Yesterday was PayDay at Squidoo and I was very pleased with the results of the work I had been doing. At Squidoo you are paid usually around the 15th of each month and most find out by logging into Squidoo and going to their dashboard where the infamous Blue Box appears stating how much you were paid.
I have broken down how people on Squidoo get paid in previous articles so I won't go into a lot of detail except to say that one of the methods of making money online at Squidoo is by how your webpages rank against those of other Squidoo members. There are about 2 million pages on Squidoo these days (only about 650,000 when I started 2 yrs ago!) and some are REALLY bad while others are top notch work. I would suggest you visit as many of the better ones as you can to find out the level of quality of the best ones.
In order to make money through Squidoo Lensrank, your webpage needs to rank at about 85,000 or higher. That is not always easy, but as always, the cream rises to the top. The Lensrank scale is divided into 3 "Tiers":
Tier One: Pages ranked from number 1-2,000.
Tier Two: Pages ranked 2,000-10,000.
Tier Three: Pages ranked 10,000-85,000.
That is the webpage's average pagerank over a month's time. You can find out what your page's lensrank is by going to the stats page on you dashboard for each of you webpages. Because there can be a lot of fluctuation because of traffic, sales and other factors, your page may move up or down in the lensrank scale. If you've made a page and it floats up into the top tier for a few days (good job!) but then slips back into tier 2 or 3, it will be your average rank for the month that your Squidoo pay will be based on.
Also, you are paid monthly on Squidoo but there is some delay in when you will see any money in your account. We were just paid on December 15th for our Lensrank (and sales) from October. So if you had been on Squidoo for some time and had some successful Halloween pages that ranked well, your earnings for October were paid this month. November will be paid in January and December will be paid in February.
The payouts for this last payday were of course based on your average October Lensrank as follows:
Tier One: $24.98
Tier Two: $4.25
Tier Three: $0.21
Added to that are InfoLink payments which were paid out as follows:
Tier One: $5.80
Tier Two: $0.99
Tier Three: $0.05
There is also the possibility of getting some Chitika advertising payments:
Tier One: $0.17
Tier Two: $0.03
Tier Three: $0.00
So, theoretically for each ranking webpage you could have made money on Squidoo as follows:
Lensrank + InfoLink + Chitika
Tier One: $24.98 + $5.80 + $0.17 = $30.95
Tier Two: $4.25 + $0.99 + $0.03 = $5.27
Tier Three: $0.21 + $0.05 + $0.00 = $0.26
And that is not including any sales you may have made through Amazon, eBay or other affiliates. On a personal note, this was my highest ever payout from Squidoo and I am quite pleased with the results I have been getting with the website and look forward to next month's payout and especially February's which will include Christmas sales. I am pretty sure it will be a personal best as I have already done 4 times as much in sales this December compared to last year.
If you want to take a look at the Squidoo Forum posts for those people talking about their Squidoo earnings, here's a link: Squidu Forum
Showing posts with label Squidu Forum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Squidu Forum. Show all posts
Changing One Webpage To Appear More Businesslike: How I Did It
I published a webpage about books on Squidoo called Current Bestselling Books. It is a new page, just created this September 13th, so the traffic is very slow. This has given me time to re-define the webpage to be a more pleasant experience for any visitor. It's not the prettiest of pages but I think it will do for now. One good aspect of making pages on Squidoo is that you have so many options as to the layout of your webpage you can make your page almost to any design you can think of. But within the module system Squidoo has set up.
I have chosen to highlight a number of books available on Amazon.com
. The page itself is more like a bookshelf that I place books for sale and either people buy that book or another or they move on to other websites. A very simplistic view, but you should try to look at it from that perspective. On your Squidoo webpages you provide visitors with the same options - stay and buy or go ("thanks for stopping by! Tell your friends about my website" I yell as you leave.
My plan is to have a note about each book which will give the page a bit more stickiness rather than just having the books themselves all lined up. Having short reviews should help get the page indexed by the search engines and by updating frequently, there will be some positive movement in the PageRank. This obviously won't happen overnight because this is a very competitive niche. I have no illusions of this page making a ton of money over night. It doesn't work that way - you have to put in some work beyond just putting your page on the Internet.
You have to look at what any visitor to your webpage is looking for. Hopefully if someone has come to my page I am hoping they are looking for a book to purchase and or just to brouse the selection. You can have your selection remain static, or you can go in and change things up. New items, move some that are not getting any clicks out or demote them to a different area of the page. You haven't removed the item, but simply placed it in a less conspicuous place - thereby freeing up room for other items to be shown. Just your basic retail.
That's what I'm doing and the updates help bring in more people to check out the page. Currently it is mostly fellow Squidoo people and the occasional person from search engine traffic. Obviously if I am going to make this page any kind of success, I need to increase the number of visitors. One of the things I am doing is writing this blog post showing how I am actually working to make this page succeed. Another is having my webpage's address in my signature when I leave messages in the forum at Squidoo. It's called the Squidu Forum and you will learn a lot about making a great lens on Squidoo by going and reading as much as you can. The go back again.
Also I posted in the "Critque My Lens" section of the forum and some people gave it the thumbs up that they liked it. Those were from people already on Squidoo. Those not on Squidoo can't say they like the webpage except in the comments section at the bottom, which are always appreciated. If you think I'm missing something let me know so I can address it.
Finally I am looking for backlinks that will help the page rank a little. This means moving a little closer to the top of the heap when the search engines which means - more traffic, more sales, more success - which is why we're here. I will be reporting on how this little project progresses.
I have chosen to highlight a number of books available on Amazon.com
. The page itself is more like a bookshelf that I place books for sale and either people buy that book or another or they move on to other websites. A very simplistic view, but you should try to look at it from that perspective. On your Squidoo webpages you provide visitors with the same options - stay and buy or go ("thanks for stopping by! Tell your friends about my website" I yell as you leave.My plan is to have a note about each book which will give the page a bit more stickiness rather than just having the books themselves all lined up. Having short reviews should help get the page indexed by the search engines and by updating frequently, there will be some positive movement in the PageRank. This obviously won't happen overnight because this is a very competitive niche. I have no illusions of this page making a ton of money over night. It doesn't work that way - you have to put in some work beyond just putting your page on the Internet.
You have to look at what any visitor to your webpage is looking for. Hopefully if someone has come to my page I am hoping they are looking for a book to purchase and or just to brouse the selection. You can have your selection remain static, or you can go in and change things up. New items, move some that are not getting any clicks out or demote them to a different area of the page. You haven't removed the item, but simply placed it in a less conspicuous place - thereby freeing up room for other items to be shown. Just your basic retail.
That's what I'm doing and the updates help bring in more people to check out the page. Currently it is mostly fellow Squidoo people and the occasional person from search engine traffic. Obviously if I am going to make this page any kind of success, I need to increase the number of visitors. One of the things I am doing is writing this blog post showing how I am actually working to make this page succeed. Another is having my webpage's address in my signature when I leave messages in the forum at Squidoo. It's called the Squidu Forum and you will learn a lot about making a great lens on Squidoo by going and reading as much as you can. The go back again.
Also I posted in the "Critque My Lens" section of the forum and some people gave it the thumbs up that they liked it. Those were from people already on Squidoo. Those not on Squidoo can't say they like the webpage except in the comments section at the bottom, which are always appreciated. If you think I'm missing something let me know so I can address it.
Finally I am looking for backlinks that will help the page rank a little. This means moving a little closer to the top of the heap when the search engines which means - more traffic, more sales, more success - which is why we're here. I will be reporting on how this little project progresses.
No Updates At Squidoo For 3 Days! What's Up?
What the heck is up with Squidoo? There's been NO UPDATE since Thursday, April 23rd and no word from the powers that be as to what is causing the problem. I've been with Squidoo for a fair stretch now and I have seen a day go by without the Squidoo lensranks getting updated, but usually they do tell you what is going on to some degree. This is getting ridiculous. No update Friday, okay. No update Saturday hmmm... Now no update on Sunday ??
Basically I would like to hear something from Squidoo HQ - even a "please stand by" or technical difficulties, or something. It almost feels like when they left work Thursday night, every one called in sick the next day and forgot to turn on the auto-updating machine. Or, the weekend crew didn't have the keys to get into Squidoo Headquarters. "I thought you had Seth's phone number." "No, I thought you had it." Can't you just picture a group of techno-geeks with worried faces tugging at a locked door trying to get into work?
Actually, I don't think it was anything like this, but there is a little frustration with the disturbing lack of any feedback to questions being raised about the problem over at the Squidu Forums. Meticulously tracking the lensranks of all my lenses is not something I do on a daily basis, but I do check in to see where they are from time to time. If you are at Squidoo and just looking at the site from a money angle, obsessing over your lensrank is just not the way to go. If you want to reach a higher level on money there, you need to look beyond lensrank. Work on promoting some sales from your lenses.
One thing about this lengthy period of time without an update, if you work on your higher ranked lenses, there's a chance that when the update finally happens, that a couple of your lenses might get booted down in the lens ranks. Several Squids have complained about this in the past and I think it may have happened to some of mine in the past. It does seem that at least once a month there is one day in the month when the lens ranking update gets skipped. Sometimes that period stretches to a couple of days. I haven't seen it happen for 3 straight days and will be very interested in checking in Monday afternoon and seeing not just that there has been an update, but some sort of an explanation is provided. And at least some lip service that HQ is trying to prevent it from recurring.
Meanwhile I've been outside, away from my computer, trying to catch a bit of sunlight and working on replacing my pasty white complexion with a slightly less pasty countenance by digging up my garden. Need to get the veggies in soon and getting away from Squidoo for a day or two may not be such a bad thing. But while I was shovelling you can bet that I've been turning over a few lens ideas about gardening. "How To Grow A Bigger Tomato" or "What's A Good Fertilizer For Small Back Yard Gardeners?" That sort of thing. I'll add them to my Squidoo notebook.
Basically I would like to hear something from Squidoo HQ - even a "please stand by" or technical difficulties, or something. It almost feels like when they left work Thursday night, every one called in sick the next day and forgot to turn on the auto-updating machine. Or, the weekend crew didn't have the keys to get into Squidoo Headquarters. "I thought you had Seth's phone number." "No, I thought you had it." Can't you just picture a group of techno-geeks with worried faces tugging at a locked door trying to get into work?
Actually, I don't think it was anything like this, but there is a little frustration with the disturbing lack of any feedback to questions being raised about the problem over at the Squidu Forums. Meticulously tracking the lensranks of all my lenses is not something I do on a daily basis, but I do check in to see where they are from time to time. If you are at Squidoo and just looking at the site from a money angle, obsessing over your lensrank is just not the way to go. If you want to reach a higher level on money there, you need to look beyond lensrank. Work on promoting some sales from your lenses.
One thing about this lengthy period of time without an update, if you work on your higher ranked lenses, there's a chance that when the update finally happens, that a couple of your lenses might get booted down in the lens ranks. Several Squids have complained about this in the past and I think it may have happened to some of mine in the past. It does seem that at least once a month there is one day in the month when the lens ranking update gets skipped. Sometimes that period stretches to a couple of days. I haven't seen it happen for 3 straight days and will be very interested in checking in Monday afternoon and seeing not just that there has been an update, but some sort of an explanation is provided. And at least some lip service that HQ is trying to prevent it from recurring.
Meanwhile I've been outside, away from my computer, trying to catch a bit of sunlight and working on replacing my pasty white complexion with a slightly less pasty countenance by digging up my garden. Need to get the veggies in soon and getting away from Squidoo for a day or two may not be such a bad thing. But while I was shovelling you can bet that I've been turning over a few lens ideas about gardening. "How To Grow A Bigger Tomato" or "What's A Good Fertilizer For Small Back Yard Gardeners?" That sort of thing. I'll add them to my Squidoo notebook.
