For a blow by blow of traffic stats etc for the lenses in the competiton, official judge and arbiter Fluffanutta of SquidUtils fame has created an AWESOME comparison chart that compares traffic etc of all the competition lenses and updates daily.

As the month goes on, I’ll update earnings totals on Captain Squid. I’m also looking to update earnings on SquidUtils but fluffanutta and I haven’t figured out the best way to do it yet.

Squidoo Account Earnings Growth

Now, every month payday invariably brings about discussion of Lensrank, that magical formula that helps determine how much your lens makes in a month.

Today, lets focus on one aspect of lensrank that is discussed some, but often not given the weight it deserves : clickouts.

I recently did an experiment and removed RSS feeds from about 40 of my lenses (Squidoo’s analytics do not as of the writing of this article track clickouts from RSS feeds in your stats) and replaced them with eBay modules (which do track clickouts).

the results were immediate and impressive. The clickouts that weren’t previously being captured are now being tracked properly.

And my lensrank SOARED on those lenses and has continued to stay very strong.

The moral of the story? Clickouts can make you more money, lots more.

So, make sure there’s stuff to click on on your lens.

Squidoo Lens Earnings Screenshot

Almost $4.00 from one sale certainly isn’t too shabby.

If we can keep up our $0.95 average pending lens earnings, we are probably about 1500 lenses away hehe. Don’t worry though, our goal is to get that overall number much higher through tons more sales and smart use of other affiliate programs.

Since I’m only counting earnings as they are PAID instead of registered on the Dashboard, the official earnings count will still read zero for another month or so but it’s definitely a solid start we can build on!

$2,000 / mo. here we come

I’m in the process of creating some charts to summarize all of the statistics on an ongoing basis. Once this is live I’ll let everyone know so they can catch up on any weeks they missed.

Week 1:

Lenses created: 3

Lenses Receiving Search Traffic: 2

Total Traffic: 181

Squidoo Earnings : $0.00

Aff. Earnings : $0.00

Discussion:

My Laptop got destroyed halfway through last week, which definitely put a damper on new lens creation. However, this weekend I bought a new computer that will allow us to move forward! Significant search traffic is already going to the first two lenses I created, with approximately a 40% clickthrough from search traffic to Amazon or Affiliate links. As traffic increases over time, this should lead to some good sales. In the past it’s usually taken between 30 and 60 days for lenses I make to start seeing significant sales, so I’m not too worried about not having any sales from the squidoo lenses in the first week.

The response from the Squidoo community to the quest has been great so far and I have tons of topics to write about just from the comments I have received. Stay tuned to have more of your questions explained in depth!

Some Fun Facts about my time on Squidoo:

I began using Squidoo right around when there was 100,000 lenses.. Now I think there’s close to a million.

I’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 lenses. While I’ve slown down my output a bit since moving to Singapore (so much to do and so little time!) I’m hoping to maintain my rate of better than a lens a day for the foreseeable future. It’s too profitable and fun not too!

I’ve had multiple lenses earn over $1,000 in a single month.

I’ve had a nice handful of lenses earn over $100 in a single month.

I’ve got hundreds of lenses that have only ever earned pennies. (and that’s okay! Success with no failure is pretty boring..)

I was an original Giant Squid and Giant Squid 100 member.

I started Squidtop – a Blog network for lensmasters that is building up a nice community. I’ve got plans to make this even more awesome in the near future, if you want to help, let me know!

The Isle of Squid lens directory has grown to include thousands of hand reviewed lenses representing some of the best that Squidoo has to offer. This is another project that I’m hoping to expand in coming months and if you want to help, let me know!

I’ve met some amazing people from not only across the US but across the entire world. Some of you folks are truly amazing!

Posted 1,000+ times in Squid U…

and so much more I can’t think of right now…

Here’s to another 2 years and beyond of Making Money and Having Fun!!!

Definitely worth a read. I had forgotten I’d written so much for that interview, probably should have kept my mouth shut about a few things in there but oh well .

First, once you make more than $600 from Squidoo or any other affiliate program they will send you and the IRS a 1099 form at the beginning of next year, telling both you and the government how much money you earned. Yes, you owe taxes on this money!

Now, you are taxed on profit not on gross income. Therefore, many companies spend some cash at the end of the year on things they may need in the coming year in order to put the cost towards their total expenses, thus reducing their profit and their tax burden on April 15th.

If you haven’t done any accounting during the year to track your profits and costs, now is the time to do it. If you don’t know how much money you’ve made, it’s very difficult to predict how much you will owe in taxes.

As an example, if you made $1,000 during the year and spent $200 on hosting, domain names, and other expenses, you have $800 in profit. From that, you will need to make sure you have enough to pay taxes. I’ve found that opening a separate account within your business bank accounts specifically for tax witholding is the easiest way to do it. In this example, if you are in the 25% tax bracket you should withold at least $320 (40%) of your profits. Why 40%? Well, since you are self employed, it is your responsibility to pay your own FICA and Medicare taxes which add up to about 15% of your earnings on top of your normal tax bracket.

40% witheld? Ouch! Yep, that’s the way it works.

There is hope though. You can do things like open a retirement account to ’shelter’ some of your online income. You could also spend some profit on business related expenses like new computers or software and reduce your tax bill that way.

For example, if you opened a SEP IRA and bought a $600 computer with your profits you are then looking at a potential tax bill of:

$1000 income
-$200 Hosting
-$600 Computer Expense
-$50 SEP IRA contribution

$150 * 40% = $60

Now, instead of paying $320 in taxes on $800 in profit, you have bought a new computer to help you make more money, opened a retirement account, and reduced your tax bill to $60. Pretty cool, huh?

I am not a tax or accounting professional and these numbers are just used for illustrative purposes. You should definitely seek advice from someone that knows what they are talking about (that’s an expense as well, by the way ) .

However, Hurry up! The year is almost out!

The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008

Can Squidoo Make you $500 in one day? Yep. - This was a post to mark the first time that I ever earned $500 in one day with Squidoo. My Holiday season hasn’t been quite as juicy since then, but that was somewhat expected with the current content mix of my lens portfolio.

The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters – This tip is a bit more motivational and attitude related than any specific thing you can do as a process to succeed on Squidoo. However, you guys obviously liked it as this was the second most visited post of the year. I’ll have to write more posts like these in 2009.

One Lens, One Month, $1,000 – This is another earnings milestone post, marking the first time that I earned $1,000 from a single lens in one month. To date, I’ve had 2 different lenses earn that much in a month so it can in fact be done and is not an isolated incident.

Making Money with Pepperjam – This popular squidoo affiliate marketing post gives a step by step guide on creating a lens to promote a Pepperjam Network affiliate product. Don’t miss the second part of the series where we talk about adding products to a lens from a Pepperjam Advertiser.

Don’t Listen to Bunk SEO Advice – Perhaps one of my personal favorites, I rail against the dumb labor intensive SEO that doesn’t really produce good results and try to shine a little light on some of the facts around employing good SEO practices in order to get the most bang for your buck with your time. When you have a couple hundred lenses, time becomes quite valuable and wasting it on things that don’t work is simply silly.

The Captain’s Personal Favorite Squidoo Posts of 2008

Here are a few  Squidoo nuggets that I think flew under the radar but have some valuable information that is worth reading.

A Guide to Squidoo Income – A lengthy post detailing the nuances of Squidoo’s income sharing structure and when payment takes place for various types of earnings. I hear this question so often that I had to put something out there I could refer people to.

8 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Squidoo – Get these if you haven’t already. I still use every one on that list constantly. I may expand this to 10 plugins next year sometime but these 8 are enough to really reduce wasted time when you are building lenses.

Using Tags on Squidoo – This was a three part series I wrote in April and May. Since Squidoo changes so fast, a few small points may be out of date here and there but I’m still a firm believer in using this strategy to increase lens visibility. Start with an overview of link flow, then learn a little more about how Squidoo tag pages (used to) work and how they still do before finishing up with learning how to leverage the ‘Discovery’ or ‘Explore More’ box on lenses.

Those are the 10 best blog posts from Captain Squid this year according to you the reader and how I was feeling about my personal favorites this morning.

Anyone else have any favorites I missed?

In fact, I broke the $500 mark in one day for the first time yesterday!

I know I said I wasn’t going to announce anything until I hit the $1,000 a day mark, but I was pretty excited so I thought that I would share.

Could end up breaking the $5,000 mark for the month depending on how the last few days pan out…

I don’t mean for this post to brag (okay, maybe a little) but it just goes to show what you can accomplish with Squidoo if you just keep pounding day in and day out creating awesome lenses that sell great stuff.

I don’t sell ebooks on any of my lenses, although a lot of people do well with them and I don’t begrudge them that at all.

In fact, I don’t build lenses about things that I don’t feel comfortable talking to people about face to face in real life. I guess that is my true litmus test on what to build lenses on.

Either way, I’m halfway to the $1,000 / day mark, maybe I can hit it by the end of the year! we shall see….

Let’s take a hypothetical situation. You are a new squidoo lensmaster. You want to turn squidoo into a major income stream of yours, earning $2,000 a month from visitors to your lens.

Let’s look at a few potential scenarios that could get you to that $2,000 a month from Squidoo:

1) All revenue share – If you only earned revenue from squidoo’s advertising revenue share from Google Adsense and Glam (or other CPM network) ads your lenses needed might look something like this. I’m using some pretty generous ratios here with 30% of your lenses in the top two tiers, which is almost impossible to maintain without massive upkeep after you hit 200 lenses or so but that’s just my opinion.

Tier 1 lenses ($11 ea.) : 100 = $1100
Tier 2 lenses ($2): 400 = $800
Tier 3 lenses ($0.08) :  1250 = $100

Total lenses needed : 1750  Total revenue: $2000 / mo.

Wow. What a terrible deal. Keep in mind that I’m being quite generous here on how many lenses most people average in the top 2 tiers. I bet it would take significantly more lenses than even this to hit $2000 /mo. from squidoo’s adsense sharing.

2) Add in some money maker modules. Okay, lets adjust the playing field a bit and see if money maker modules can get us there faster.

New assumptions:

16 visits a week per lens = 64 visits a month
average click through rate of visitor = 50% (why so high? I’ll explain tomorrow. Actually, CTRs of 70% + are pretty easy to get..)
Ebay/Amazon conversion rate = 2% (this is low, but commissions are split anyway so i figure it evens out)
Avg sale = $0.74 (just a wild guess, seems reasonable)

On average, this works out to about $0.50 a lens in earnings each month (I’m actually a bit under this but I don’t use as many money makers as I probably should)

Looking back at our first example with the new royalties added in…

Tier 1 lenses ($11 ea.) : 80 = $920
Tier 2 lenses ($2): 300 = $750
Tier 3 lenses ($0.08) :  650= $377

Total: 1030 lenses and $2047 in revenue

Ouch, that still seems like a lot of work… with those assumptions. Feel free to put your own data in and play around with the idea. The way to win with this one is to either have a higher average commission or have a higher conversion rate on money maker modules, or more traffic, or all of the above. If you use money maker modules well, I think 1000 lenses is probably pretty reasonable in this projection.

3) Sprinkle in some affiliate programs. This is where you can really break the earnings out and scale them a bit. Say that you earn $3.00 every time someone fills out a form that you send them to. They didn’t buy anything, just provided some information, so your conversion rate could go up to 5% or significantly more than that depending on the vertical, offer, etc.

If you make $3.00 per action and have twice as many actions/sales as before, the numbers start to add up quickly…

Changed assumptions:
New conversion rate: 5%
New Sale amount : $3.00
Avg Sale amt / lens / mo. : $4.80

Giving us..

Tier 1 lenses ($11 ea.) : 40 = $632 (40*(11+4.8))
Tier 2 lenses ($2): 160 = $1088 (160*(2+4.8))
Tier 3 lenses ($0.08) :  57= $270 (57*(4.80+0.08))

Okay, now we’re talking, 250 lenses or so to get to $2,000 bucks a month is much more like it!

Final Thoughts:

The point here is not to come up with some magic mathmatical scenario which allows you to earn bajillions of dollars with one lens.

The idea is that you can take the data that you already have and use this kind of modeling to project when you will be making $2,000 / mo. at your current growth rates.

An when you do, I bet a huge chunk of it is not related to lensrank earnings at all.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the less  time you worry about lensrank and the more time you spend developing great content that is fun to share, the faster you will get to your goals for yourself, charity, or whatever it may be.

On the other hand, if you just like the Lensrank as a badge of honor and don’t really care about the benjamins then please disregard this post.