1) They save you a lot of time if set up correctly. I thought that having 7-10 labels broken out into groups of 50-100 lenses would help a ton and it did. However, breaking the labels out even further into sub-genres of 10-20 lenses is going to work awesome. That’s going to be my next step.

2) Aggregate Performance #s rock - I care about how groups of lenses perform, not one lens in particular. So, when you can see if a group of lenses is rising or falling in traffic it is incredibly useful. Over time this will allow me to create better and better ‘groups’ of lenses based on the performance results of other groups.

3) A/B Testing - I’ll get into this a bit more tomorrow, but using labels to take a group of lenses and keep one as the control and the other as the experiment can be quite useful…

4) Tier Labeling – This is Huge! Label your lenses in each of the top two payout tiers so you can track them more closely and spend a little extra time on the ones that are slacking off and losing Lensrank. Play the ‘edges’ instead of the ‘middle’.

I don’t think I loaded my lens list that had all of my lenses yesterday except for maybe a handful of times to add labels to lenses.

This thing is going to be awesome for lens management, with filters, labels, and lots of other goodies.

Without further adieu, here are some screenshots!

This is what a list of labeled lenses looks like:

Here’s what the Daily Digest front page looks like:

Here’s one from Megan at HQ on the page where you add labels (love the checkboxes!)

My thoughts -

The New labels function is going to go miles for me in turning lenses into manageable groups. Maybe a traffic, revenue, and lens count on each label and filter page as well as the current daily digest? That would really let you see how segments of your lenses are performing which would be huge.

A pending revenue total on the daily digest would be sweet.

The ‘Top lens of the day’ section on the Daily Digest could have Today’s traffic as well so you could see how well it was doing today.

the ‘Needs some love’ section could probably go without the lenses I have in WIP, but some lensmasters may want it to include WIP lenses …

The sorting function by traffic is a little buggy. (Disclaimer: HQ is still ironing out tons of UI stuff so that’s probably where this is coming from)

Being able to set labels or filters based on things like # of stars or LR or traffic would be sweet. For example, say I want to track the #  of lenses I have between LR 20,000 and 50,000 on one list…

Overall, I think it is going to be a bajillion times better than the previous incarnation. I can’t wait to see what they do to the workshop!

What do you guys think?

While frustrating, it’s certainly not the first time I’ve had a few days like that and it wont be the last. It did get me to thinking on the varying ‘barriers’ to Squidoo Lensmasters and what causes them.

So, in increasing order and thanks to the ‘The Dip‘ , here are the Dips that I’ve seen happen in Squidoo.

Dip 1 : 0-2 lenses – Getting Started (Just Build One!)

Considering how easy it is to do nothing, it can be considered almost a herculean effort to start a new lens. Sure it’s not hard and maybe even a little fun. Sure, your first lens may stink (mine did). When I look at the 10 or so people that have been referred to Squidoo from me, I think 2 people have made a lens, and each has only one at that.

If you view Squidoo as a ‘drive-by’ link drop for your other sites, you are not going to move past this Dip.

Note: Do you use other social sites as a ‘drive-by’ link drop for your lenses? The same principle applies…

Dip 2 : 30-75 lenses (The Aversion to Scale / Quality Check)

Once you figure out how to make a few lenses you really start getting rolling, pushing out lenses. It seems like you have enough ideas for an infinite amount of lenses. Giant Squid? No Problem! I’ll be there by the end of the week. Of course, now is where quality comes into play. If you are unable to provide even a basic level of quality content on your lenses, you will have a nice dashboard full of a lot of lenses with zero traffic.

Conversely, this is the number of lenses that some of the highest quality lensmasters on Squidoo have. They produce insanely good content, beautifully formatted lenses, epic squidbooks and more. For them, this may be their sweet spot. These lensmasters may only make 2 lenses a month, but if both of those lenses are going to consistently rank on the top of the pile, that may be worth it.

Oh yea, and a lot of that second group (and most of the Lensmasters beyond this Dip) put in an insane amount of work to help other lensmasters. Why? Because they enjoy helping people.. *gasp*.

The big reason this is a dip is two-fold:

1. If your lenses are junk, you have to learn to make them better before you can really move to the next level.
2. Learning how to scale Squidoo is hard. Very hard. Changing your mindset from building a lens a week to one a day is too much for some people. Going from one a day to 4 a day? Ouch. It Stings and it’s a Dip to overcome.

Dip 3 : 200 – ??? Squidoo Lenses (The Technical Dip)

Is this a Dip? I’m not sure. I think there is one right around here though and I think there are a lot of lensmasters pushing against it right now. When I started Squidoo a Year Ago the very tippy top lensmasters in terms of lenses that I knew had between 300-600 lenses (JeffyV and Glen and Relache and some of you other old timers, please correct me if I’m off). Now, it doesn’t seem like there are ANY lensmasters with several thousand lenses (well, maybe there’s a spam account running around somewhere, but I doubt it).

It’s certainly not for lack of trying by lensmasters to build more lenses, and Squidoo HQ definitely wants their best lensmasters to make more lenses (duh) so what’s the problem? Why is it increasingly difficult to scale squidoo lenses at higher volumes?

Going from lens 1 – 10 was challenging. Going from lens 10-100 took marginally more time but was less technically challenging as you pretty much know the ropes. Going from lens 100-1,000 has been all but insurmountable for virtually all the Lensmasters so far…

I’ve heard some rumors that a new dashboard may be in the works, that would help. I think part of the problem is the infrastructure squidoo has started with (Although HQ has really been pushing to stay way ahead of 99.9% of their users which I soundly applaud). You have to take a whole new look at usability when you have folks that need to look at 1,000 lenses and know which ones are making money, getting traffic, ranking well, have new traffic sources, or broken links and videos when compared to someone who has 5.

The time spent actually building lenses instead of loading dashboards and workshops, copy / pasting, and other tedious time sinks will have to increase in some way.(It takes approximately 30-90 seconds to load a dashboard with 400 lenses over a cable internet connection, and longer to go to a lens workshop)

Why can’t HQ instantly let people copy modules to other lenses, edit multiple lenses at once, or give them more powerful analytical tools? Because creating tools that power users (i.e. trusted users) find useful but potentially malicious users can’t find ways to exploit is a tough cookie.

I’m not sure how to climb out of this Dip, but when I figure it out it’s going to be awesome..

By the way, if you haven’t read Seth’s book: The Dip you are probably a bit confused about what a ‘Dip’ is. Buy it. Read it.

That being said, here’s how I would fix the dashboard:

• Once you hit a certain number of lenses (50,100?) the dashboard would automatically change to a new format. HQ could afford to make the new dash more feature intensive because many fewer people would be using it, allowing the Squid Servers to keep up.
• This Dash would allow me to one-click publish my lenses. ( a pipe dream but it had to be said).
• Ability to edit keywords, title tags and republish without leaving the Dashboard.
• Sort by primary tag. Why? Lots of reasons.� Read The Importance of the Primary Tag by Fluffanutta for an overview.
• One Screen lens creation. I absolutely hate having to load 4 screens to create a lens. After doing it over 300 times I pretty much have those little sayings memorized. Creating lenses from the dashboard functionality would add extra bonus points.
• Ability to define groups and folders for lenses. Easily view groups and folders of lenses. The Dashboard Extender by Magicality currently does this, but the load times are so horrific for a large group of lenses that it’s not worth turning on.
• Advanced sorting and search functionality. I want to be able to view all of my lenses that have less than X visitors and fall between X,XXX and XX,XXX Lensrank. This is huge for maintaining a large group of lenses and difficult to do currently.
• Access to the Lens RSS feed as a link from the Dashboard. Why don’t we already have this?
• Lens specific earnings reports by day. I want to see which lenses made sales yesterday and through which affiliates.
• Aggregated click through reporting. How many clicks did I send to ebay and amazon yesterday? What lenses did they come from?
• Ability to create Module Templates. I almost always select ‘I want to do my own thing’ and then load in the exact same modules, especially when I’m doing a group of similar lenses. The ability to roll my own pre-set module groupings would be amazing.
• Back up all lenses as a ZIP file.
• Have a ‘Saved Plexo’ list. Goes back to creating similar lenses. Keeping another window open for the sole purpose of grabbing the same plexo over and over is easy to fix.
• Easier Co-Brand creation. Instead of going to each co-brand home page to create a lens, how about a drop down on the dashboard (or new one-page lens making screen) that lets you select your co-brand?

Perhaps I’m not using squidoo as intended, but I am more concerned about overall performance and performance of clusters/themes of lenses than I am with the performance of any one lens. Before I go and build 20 lenses to flesh out an idea, I like to have enough data to tell if that idea is going to make money and scales well. Up to now, doing that is kind of painful just for the number of screens I have to load and the amount of manual calculation I have to do.

What would you add? what’s on your Squidoo Dashboard Wishlist?

There’s a new Lens Royalties Tab!

Click on it and you get a huge list of your earnings for your lenses for a particular month including groups. There’s also an export button

For all of you stat lovers out there (and I know there’s a bunch!) this is a great tool that replaces all those manual reports we used to run on Payday. It’s also a good substitute for the Dashboard Extension (Sorry Magicality, but it takes up to 3 minutes to run on a dashboard of 270 lenses..)

Have a Piratey Monday..

-The Captain

Dashboard Earnings: $0.56 … Not too impressive
CJ Earnings:

In December, I saw some great growth in my Dashboard earnings (from crap to slightly better than crap) breaking the $50 in my pending cash for the first time. This was coupled with a serious slowdown in CJ income.

However, it looks like Commission Junction is of to a great start in ‘08!

With the Adsense Payouts averaging what they have, The Captain is on pace for about $10,000 in earnings from Squidoo this year.

Stay tuned to see if that is an over-estimate or just the tip of the iceberg….

-The Captain

Don’t have the DE yet?

Check out the lens for all the cool information related to it.

You can also download the plug-in from this link.

Don’t have Firefox?

You need it! All of the tools I am developing for you folks will be in Firefox and I can’t guarantee they will transfer into IE. So, Go get Firefox .

-The Captain

Check out the great new lens by boardofeducation. He has an excellent summary of the basics of the Dashboard and how to use it effectively.

Captain’s Corner:

Ready to supercharge your dashboard? Download the Dashboard Extender Plugin and get access to even more useful stats. If you have trouble, make sure and check out the forum post for questions about the Dashboard Extender.

-The Captain