Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
As some of you may have noticed, there is now a new ‘Squidoo Lens Tools‘ section of Captain Squid. Over time, I will be building this up with some personal scripts that I have written as well as some of the great tools I find online.
The first addition to this new section of the Captain is a keyword Analyzer. Simply put in your lens URL (without the http://) and it will return a list of keywords pulled from your lens.
Tip: Make sure that any keywords highlighted in yellow are also in your Tags.
Tip: Take your top 3 or 4 keywords and combine them into multi-word phrases in order to attack that long-tail you hear about.
Example:
When I entered my Pirate Costume Lens into the generator, I received the following keywords:
So, in order to come up with quality tags, I then combined these keywords into multiple word ‘long tail’ tags like so:
girl pirate costume
female pirates costume
lady pirate costumes
etc. etc.
When google checks your page, it reads the tags first (not assigning any special weight to tags that I can see) and then reads your content. I’ve found that the closer the two match, the more long-tail terms I get hits for.
- The Captain
This is Part Two of the Commission Education basics for Squidoo Lensmasters.
Amazon is probably the most popular vendors used on Squidoo. Why not? They have everything, an easy to use website, and are trusted almost as much as a brick and mortar store (i.e. Wal-Mart or Sears or Barnes and Noble) . Let’s see how their affiliate system stacks up within the Squidoo platform.
This is the rate chart provided by Amazon:
As you can see, the more products referred the better the rate awarded. It’s probably safe to say that Squidoo is at least in the 8.25% tier. If that is the case, lensmasters are getting approximately 4% per sale which is the same as being an Amazon associate on your own. If Squidoo has the top tier (which it may) and you sell less than 7 items through Amazon personally a month, then Squidoo can actually earn you more money.
Important things to remember:
- The Cookie for Amazon is only 24 hours - make sure your visitors are ready to buy right then when they click through. It’s more difficult to get residual sales from the visitor like eBay.
- The Commission is based on sale price - The commission is a percentage of the item price. I’m not sure if you receive a commission for a used item sold through eBay’s platform by a third party (I don’t think you do).
- Electronics payout less - Amazon electronics pay out about half the commission of other items. If you are promoting electronics, use eBay or the SuperStore Module.
All of this does not make Amazon better or worse than eBay, just different. Find out ways to use these rules as advantages and you would be surprised how much you can make. There are associates of both programs that make tons of money every month.
-The Captain
I’ve noticed a lot of curiosity on the Forums lately about how commissions actually work with eBay and Amazon.
I’ll cover each Affiliate Program in separate posts so as not to get them confused and to let everyone in on how it all works.
The eBay Commission Process
- A visitor to your lens clicks on an ebay affiliate link. It will look something like this in your Stats Page:
- When a user clicks on this link, a cookie is placed in their browser.
- This cookie is good for 7 days or until that visitor clicks on another eBay affiliate link somewhere else, overwriting yours.
- For the duration of the cookie, any item that that the visitor places a bid on and wins will generate a commission for you.
- The bid needs to be placed while the cookie is there, but the item can end after the cookie expires.
Payouts
eBay pays out 50-75% of the auction fees they generate from referrals as well as $25-$35 per new sign up. Squidoo has not announced what tier they are in or if Lensmasters are paid out based on the lowest tier. Eventually, when eBay reporting is installed, it will be easier to track this.
