Who Do You Write For? What's Your Niche?

This blog is all about increasing our income through Squidoo so it's good to stop and ask yourself the question - who do you write for? - as this can help you to refocus. I enjoy the flexibility of being able to write about anything I like on Squidoo and I still do! When I want to look at making money however I have to look at how I write. The lenses that make me money aren't ever going to win a pulitzer prize or be something I showcase to my mum, but they do their job.

This lens - Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments - is a lens that has made it into tier one with only one like. This is because it wasn't written for the Squidoo community it was written for one purpose alone - to sell Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments! It has also served another purpose as it adds some backlinks to hubpages where I have a number of Disney Princess hubs.

At this point of time this lens has the third highest amount of sales sitting on my dashboard, and that's only the ones showing from the module as I have also made some sales directly through Amazon. The one that is sitting in second spot has actually just got lucky with sales sprees, but this one has got there on it's own merit.

The majority of traffic to this lens comes from google although I do get some through my Christmas ornament lensography - Unique Christmas Ornaments. Until mid November every sale through this lens had been for something on the lens. What that tells me is that it's a niche lens and people are already thinking of buying before they land on my lens.

It's the most success that I've seen using the page break module on a lens and this has actually helped me to get on the front page of google for other keywords ie Cinderella Christmas Ornaments and also for keywords such as Sleeping Beauty Xmas Ornaments. Now I never usually use the word Xmas, but the title for each page break limits the number of characters you can use and guess what? The general public do put xmas into google!

Since the middle of November I have managed to catch a couple of sales sprees, but these have included one of the products on my page. So if you're looking at writing a sales lens do it and don't worry about garnering support from the Squidoo community instead work on your seo and get google to fall in love with it.

This also shows that page break lenses can be sales lenses, although I must admit this is the only one that I've had success with in terms of converting sales really well.

Another thing that this lens shows us is that it is important to write about a niche. If I had just written about Christmas ornaments I probably wouldn't have ranked well at all, in fact I think it's too broad to just have Disney Princess, but with the page break it's managed to break the lens into a more niche niche market ie Cinderella Christmas ornaments.

The other question in the title is What's Your Niche? Now I do have a number of one offlenses, but the most profitable of my lenses have been written around a niche. Using the lens above as an example I wrote my Unique Christmas Ornaments lens first and then have added more niche lenses to it. The Disney Princes lens is on this lensography as well as on the lens Christmas Ornaments for Children.

When you come across something that you love, think of other products that are similar and make lenses on them too interlinking them all. A fellow lensmaster and reader of this blog is Rhonda aka Pukeko she recently did a lens on penguins and before you know it she's produced lenses about Penguin iphone cases, penguin jewelry etc. This is how you develop a niche and it will be interesting to hear from Rhonda next Christmas to see how successful it's become. The other great thing that Rhonda did was to create a lensography - The Best Penguin Gifts Ever - which gives them all free backlinks and another thing that she could do is make sure that this lensography is included on each of her penguin lenses - she's already on the front page of google for penguin gifts.

Which niches have you developed and have they been successful? Let us know in the comment section. While you're doing that have a good think about who you're writing for.

The penguin picure is here thanks to Lord Biro.

Sales Don't Know Your Lensrank

This is just a quick post today as I was looking at my dashboard and thought I would share some thoughts with you. Hopefully everyone is seeing lots of earnings on their dashboard as we hurtle towards Christmas.

It seems that every few months there's a discussion about improving lensrank and I always think to myself it doesn't matter if you optimise your lens you can make sales with any lensrank. Of course the ironic thing is that when you do make a sale this increases your lensrank!!

I have stated publically before with lensranks of lenses that still show income, but I thought I would bring it up again in case anyone was worrying about it. As of today these are my lensranks of over 100,000 that have sales on them -

lensrank 109,571 pending $2.71
lensrank 115,779 pending $2.20
lensrank 283,207 pending $1.12
lensrank 113,107 pending $0.86
lensrank 183,445 pending $0.71
lensrank 168,097 pending $0.54
lensrank 201,069 pending $0.29

So my little bit of advice today is to stop spending time stressing on lensrank or trying to do things that may improve it and concentrate on building backlinks, promotion and making sure that your lens is loved by google, rather than fellow lensmasters who won't be buying from you anyway. It's always nice to get both lensrank and sales, but there is only a limited amount of spaces in the tiers so if you're after an income you need to focus on increasing sales instead.

The trick with these lenses is that they rank on the first page of google for their keywords, except for one of them and that one gets all of it's traffic from a higher ranking lens that is on the front page of google and also has a lot of organic backlinks. The people who click through to this particular lens do not click to look at it, they click to buy!

Chitika and Squidoo - Yes or No?

What are your thoughts on the Chitika ads at the bottom of our lenses? I hadn't really looked at my old lenses to see how they looked, but recently I have been making a number of iphone case lenses. At the bottom of these lenses I felt that the Chitika ads were quite jarring, but do they work?

I have had some success from Chitika on other sites so I'm sure that they must be bringing in good income for Squidoo, however I'm not sure if I can't do better. What do I mean? Well I checked my stats from the last payment and my tier one payment for Chitika was only 42c. I'm not concerned that I turned the Chitika ad off of my iphone lenses now, 42c really isn't a huge amount in my opinion.

However......Chitika knows what they're doing so perhaps I should try a little experiment.

I have taken the Chitika ads off of Lou's Online Jewelry Store and have added a text module at the bottom of each page (it's a page break lens) and I have put a banner for one of my affiliates along the bottom. Now this lens doesn't get a lot of visits, but I had just been looking at that affiliate (seeing a few of Kate Middleton's engagement rings being sold thanks to one of my hubs on British Royal Engagement Rings) at the time that the idea came to me.

I am going to check out a few other lenses and put this idea to the test - anyone care to join me? It will be interesting to see if we can get clicks to our affiliates that payout more than a mere 42c for a tier one!

Best Reviewer - A Site for Backlinks

I've just been sent an opportunity to try out a new site called Best Reviewer and it looks awesome! Basically if you have a niche like cupcakes and you have five different types of cupcake lenses ie chocolate, vanilla, banana, strawberry and orange then you go to Best Reviewer and write a 'review' on the top five cupcakes. Write a blurb on each individual type of cupcake and put the link to each of your individual lens at the appropriate section. Five backlinks for one article - what more could you want?

I think Best Reviewer looks like a cross between a top 10, 5, whatever number you want list (and we all know how successful they usually are) and a lensography!

I have seen a fellow lensmaster put a top 5 together where he only had lenses for 3 so he also linked to a government site and wikipedia so don't worry if you don't have enough lenses. You can link to articles, hubs, even zazzle designs as well as lenses.

Google Alerts - Keeping Up To Date

Do you use Google Alerts? This is a handy, free tool from Google. I use it on my username - lou16. It's handy to see if anyone blogs about you or links to any of your sites. I've found blogs that I think are interesting and they have linked to one of my lenses so I've tweeted them. I used to digg or stumble articles that linked to me (provided they were good and not cut and paste with a link that is), but as I don't really digg or stumble any more they just get either tweeted or a reciprocal link from one of my articles, lenses or hubs.

You can also use Google Alerts if you have a niche and use the alert for your primary keyword.

The Google Alert I mainly use though is my lou16 one and it was interesting to see which directories showed up first when I submitted a lens in my experiment last week - squidom showed up on an alert within hours!

How Do I Set Up A Google Alert?

It couldn't be easier, first go to Google Alerts
Next add your search terms and I leave it on everything, but you can choose to just be notified about blogs, news, videos etc. Decide how long you want your email to be and enter your email address.
Now you just wait for the alerts to appear in your mailbox.

On a personal note I'm back overseas next weekend, I'm hoping to have time to still post to this blog, but if I don't respond to questions it's just because I'm not at home and I will get back to you when I can.

Using Squidoo Directories for Backlinks

While organic backlinks are by far the best ones to get, don't dismiss the role that squidoo directories can play. There's always a lot of discussion online about the importance of backlinks. What's good and what's not and I am by no means an expert. I see a backlink as a recommendation, imagine you're sat at a table with a couple of your friends and there are also a couple of their friends present who you don't know as well. The topic turns to where you can buy the best Indian, out of all the recommendations you're going to allocate value to them. One of your friends has similar tastebuds to you so you take her recommendation more highly than the people who you don't know as well. Google also allocates it's own value to bakclinks, but unfortunately we don't know what Google bases it's values on.

The way I look at it, even if I didn't know the other people at the table very well if they ALL recommended the same place chances are I'm going to try it out - why wouldn't Google act the same way?

After using the interlinking lenses tricks that we've discussed previously, squidoo directories are probably one of the easiest ways to build backlinks. I've used various squidoo directories on and off and when I look at some of my older lenses I wonder why I wasn't more consistant with my practises!

This week I've been checking out the squidoo directoris to see what ones are still working. A couple of the directories aren't taking submissions at the moment, but all of the one's here are working fine as of posting -

Lensroll
Squidom
Isle of Squid
Squidup
Squidooenc.corank
Squidlog
Slinkset
Squidpoint
Squidirectory

My Experiment on Squidoo Directories

I have a lens that spent the 1st couple of weeks of this month in tier 1 before dropping into tier 2 (it has been a pretty consisten tier 2 lens for a while now). Most of it's traffic is referred with very little coming from Google. When I searched Google I found out why - it was at #53! I added the lens to 2 of the directories mentioned and the following day it was at #24. Two days after submission it's moved back into tier 1.....will the monthly average be enough? I added the lens to all bar 1 of these directories and it's now at #23 in google. It's also moved further into the top tier which I think is due to visits from members of the squidoo community that are involved in the squidoo directory and who have given the lens a thumbs up.

My conclusion - spend a few minutes adding your lenses to these squidoo directories. I'm waiting to see where this lens ranks for it's main keyword in a couple of weeks when the backlinks have had time to percolate and I'm expecting good things :)

So, do you use the squidoo directories?

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?