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 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

This has caused some big time ripples as it is the latest in a string of moves by eBay that increasingly makes their affiliate program more and more hostile towards its own affiliates.

Along this line, HQ announced their new eBay policy today for lensmasters.

In a nutshell, no more adding your personal ebay links to squidoo lenses.

What does this mean for your options? I see a few:

Use Squidoo’s ebay modules – Easy, fast, and they have proven to convert over time. However, Squidoo keeps half the income (which is pretty fair imho).

Stop using eBay – Over the past few months I’ve begun transferring a lot of my sites and content away from using eBay as a prime revenue generation source. For such a large company, their policies have been remarkably inconsistent and prone to change.  When compared with the other affiliate behemoth, Amazon, I’m constantly surprised at how well Amazon executes its program and eBay flubs theirs. If the products you are reviewing or reccomending on your lens can’t be found on Amazon, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the other networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, Linkshare, and the like. Often you can find great programs that promote very cool specialty items and give you a better commission on top!

All in all, look at this change as an opportunity to diversify your income streams, not as a death knell on your online efforts.

What thoughts do you folks have?

The Real Facts about Plexo Modules:

1. Votes are pooled across all versions of the plexo. If you grab a plexo module from one lens and drop it on another, votes on either lens will add to the vote count on every lens that plexo is on.
2. The Lens Owner earns Plexo Revenue. After checking and double checking the Amazon Associates IDs on the plexos, I’m almost positive that the owner of the lens that the plexo sits on generates the Amazon revenue.
3. Plexo Modules are Evergreen. Plexo Modules are indexable by the Search Engines.

Now, for a long time I thought that Plexos could be useful on Squidoo if you had a really viral list or something but for the average user they just didn’t have the user base to really do anything cool. In fact, I often see Plexo modules out there in Squid Land all by themselves looking lonely. Unless those lonely plexos are on a superstar lens getting thousands of hits a week (and some are) there simply are not enough visitors, much less other squidoo users who are going to come ‘grab’ your plexo. This method of ‘build a plexo and leave’ just doesn’t work that well. Sure, you get some benefit from it, but it’s not super duper cool.

However, unlike most of Squidoo that pulls data from other sources for the visitor to read, Plexos both pull (from Amazon, your list, YouTube, etc.) as well as push (votes, links to your lensmaster page) data around Squidoo.

I can think of a few ways that this can actually be super powerful and has been way under-utilized. I think I’ll save some of my thoughts for my next issue of the Captain Squid Newsletter

Plexos: Love ‘em or Hate ‘em ?

Many people often forget that if the picture is a giant stuffed elephant and the title says ‘plush toy’ or something similar, Google thinks that is a picture of a plush toy, not a stuffed elephant plush toy, which is what you really want the spiders to think.

Do NOT copy/paste the same description on every product.

Write a short unique, keyword rich, description of the item (I usually make ‘em 10 words or less)

Why 90% of the people reading this post won’t go change any of their product descriptions :

1. It’s boring
2. It’s hard
3. They want to come back later and say ‘But I’ve tried…. and I can’t get any more traffic’ Waaa!
4. They might be Ninjas, in which case they shouldn’t change their descriptions..

-The Captain

It basically pulls a 5 item plexo list from Amazon with items that are ‘related’ to the item you give the module to start with.

Why this is awesome:

• More SE friendly instant generated content.
• Adds a great ‘exit path’ for visitors to your product themed lenses that may want to look at something else.
• They round off the end of a lens well.
• I think they are easier to edit than the classic Amazon Plexo module

Throw some up on your lenses and let me know how they do!

-The Captain

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