6
HIMYM Tee #3
How I Met Your Mother T-Shirt #11
HIMYM t-shirt #9

So there’s always hope if you’ve set your lens up and have directed some interlinking and backlinking time may be the missing link.

I must admit that this has happened with other lenses in the past where they will suddenly start to peak for no reason except that they are older so there’s always hope :)

How Can I Increase My Squidoo Income?

As I’ve stated I really want to increase my Squidoo income from 3 figures to 4 figures a month by the end of this year. I’m not talking about including other affiliate income, just straight from Squidoo alone. How can I do this? Well I’ve never been too hung up on lensrank in the past because I’ve had sales from lenses that are ranked in the 300k and I think position in google and targeted visits are much more important, however the tier payments keep adding up.

Tier one paid out $20.72 last payday and up to $27.68 if you had all of the ads enabled which means that if you didn’t make a sale, but just had 10 in the top tier you’d make between $207.72 and $276.80. Maybe I should try and do both – increase my lensrank and also make sales, but do sales lenses ‘make it’ into the top ranks of Squidoo?

There are so many factors that go into lensrank it can be a hard one to conquer. Traffic is one factor, but last year I found that I had a lens that was on the same subject as a fellow squidooer and they were quite alike (not copied, it was just a popular subject). I had over 5 times the traffic and was on the front page of google……I’m not sure where the other lens was on google, but it wasn’t on the front page. This increased to just short of 10 times the traffic when a few events occurred. I made a number of sales on this lens and considering the traffic and google positions of the lenses I would make an educated guess that the other lens could not have made as much in sales. It was ranked above me however!

What else can we look at? I had lots of clickouts, not sure how many the ‘opposition’ had had. Backlinks for my lens were way up on the competition and then I looked at the star ratings. This was my mistake, I hadn’t been promoting my lens within Squidoo because I was getting plenty of traffic outside. The ‘other lens’ had received 10 times as many ratings as mine which had to be the key to the higher ranking.

BTW - I’ve been particularly fuzzy over which lens because it involves someone elses as well, not because I’m trying to hide anything.

What does this say to me? As well as doing all the usual things I think I have to start implementing my squidcast calendar that I have thought about in the past. I also think that I may have to start commenting on more lenses again, despite what I’ve said in the past. I also always keep up to date on squidu, but don’t always comment on discussions, obviously I should raise my profile there.

Let’s see if I can increase tier payouts as well as sales on my lenses, not forgetting that sales are said to increase your lensranking as well.

If you’re wondering how I know the traffic, backlinks and ratings a lens by someone else has it’s because I used Squidaholic. This is a great site to keep an eye on. It has so much information on it and can really motivate you when you don’t feel like setting up backlinks – if someone with a competing lens has 100 backlinks and you only have 5 wouldn’t that motivate you?

Are You Ready for Halloween?

If you’re hoping to make lots of sales for Halloween you really should have your lenses set up by now so that you can work on more backlinks and promoting your lenses in the lead up. Halloween is a huge money maker for a number of people on Squidoo and I know I did quite well last year as well – I’m hoping to do even better this year, but only time will tell.

If you have a few Halloween lenses then grouping them together should help and if you’ve already read up on linking strategies I’m sure you’re already doing this. I actually have two Halloween lensographies this year. Last year I created my Boo!ography using the squidboo template which is a good idea if you haven’t been using the squidboo template because it’s like another front door to your lens and it has it’s own top 100 (I think).

This year I’ve created quite a few extra costume lenses so I created a costume-ography as well. I decided to create this separately (although it’s linked to my boo!ography) because Halloween’s not the only time people wear costumes. I made the mistake on one of my first costume lenses in using the words Halloween costumes in the url as well as the title. If you keep the word Halloween out of the url, you can still put it in the title and then take it out of the title after Halloween has passed.

When I lived in the UK we used to dress up in fancy dress for New Years Eve, I then moved to New Zealand where everyone in the town I lived seem to dress up for Christmas Eve. Over the years events such as 30th, 40th, 50th etc birthday parties have gone through stages of becoming fancy dress events. Basically I want to be able to promote all of my costume lenses throughout the year and not make them just about Halloween………..don’t get me wrong Halloween is still the biggest sales time for most of these lenses, although one of them makes sales every week of the year – I’ll let you try and guess which one and why.

Shareasale, Linkshare & Clickbank on Squidoo

One of the great things about Squidoo is that it allows you to use different affiliates in order to make money. I use the text module to promote these products as a rule and it’s great in that I can just get the html from the affiliate and paste it straight into the module – how easy is that?

Out of these three Shareasale is definitely my favorite, it offers html for different sized products when you’re adding them to your lens. If what you want to link to doesn’t have an actual product link then you can build a custom link. I have done this on a number of lenses, my most recent one (I think) is one my Cows Christmas Ornament lens. I created the custom link for the cow in the wreath….the custom link is just a text link however so I uploaded the picture to my computer and put it in a text with big picture link. I used the custom link to link the picture as well as underneath the picture for a text link.

I haven’t used linkshare quite as much and consequently have had no sales what so ever from them. I originally joined linkshare specifically to sell one particular product as it wasn’t available through anyone else and the merchant turned me down! Not happy as I was getting thousands of hits a day, but it’s now on Amazon and I’ve sold some of the product so more fool the merchant!!! It does seem to have a few interesting products with merchants that have approved me, so I’m still trying it out.

Clickbank has got a bad reputation, but it does have a few products that are pretty good. I promote about 4 different products – 3 of them on Squidoo. I was going to stop using them, but I have quite a bit of money pending with them, unfortunately getting the first payment involves having so many sales through so many cards etc and too many people are using paypal!

I think if you’ve got time to sort through you can find some good products on clickbank, but it’s not one I generally recommend.

Which affiliate program is your favorite?

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?