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!!