Tagged: lenses RSS

  • cjsysreform 7:47 am on December 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: lenses,   

    People buy weird stuff off my bra lenses. 

    squidoolens-amazonorders

    I can’t decide which is funnier: the vibrator, or the Three Little Bears books. This sort of thing is the real reason I’m still on Squidoo.

     

  • cjsysreform 7:35 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: holidays, lenses, ,   

    Don’t publish new content over the holidays! 

    Oh yeah, that’s right, I went there.

    If you’ve got existing content that sells stuff (directly or otherwise… yeah, this means everyone), here’s what makes more sense: use your time over the holidays to polish and promote this content so it doesn’t get swallowed up by all the mass hordes of seasonal ad copy in your niche.

    Was that too fast? I’d say more, but you’re all smart people and I hate to waste your time with a lot of unnecessary extra words. Any questions, comments, rotten tomatoes, hate mail, etc. are welcome.

     

    • Chef Keem 8:10 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Could you please say that again? Or should I simply re-read your post? And will a rotten aubergine do?

      Otherwise, I tend to agree with your strategy.

    • cjsysreform 8:31 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Dude, what the heck is an aubergine?

      The point of this post is mostly to get people to question the common doctrine of “the more lenses I have, the more money I’ll make.” Or does everyone know this already?

    • cjsysreform 8:35 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I feel like even the Giant Squids sometimes get caught up in numbers that don’t mean anything, i.e. lensrank and so forth… I know that my own focus got way too narrow when I was cranking out lenses like crazy in September.

    • mysticmama 10:06 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I both agree & disagree lol!
      Personally, I think that holiday specific lenses are pretty much a total waste of time. Why put that much energy into a lens that will only be relevant for a very short period of time?

      But… creating well thought out “gift idea” lenses, especially ones promoting our other online offerings…can be very prifitable during the pre-holiday shopping season.

      My advice to lensmasters would be to go ahead and make lenses with holiday sales in mind, but to make lenses that stay relevant even after the holidays are over… I have a series of Hemp product gift idea lenses that do well all year long, but are now really picking up with the holidays rushing toward us…

      But, I really see no point in making a lens that will only be visited once a year.

    • mysticmama 10:09 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Ps…lol…
      aubergine is what they call eggplants over in parts of Europe :)

    • Chef Keem 10:11 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Oh, I understood the meaning of your post right away. Just wanted to play into your “Was that too fast?” remark. :-)

      “Aubergine” is French AND German (go figure) for eggplant.

      Oh, and making splendidly optimized new lenses IS a good strategy for higher royalty payouts. The hot new stuff tends to rise pretty quickly and might get a few extra bucks (for a month or two) in the first or second tier. At least, that’s been my experience, a number of times. And if you’re lucky (or a Squid Genius), any new lens could develop into an evergreen cash (sea) cow.

      But – and that’s where I agree with you wholeheartedly – now is not the best time for this, if you have a bunch of holiday-pregnant dust bunnies in your ’sography.

      Bookmark ‘em, re-submit to RSS directories, cross-link ‘em, write about ‘em here on SquidLog (with links, ‘course), and update your themes, tags, YT vids, etc. So by the time the bots come crawling, they’ll see your big “updated” date PLUS a bit of new content, and then they’ll throw you at the feet of the December search mob.

    • cjsysreform 7:23 am on November 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      And new images too… tons. A freakin boatload. This is mostly a reminder to myself, but maybe it applies to others too; I dunno. ;)

    • Ramkitten 8:21 pm on November 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’ve never been inspired to make a holiday-specific lens, partly because there are SO many already on Squidoo, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t come up with something that hasn’t already been done (and possibly done to death), but also because I’m not really a holiday person. Not that I don’t enjoy them–well, some of them, anyway–but I’m more of a season person. And that comes across in some of my lenses, I think.

    • drifter0658 1:50 am on November 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      If I wasn’t such an anti-romantic, bunny hatin’, commie sympathizin’, anti-union, child scarin, turkey freein atheist, I’d create a lenses that overlapped each other so I wouldn’t have to ride the rollercoaster.

      I’d do it about 6 months in advance to give them suckers a chance to grow in authority.

      Freakin’ French eggplants. Is that what they call their Army these days?

    • Susanna 3:08 am on November 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’ve always acted on the premise that, if every low-ranking web page I have online makes 50 cents a month, $6 a year, I’ll be sitting well enough. Let’s say I have 1000 pages eh?

      Then I can rejoice in the 50 odd that bring in $10 a month.

    • Stazjia 5:18 am on November 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I would never make a Thanksgiving lens now and it’s pretty late for Christmas too. I think lenses on a specific event or occasion should be up at least two full months before the event and preferably earlier to give them a chance.

      I earn some money in commission from them for a couple of months a year and then they do almost nothing for the rest of the time so I would never concentrate on them.

    • cjsysreform 2:39 pm on November 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      “But… creating well thought out “gift idea” lenses, especially ones promoting our other online offerings…can be very profitable during the pre-holiday shopping season.” -mysticmama

      Excellent point. I’m going to put this in my next post and let people show off their stuff.

    • Anne Corci 5:42 pm on November 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Drifter an anti-romantic? I’m not buyin’ it! ;)

      Other than that I agree it’s not a very good use of my time to whip up some sloppy selling lenses just for the holidays. On the other hand, it’s fun to dress up some established lenses to appeal to holiday shoppers.

      Just never change the main title of your lens, as I had to make that painful experience myself sometime ago. Google punished this folly by re-ranking my lens from PR5 to PR3.

    • cjsysreform 2:22 pm on November 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Sheesh, I’ve never had any of my lenses get past 3 in page rank. Even the ones with lots of traffic are permanently stuck at 3.

  • cjsysreform 9:40 am on October 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ads, , earnings reports, giant squids, google, infolinks, lenses,   

    A Critical Look at Squidoo, part 1 

    To follow up on my previous post, I’ve come up with a list of things that bother me about the Squidoo network. I’m going to stick to one gripe per post for now, so as not to overwhelm my readers with negativity (aren’t I thoughtful?). Whatever thoughts you have in response to this series, please feel free to share them in a comment. I welcome controversy and debate. This is The Rebel Squid, after all.

    So let’s get to the constructive criticism, shall we? First I’d like to talk about earnings reports.

    1. Lensmasters can’t see reports on their earnings from Google ads or InfoLinks.

    Maybe this information is available to Giant Squids, I don’t know; perhaps one of you Giants could speak to that.

    I think every lensmaster should have access to detailed monthly earnings reports for each of their lenses, including exactly how much was earned from Google ads and InfoLinks. This information is available for Amazon and eBay orders, so why can’t we also see earnings reports for advertising?

     

    • Chef Keem 10:16 am on October 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’m a Giant and Giant 100, but there’s no additional access to payment info for us.

      Quote from the Squidoo FAQ:

      “Ad revenue (Google and other ads). This money goes into a pool, so as to avoide clickfraud. Half of the pool distributes out to lensmasters, on a PayRank scale that is based on each lens’s average LensRank and traffic, and the number and quality of lenses in the lensmaster’s account.”

      Read more here under #9 and #12.

    • cjsysreform 10:58 am on October 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      “I’m a Giant and Giant 100, but there’s no additional access to payment info for us.”

      Thanks for that.

      As far as the PayRank scale, there are, let’s see… two lens-specific factors and two lensmaster (all lenses) factors that go into this.

      I’d like to see monthly numbers for the PayRank calculations on all of my lenses that have earned money, including all four factors and how they figure into the total PayRank for each lens.

    • mysticmama 6:24 pm on October 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’m also Giant 100 club, and no we don’t get ant different revenue report than anyone else…

      What really irks me about the way Squidoo distributes revenue… has more to do with the so called “tier structure” As Squidoo quadruples or more in size every day… why are our tiers not growing with Squidoo… the top payout level/tier only includes the top 2,000 lenses…

      I’m sure that seemed like a lot 2 or 3 years ago when Squidoo was still small & has under 100,000 lenses… according to Wikipedia Squidoo had 900,000 handbuilt lenses as of February 1st, 2009.

      Why is the top payout tier not growing with Squidoo? With only 2,000 lenses getting the maximum payout…and over a million lenses competing for those coveted spots… it makes one wonder where all that revenue is going? surely the revenue Squidoo makes on over a million lenses should warrent a long overdue expansion of the top tier level… and yes I would love to see the real revenue numbers… both for individual lenses & site wide… perhaps it’s time that Squidoo changes it’s payout policy completely and just gets rid of the tiers completely & starts just paying each individual lens a percentage of the revenue that lens creates.

    • Ramkitten 8:28 pm on November 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      You make great points, Bambi. The top tier has gone from being 2% of total lenses (when there were 100,000) to .2% now. That’s a huge difference. And when I see a spammy and/or poorly-done lens in that coveted .2% it REALLY bugs me.

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