Showcased!

Today was a great day for my lenses! When they refreshed I had 4 in the top 1000, and one in the top 100!! Yesterday only 1 of these was in the top 1000, and 2 of them in the top 2000. Though going to see whether others were reporting such a shakeup of rankings on squidu, I found most people reporting slides the other way. Gil jumped in the thread to state - “…in the middle of some optimizations to minimize the effect that lensrank recalculation has on site performance every morning. It looks like there are a few minor bugs and I’m working to sort them out now.” So we expect things to return to normality tomorrow. Though it wasn’t surprising to see so many people up in arms about their lensrank falling, I guess people are just in the habit of chasing lensrank!

Then I got a real nice comment on my,  currently, top lens about Green Computing, informing me that it was the featured lens over at the Giant Squidoo Community Showcase! My first ever award or acknowledgement for any of my lenses! I was over the moon about it!

The Importance Of Image

Stock Image of Sunrise

IMAGE IS EVERYTHING!

Content comes second!

Agree?

If you want to keep your reader on the page, or even attract new readers, you need to provide some eye-candy to keep them on the page. Plain text is such a turn-off when it  comes to presenting anything, and it doesn’t matter how good or important the text is, unless it’s an academic text or novel. images help keep readers on the page and give readers a more pleasant and memorable experience than just plain text would.

Images get visits!

Well tagged images will also increase your search engine ratings as well as bringing in visitors searching for images associate with your tags. Even If you are not using your own hosting or html to display  images, simpluy giving them an appropriate name will help your ranking rise. For example a lens about ‘widgets’ will do a lot better if the uploaded photos are called widget.jpg, bluewidget.jpg, widgetwoman.jpg. If you are using html use of the alt attribute will also help if you use an appropriate description. SemperFidelis has written an entire lens about how to optimize images to get Traffic From Image Searches.

Where do I get Images to use on my Website or Lens?

Many people will just blindly steal images from others by  finding  them on Google Image Search. This has 2 big drawbacks – Firstly it is theft and you could be prosecuted for stealing, or improper use of copyrighted images. Secondly, it can take for ever searching google to get the image you  want and then you  have to take the trouble to seek permission for it’s use if you wish to legally use it.

The other alternatives are often sited as being sites such as Photobucket or Imageshack, both of whom provided a limited free account for you  to upload images to so they are hosted online and can be used elsewhere online. Many  members actuallymake their uploads free for others to embed in their websites.  The disadvantages of this are that unless you are paying a subscription, you  may well use your allocated ‘bandwidth’ by too many people viewing your images, either on your own pages, or becauseyou enabled others to embed them elsewhere too. When you reach your capped limit your images will show with a simple placeholder image informing the viewer that the image is currently available.

A similar program to photobucket and imageshack is Share-A-Pic, there are no restrictions on bandwidth here at all. You also can accumulate credits for people viewing your images. The disadvantages are that the code provides a thumbnail of the image and only clicking on it will reveal the bigger image, also viewers will be subjected then to pop-up advertising. Though that said it is still great for many uses.

But Where To Get Professional Stock Images?

Good Question! You  don’t want to be spending time uploading and coding an image to appear to the public if it is amateurish. So, the solution is to look at Royalty Free Stock Photos. These are widely available online and companies like iStockPhoto and 123RF specialise in providing millions of stock images for you to browse and most are avialble for under a dollar in price. 123RF even have a huge range of stcok images for free download, when chcecking this evening I discovered they  have oer 18,000 currently available. From Stock Photos of Lions, to Stock Images of Lice, all subjects are catered for.

Recently I have been checking the free stock images on 123RF on a weekly basis and seeing  which images are available for free. With several hundred provided daily I usually find 2 or 3 great images I can use to go and spice up a few of my lenses. The free images are provided by members who usually earn a percentage of the sales of their work release a number of free downloads for a period of 30 days in the hope that it will bring more traffic to their actual part of istockphoto.

Search Engine Lovin’

I’ve been watching traffic to one of my lenses on Squidoo the last  couple of days with amazement as the number of visits suddenly started skyrocketing. All this traffic was suddenly coming from search engines, both yahoo & google! Never before have I experienced such loving from both search engines at the same time, and such good loving too! This lens has experienced a dramatic rise which I can’t really explain, suddenly receiving hundreds of hits a day! It was first published back in Feb ‘08 and has had some moderate success with steady visits and some regular commission, but no real spikes in traffic in all that time!

I knew nothing about the subject and can’t really recall the inspiration that lead me to create the lens to begin with. I knew I was aiming for, was very much a niche, on a topic I knew nothing about! The creation and setting up a few ebay  feeds I recall was the work of one evening, probably 3 or 4 hours research, writing, creating ebay RSS Feeds (so I get 100% of the commission ), and adding a few books from amazon (sharing the commission with squidoo on these cos they do provide a great site! ).

I published it the same evening, and submitted it to a few of the usual places, such as Lensroll, The Isle of Squid, Squoogle. I then sat back and watched it get, what I consider to be, moderate traffic, for what I had thought to be quite an extreme niche, and the occasional sale, both from amazon and ebay.

This sudden rise in visits into the 100’s a day has stunned me, it has had more visits in the last 72 hours than in has seen in the last 6months!

Sometimes I can only think that karma smiles on you and the search engines are one way of receiving good karma!

What was the lens? It’s quite an odd one, and some may even be disturbed by the subject, if they’ve never come across these before. Have you ever seen a doll so lifelike it could pass for being a real human baby or infant? They are called Reborn Babies and you should have a look at  how lifelike they are, how popular they are and how much they sell for! I’m still a little stunned, and slightly disturbed that this lens is showing as my number one on my profile as I’m not at all sure it’s suited to any of my other lenses at all, perhaps I should try and sell it whilst the traffic is so good! Anyone want to offer me a couple of hundred dollars for it?

I’m already seeing a very nice proportion of click-outs to ebay and amazon so am expecting the lens to earn very well and start showing results on ebay and amazon within the next few days. And if you look below you’ll see the squidoo royalty payout hasn’t been the best, though I feel it stands a good chance of staying in the top tier for this month!

Date	Type	Amount
9/8/2008	Cash	$1.76
8/7/2008	Cash	$5.45
7/10/2008	Cash	$0.07
6/4/2008	Cash	$0.07
5/7/2008	Cash	$1.42
4/8/2008	Cash	$1.53
Total		$10.30

So, here’s to those unusual niches!

Chasing Lensrank On Squidoo

This subject is something that constantly bugs me! Why is it that I feel good when my lens is ranking high and not so good when I see it start to slide? Why does this bother me when I should in fact be more interested in overall traffic and actual affiliate earnings of a lens, rather than some arbitrary ranking of popularity?

This is a subject that has come up on squidu.com, the squidoo community forum, time and time again as people get hypnotised by the bright lights of lensrank! In the beginning sufferers will be proud of having created a lens that ranks well, then they’ll ponder on how to increase it’s rank just a little. Then when they see it slip a few hundred/thousand places over a couple of days, they update it and add to it again. This then shows another jump in lensrank and the frown is replaced by the smile. Yet their is still a twinkle in the eye wondering what the magic ingredient to get it to go up and stay up. This is where logic leaves and obsession takes over!

I posted this in reply to a question on squidu, ‘Trying to break into the top 1000 – any constructive critisism / ideas’ an innocent enough question as 12months ago I was asking the same sort of questions!!

If it is just the top tier payout you may need to think about how many hours obsessing over lensrank divided by the payout to get the hourly rate you are willing to work for. Though if you are hoping to earn through people clicking on your affiliate links and earning you money, why are you worrying about lensrank, when you should be looking for quality traffic instead! Social Networking bookmarking may bring you some traffic, so may using stumbleupon, though do you just want a crown of people crashing through your lens wearing out the carpet following the ‘buzz’, or would you be happier with a few visitors who were interested in the subject and prepared to interact with the topic and even possibly buy something to earn you some money?

Just Build Quality Interesting Lenses – If the search engines don’t pick up on it, it’s likely their are either few people interested in the subject, or the net is swamped with other sites on the subject.

One of my early lenses did really well the first few weeks, and I kept tweaking it, adding to it, rearranging it, just to see a small surge in lensrank followed by a slide. The amount of time I was putting into keeping it up and getting traffic to it was getting to be crazy. Then I earned my first affiliate sale from it and it was a flashbulb moment! Why am I chasing lensrank when I should be chasing traffic and potential customers?? I only update this lens every few months now, yet traffic to it varies between 50 & 200 visitors a week. It doesn’t earn a lot of commission, but usually a dollar or so every other month. Since creating it in July last year squidoo has paid me about $30 for it, and I have earned maybe the same from my own affiliate links. Not megabucks, but if I had 30 lenses like this that performed as consistently – I’d be pretty happy!

This inspired me to blog here a little about the lens I mention and provide some more analysis of the stats

Here we see that the lens has stayed in the top 10,000 for most of it’s life, with a good start it did make it as high as 107, but dispite spending a month adding content and working on getting links and traffic I could not get it higher and each slide in lensrank was bigger than the last. So after a month I gave up and moved on to spend time creating other lenses.

This image shows earnings from squidoo over the last year for this lens. $30 may not seem like much considering all the work I put in, but I have strong faith that it will perform as well over the next year and only require an update every few months to maintain it’s average traffic and click thru’s. This also does not show how much I have earned from affiliate links, which I haven’t an exact figure on, but having looked at my amazon figures for sales of related products, as most of the amazon links in this lens are to my own amazon affiliate account, and a few sales of cafepress items I created specifically for this lens, I made another $60 at a rough guess.

Whilst this one shows where the traffic is coming from. Mostly it’s google as you’d expect, though there is also a good proportion of referrals from various sources. In it’s lifetime this lens has received about 2,200 visits, with 1200 clickouts, which is a pretty good ratio in my opinion. Though this has inspired me to check the format of some of my amazon links as this is the mos popular destination of those clicking out and the numbers don’t add up to my amazon clicks!

So I hope this info will provide encouragement to those who are devoting time to achieving good lensrank, and that maybe instead of chasing lensrank, which is a pretty arbitrary form of peer approval, you’ll spend your time chasing good traffic and creating more content.

There is a phrase that springs to mind here, that may help you remember to move on if you don’t get the success you’d hope for. It applies in particular to having chosen a subject matter that is either completely over-subscribed with just too much competition, or so niche that only 6 people a month will actually search keywords on your lens.

You can’t polish a turd!!

Going Niche & The Top 100!

I’ve been slacking a little on squidoo lately, real life has kinda taken over and with Glastonbury in a couple of weeks and lots to do before then I don’t think this month will be very productive. Hopefully I’ll finish off a few half completed lenses and maybe make one or 2 newer smallish ones.

Well, since I last posted I made it into the top 100! Yes, the top 100 lenses overall, and has peaked at #5 in it’s category! I got quite a buzz out of that, being as it is the first time I’ve made it into the top 100 since starting on squidoo nearly a year ago. I had a few come close, but none really stuck, and those that did get high took a lot of work re-editing and adding content regularly. In fact it wasn’t even regular at one point it was almost obsession!

Then the light dawned on me! Why was I chasing after some arbitrary peer reviewed ranking? Because I wanted to be successful! Yes, but what is success? I thought quite hard about this for a moment and it came down to a choice of two things – Praise and respect of ones peers, and earning some money. Now I didn’t totally discount the first, getting some respect and praise from your peers is pretty important, but the primary objective had to be making money for me. So why was I bothered about spending ages tweeking my lenses to get a few points higher in lensrank? Well, I decided then that for me lensrank would just be something that held some mild interest and could be fun. Though not forgetting that lensrank does sorta turn into money when the revenue is handed out once a month, but this to me is just a small bonus compared with the potential of affiliate earnings.

So, what got into the top 100? I can hear you all muttering! The lens that did was not a commercial lens as far as I was concerned, it was a How-To Guide, which explained how to use Ebay RSS Feeds for Earning Commission. This lens is a couple of months old and only occassionally tweeked, yet almost since publishing it has been in the top 1000 overall, getting to the 150’s now and then. Why did it suddenly shoot up? Who knows! The traffic stats show me there is a few more visitors at the moment, but not an amazing leap. There’s no real big traffic from referrers, so it hasn’t been picked up by a forum, blog or website that’s sending large traffic volumes. It’s got no squidoo affiliate links, which is often cited as a surefire way of a jump in lensrank if any sales are made. The only thing I am seeing on the stats is a lot of people have starred it and favorited it, but not a significant leap, the only oddity is that a lot of traffic does not seem tohave a referrer and musthave then been bookmarked onto the viewers browser.

Maybe too much of an over analysis of the stats, but I do tend to get lost in them!

What’s this got to do with Niche?

Well everything above was more to do with getting a top 100 lens eventually! This bit is about Niche Marketing -

Having made the decision not to chase lensrank and to go for more esoteric articles that may not bring much traffic, but will hopefully convert a higher number of visitors to customers! So far this is working well, I’m earning probably 10-15 times more than what squidoo give me through their revenue sharing scheme. Though it did take me quite a few months to get to this position.

Where I’m really starting to have some success is by choosing a niche that hasn’t been covered on squidoo before. Banging together some info, pics, links and then adding some affiliate links to it. Theinspiration for these niches is quite random, sometimes a thought will occur to me whilst out shopping, more often though it is either something I’m interested in, or I find a new advertiser on one of the affiliate networs and decide ‘Hey, I can do a lens on this!’

Just the other day was a perfect example of the latter. Whilst looking at cj.com, I saw a new advertiser with an unusual name. So when clicking on it and discovering it was about selling surf fashion I applied and was accepted quickly. The end result was a lens about surf fashion and as well as the CJ advertiser, I could implant plenty of ebay modules too. The result was a lens about Boardshorts

I do intend to create more of these micro niche lenses in the near future, possibly choosing ones that will link in with previously created lenses. Whilst it may be only one or 2 sales a month from a lens, the more created, the sooner it is when everyday you earn a commission!

The most recent addition to my stable of Micro-Niche lenses was The Boardshorts Superstore, a lens about an online emporium selling a huge range of surf gear and fashion items.

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