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!
Okay, so after spending all day on Sunday re-tagging over 70 lenses (thank my piratey stars that the keyboard shortcuts for fast tagging still work.) based on the results of a test I was running (more on that later..) I’ve come to some conclusions about labels.
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.
As tends to happen every 3 months or so, it appears that Squidoo HQ has again updated the special sauce that keeps Squidoo interesting, Lensrank.
The last lensrank ranking change brought us a much heavier weight placed on traffic and less placed on having a single star rating. This shifted focus towards bringing traffic to your Squidoo lens, and it worked.
Traffic to Squidoo has increased at a healthy clip the last few months, and the top 10,000 spots in LensRank have become a pretty competitive place to be, and HQ has rewarded lensmasters that have gotten there.
It appears that the rules have changed again. After moving to some new servers, there have been some bugs to work out of the system and HQ has been working very hard to do that. After yesterday’s LensRank update, there also appeared to be another fundamental shift in the way LensRank is calculated. Some people had lenses rise up the rankings, some had lenses fall, and for some I’ve talked to, they haven’t noticed much affect.
Note: The next little bit is purely my own speculation. HQ hasn’t confirmed any of this, neither has anyone else in the Squidoo community. This is solely conclusions (probably incorrect) that were drawn from looking at trends and patterns I saw emerge from my 300+ lenses. So take it for what you will.
From what I can tell, there are at least 20 different factors that can affect Lensrank in some way, so reverse-engineering the algorithm is not something that I have the time or inclination to do.
What I’ve seen
There appears to have been an overall heavier weighting on some factors relating to ‘lens quality’ such as:
- Age of lens
- # of modules
- # of ratings
- # angel blessings
I think that Traffic has remained heavily weighted, but the ‘threshold’ for it may have risen. An example would be that instead of more than X visitors having a solid boost on your LensRank Y visitors was needed. I saw the rankings of a lot of lenses with 0-20 visits a week get jumbled all over the charts, but the ones with 50 visits or more a week stayed pretty strong.
Source of traffic may also play a role, but I haven’t dug deep enough to find that one out yet…
Dashboard commissions don’t seem to matter a whole lot either way..
In short, building quality lenses with content that people want to read will make you money. I know, shocking, right?
Maybe I should change my name to Captain Obvious…
Note: The Earnings included in this report are November 2007 earnings directly from Squidoo and Commission Junction Earnings from December 2007
Unfortunately, This month’s earnings from Squidoo and CJ activities was not as zesty as I had hoped. All told, My payout dropped by about 50% from last month, down to about $275.
�Squidoo Earnings for November 2007 (Paid in January):
$125
CJ Earnings for Dec. 2007 (Paid in January) :
$150
�Why did earnings drop?
- Squidoo tightened the payout tiers: As far as I can tell, the LR cutoff for earning the top tier ($6.23) this month went from around 2,700 to right at 2,000. Obviously, this caused fewer lenses to receive the big bucks, resulting in a lower Adsense share for yours truly.
- Squidoo’s LensRank algorithm changed: The Lensrank algorithm went through a change right in the middle of the month, weighing traffic more heavily. I made changes to my lens portfolio to adjust to the new ranking method, but not quickly enough to be reflected in these earnings.
- CJ was awful for me in December: I was set up to sell many more services and business products in CJ than consumer goods. Since December is historically terrible for these things, I’m not terribly surprised my earnings fell off.
Why I’m Still a Salty Old Pirate
- �Traffic is improving - It’s taking work and difficult to balance building new lenses with traffic generation for old, but my traffic is swiftly recovering from its christmas slump. More traffic = more $$ = higher LR.
- Hey, it’s still $300 - Not bad for doing something I have a blast doing
- CJ has already passed Decembers numbers in 8 days - well, almost. My CJ earnings this month are rolling right along, and I am back up to.
- Rankings are returning to previous levels - I now have fought my way back to the same number of lenses in the top 10,000 as I had before the algo change crushed me. Onward and upward!
Brief Squidoo Stats Update:
Current # of Live Lenses: 253
# of lenses built in Dec : 31
# currently in top 10k : 60
Total Earned with Squidoo in the last 4 months :$1500
-The Captain
