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!
I was going back over some of my payout records for squidoo and I realized something that made me do a very hard double take. I believe that it’s actually better for lensmasters and they make more money when squidoo uses the tiered adsense sharing program they currently have in place.
Before I explain why, here is a little terminology I’m going to use.
CPM - This is the amount of money you earn per 1,000 impressions.
I realized that on average, each month I am earning anywhere from $6-$10 CPM from the ads on squidoo. This is insanely high compared to anywhere else you can publish on the internet that I have found. In my experience a CPM of $2-$5 is considered very good. If you take away my highest traffic lens, I’m earning over a penny a visitor that comes to my lenses. wow!
I’m not saying this to brag, but instead to illustrate why the revenue sharing system that squidoo has set up is far superior to a system like Hub Pages where the impressions are split, not the revenue.
If you were able to use your own adsense code, you would only receive earnings based pretty much on the volume of your traffic, instead of the quality of your traffic. The current tier system means that your lens has to be judged to be of high quality as well as draw traffic in order to be rewarded. I truly believe that in the long term this is a win for both the lensmasters and for squidoo. As more and more high quality content drifts to the top (can you imagine the day when getting into the top 100,000 will be like getting into the top 100?) the amount squidoo can pay each month to these lenses will only increase as well (Imagine a top tier of $80 instead of $8 ).
I’m willing to listen to arguments as to why we should be able to use our own adsense code, but you are going to have to justify three things if you change the current adsense sharing system that squidoo uses:
1) Does your system make $8-$10 CPM?
2) How do you prevent click fraud if users are allowed to input their own accounts?
3) That’s it. Just two things I decided.
So? Is Squidoo’s adsense sharing the best way? or is there another way?
During our little discussion on tags the past few days, I noticed that Drew from Squidoography posted an excellent tip on easily searching different squidoo tag pages using Firefox.
Essentially, you can create a firefox bookmark that allows you to type ‘tag search+tag+here‘ into your Firefox address bar and instantly pull up the related squidoo tag page for that search term.
This is a great way to avoid having ’stranded’ tag pages that your lens links to.
Thanks for the great tip Drew!
If you missed it, make sure and read the first part of my series on Squidoo link flow from and to lenses.
Now that we’ve established where the links from lenses go to, lets discuss a little bit about how those Squidoo tag pages I crow about so much play into the whole system.
About Tags on Squidoo
The next two diagrams I’m going to show you assume a few things about the tag page. The first is that multiple lenses use that tag (10+). The second is that you use that tag on your lens and that tag is relevant. Having a lens about lemurs and using the ‘marketing’ tag just because lots of lenses use that tag isn’t going to do any good. Unless, of course, your lens is about how to market to lemurs :).
Where do Squidoo Tag Pages get their links?
Every lens that uses a tag creates a link back to the front page of the related tag page.
Where do Squidoo Tag Pages Link to?
The First tag page accumulates all the ‘link juice‘ or ‘votes‘ from all the lenses that use that tag. It then distributes these ‘votes‘ among the top ten lenses for that tag as well as to the deeper pages for that tag. For example, the tag ‘Affiliate Marketing‘ has over 2400 lenses that link to the front tag page. That main tag page then distributes all of it’s accumulated link mojo to the 10 lenses on that page as well as the 247 other ‘affiliate marketing’ tag pages. This means there is a ‘trickle down’ effect where those lower tag pages still get some link mojo to distribute to the lenses on each page after the first.
What Happens when you use uncommon tags on Squidoo?
If you use ‘unique tags‘ like ‘best place to buy a new purple rabbit‘ or some such nonsense, you will end up with a lot of tag pages like this one. A single link between the lens and the tag page. Look less exciting? That’s because it definitely is. There are many fewer ‘votes’, fewer paths for the bots to follow to discover your lens, and less exposure overall for your lens.
The lesson in Squidoo Tags:
Pay attention to what kind of tags you are using. If you have a lot of ‘dead end’ tags on your lens, it’s probably affecting your lens negatively.
Next up:
Squidoo Link flow and the Discovery tool OR Why the new Discovery tool Rocks my Socks
