Either way,  the contest has given me some great new ideas for templates etc for future lensbuilding, as most of the contest lenses from me were built in a single afternoon using a relatively simple template.

Multiply by a few hundred and we’ll be in business .

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.

From Last friday (the 9th) till this coming Friday (the 16th) Troy and I will each build ten lenses.

The lenses will follow the following rules:

- Promote a product from Amazon related to the ‘fitness’ category.
- Use only Squidoo Modules and Squidoo’s Amazon Links

One month from Friday, May 16th, the group of lenses with the most Pending $$ on the Dashboard will be judged to be the winner.

The Variable that we are testing is that I will be focusing on lower cost items and hoping to make a large number of sales, while Troy will be focusing more on big ticket items in the hopes of landing a few monster commissions.

The Fluffanutta will be the impartial Judge in order to ensure fairness

I’ll post a few example lenses later so you guys can see what we are building. May the best Amazon Sales Lensbuilder win

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

Here’s my general philosophy on researching new squidoo lens topics (or new niches in general)

1. Don’t focus on just ‘one’ keyword to the exclusion of all others - I find this takes a very narrow minded view towards what you want to accomplish and doesn’t really result in the outcomes people are looking for (namely, traffic, attention, conversions, etc)
2. You don’t need monster niches – There are plenty of people that search for specific models, styles, etc that there is no need to target a monster market unless you have a monster budget. For example, instead of going after everyone that wants to buy an appliance, focus on a specific brand of dishwasher.
3. Target Buyers – Unlike most of the people reading this, nearly everyone spends less time on the internet then you. They aren’t up on the latest SEO news or conversion metrics or any of that stuff. They want to find something they are looking for, get good information about it, and buy it. Writing your content to focus on these people will astronomically increase your conversions.
4. What is available? - Although Amazon has pretty much everything for a lot of verticals it is more ‘broad’ then ‘deep’ in some. I’ll often pick new topics based on what advertisers on some of the affiliate networks look interesting or cool instead of what some research tool tells me I should.

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!