Payday At Squidoo Just Around The Corner

How do I know that Squidoo is just about to send notification of payday? The amount in the "Pending" column of my dashboard just dropped, so that means Squidoo is preparing November's payout. All sales made on your various lenses at Squidoo over the month of November will be included with whatever ranking bonuses each webpage earned and that amount will be sent to you (as long as it all adds up to at least $10.00).

Maybe tomorrow, or the next day when you log into Squidoo and go to your dashboard you will notice the infamous Big Blue Box saying "It's Payday!" and how much will be sent via PayPal. Any sales that were made during the run-up to Christmas will still be sitting at the bottom of your pending columnand will be paid out next month. As always, Squidoo pays two months behind - this payout is for activity and rankings for November, and the activity and rankings for December will be paid this time next month. If what you have at the bottom of your pending column is a big fat $0.00 right now (hopefully not the case), the February payout will be just for December page rankings.

So if you are not satisfied with what you will be earning at Squidoo for December 2009, NOW is the time to begin working to improve your results for December 2010.  I know it does seem very far off, but Christmas can be an extremely lucrative time to have webpages up - just ask flowski, whose excellent lenses were at the top of the Squidoo rankings this year (see my post What Are The Top 10 Squidoo Christmas 2009 Lenses?) and he mentioned in the Squidu discussion forum that his top page had passed it's one millionth visitor! Can you imagine what his pending total must be for Christmas?

Christmas 2010 does seem a long way off, but you need to do two things now:

• build Christmas webpages, and
• get them ranked in Google and elsewhere

Don't try to slap together two or three lenses in November hoping to generate a ton of sales. Do the work now. That's what I've been doing. I have been putting together several different webpages that will A) rank well at Squidoo over the oncoming Christmas holiday season, and B) will generate even more sales at that time. I did okay sales-wise this past Christmas, but I think I can do so much better and so can you, with a little bit of preparation.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing how much money I made at Squidoo for November. I have a general idea of course, but it's getting the actual notice I like.

Squidoo Land ~ Xmas Holiday Sales Are Up

I don't know about you, but Christmas has been pretty good so far for my Squidoo lenses. I'm getting a nice little bump in sales at Amazon on items sold through my webpages as people search for stuff to buy to fill little Billy and little Amber's Xmas stockings. Something that always amazes me is when items are purchased that have absolutely nothing to do with the content on my page. I put something that's appealing to someone reading my content and they click and go to Amazon and the visitor ends up buying something TOTALLY unrelated to my page.

People seem to get to Amazon and then just bounce from page to page on that site and end up buying books and other items that are light years away from what I recommend. One visitor actually bought some childrens' books that I have been contemplating doing a lens about. The titles turn up in the royalties section of the stats section of my lenses and I am amazed at the coincidences.

As always, I don't get any Christmas holiday themed pages completed in time to really do well when the big rush begins, but I do okay (thank you very much) but just like last year I'm kicking myself for not having completed a webpage (or three!) what will help people making their holiday purchases. What I plan on doing is creating 3-4 webpages at Squidoo after the new year so that they will be open for business NEXT year and will be ranked nicely both on Squidoo and Google. What I'll need to do is to try to do a little more optimization on those lenses than I usually do my Squidoo lenses (and my non-Squidoo webpages) that will draw a greater share of traffic in a holiday spending mood.

I've seen that there are many first-rate holiday pages on Squidoo that have a LOT of work done on them and they have a corresponding healthy pagerank both with Google and Squidoo. Of course, simply have a high rank a Squidoo gives each high-ranking lens a nice little bump in revenue each month (and that does add up at the end of the year), but if you are doing this to make some extra money, it's the sales that you need to be concentrating on. Now, not everyone makes pages at Squidoo and elsewhere just to generate some money, but it is very nice to have a few extra coins to jingle in your pocket - especially during the holiday season.

Having pages up and drawing traffic (and sales!) long before Christmas is what I plan on doing in 2010. What I should be doing is making new lenses with a holiday theme each month and even if they do not rank very highly in May or June is nothing to be worried about. My plan is to increase the sales off my pages at Christmas 2010 and rather slipping into panic mode because I am underwhelming visitors to Squidoo who want to buy presents this year, what I need to do is look down the line. Creating excellent content that will draw visitors looking for Halloween, Christmas, and New Years' is what we all should be striving to do.

What I plan on doing is to start making several webpages about Valentines Day and Easter (amongst others) so that went them - and they will visit, you have the content they are searching for.