I sometimes feel like I say this all the time, but I wanted to point out once again that I make most of my money from Squidoo on lenses that are not in Tier 1. As a matter of fact, I have pretty much given up trying to keep lenses in Tier 1. If they are there, great. If not, I don’t sweat it. This is because the competition is so fierce for Tier 1, it is getting harder and harder to stay there. Therefore, I spend my time on what I can achieve.
What I can achieve are sales from my lenses no matter what Tier they are in. Some of my lenses float up and down in the Tiers depending on time of year. The ones that move the most are holiday lenses, but there are other seasonal lenses that float as well. These can be lenses that are about education, gardening, home improvements, or other topics that people tend to do at specific times of year. For instance, where I live, high school proms tend to be in the spring, and traveling is in the summer, and mid winter. Therefore, they have seasons.
I have been slowly working on creating an evergreen collection of lenses that continue to pay out all year, but not every lens will do this. Since I tend to create lenses in groups, some groups will rise in traffic during the beginning of the year, while others will rise in traffic in the fall.
So I treat lensrank money as a bonus each money, and spend my time working to grow my sales income.
Sales from Squidoo lenses can be achieved within Squidoo through sales modules Amazon, Ebay, or CafePress. You can also achieve sales through your own links to affiliate companies or your own company via a Squidoo lens. I do both, and both are quite successful. It does take time to build sales, and quantity of lenses. If you are lucky, you might have one lens that will earn you a lot of money, but most people have earnings that are spread out over a number of lenses, and that build over time. You will find that some lenses never end up making much money, while others do, and you may not ever know which ones will until after they do.
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Tier one seems impossible to achieve at Squidoo. I make my money there in a variety of ways. I’m just learning about the “evergreen” type pages.
I don’t think it is impossible, but I do question the value. In the long run, the goal of making money online should be examined in an hours of effort + quantity accomplished = money earned. Spending a lot of time trying to make a small amount of money just doesn’t make sense, when you can make it elsewhere for less effort.
I’m only now finding out how much resistance you face pushing into tier 1. It’s interesting really but also keep in mind that is much harder with lenses designed to sell. I think if you build around it (which I’m not currently doing because imo building sales lenses is much better as a new squid) you have a much easier time.
I have to respectfully disagree with you on this. Lenses designed to sell can reach the first tier just as much as any other type of lens. There are a lot of different factors that push lenses into the top tier. I just don’t rely on that income.
Thanks for the information Paula, I have been learning how to make better lenses that will grow over time and having evergreen I think is the best too. Although I have been making sales lenses they are harder for me to do because I like making informational lenses much m ore.
This is very sound advice. Also once I was able to shake off the notion that sales lenses were evil, and strike a balance between sales and content lenses, while focusing on a specific niche, or have them related peripherally at least, things started moving very quickly for me in a positive direction. I believe finding and focusing on a niche is important, as long as it’s not too obscure.
Blogs and linking to other content sites can really feed off each other, with back linking and just overall exposure, though I have found places like Hubpages and Wizzley can be frustrating with how few out bound links they allow.
Ironically, my only top tier lens is a sales lens. but I have a few dozen tier 3 lenses that earn a nice amount through Squidoo sales and Amazon Affiliate sales, just pennies though in tier payments.
You have a nice site here, I wish I would have checked it out sooner.
Thanks Jason.
I have only had one lens in the top tier for more than a week, and the second one got to #100 for about a week due to a fluke. The one that stayed in Tier One for about three months was a sales lens. It’s still my top lens, but it’s now hanging out in Tier Two. For me it’s getting harder to even keep lenses in the other tiers, especially Tier Two. This year I’m getting my first sales from a lens I made while RocketMoms was still around. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how a lens can just suddenly start selling. I wish I knew the secret to making all my better sales lenses successful .
Barb, you may want to look for some of that information on this site. We have discussed that quite a bit here.