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.

It is an excellent example of how a few ticks of traffic to your lens don’t necessarily mean you will instantly climb to the top of the lensrank ladder. If your visitors arent engaging with your lens, your rank can quickly return on it’s previous path of decay.

This topic is worth further discussion and I’ll dig through some of my stats to see if I can provide some other examples that help make mac33’s point and expand it into some other potential factors of the lensrank algorithm.

Great Post mac!

This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.

A stepping stone? Yes, definitely. Who doesn’t love a few extra bucks coming in every month? In fact, it’s possible to make several hundred bucks a month this way.

Why is it not worth worrying about using lensrank to earn money? Because the amount you will earn tops out pretty quickly. Getting a lens in the top 10,000 or 15,000 lenses is HARD.

The top payout tiers are competitive. In fact, I would venture to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something where people spend so much time trying to make an extra two dollars.

There are a lot of people out there that try to ‘game’ lensrank with rating swaps or traffic swaps or exchanges or multiple accounts or whatever. I’m not really surprised that people try to game or optimize their rankings. What just shocks me is the amount of time people are willing to put into it.

Think about it. It’s easy for a small item sale from amazon or eBay to add up to more than an entire month’s of effort on gaming lensrank ($2).

Conversely, if you are really worried about lensrank or people trying to ‘game’ it. I wouldn’t be.

Be grateful that they are wasting their time doing incredibly unproductive things.

If you run across one, report them. No need to crow it to the rooftops or go on witch hunts across the interwebs trying to find pepole who are gaming a ranking mechanism on a medium size website…

Instead of responding to them or worrying about them, go build your next lens that’s going to make some real money.

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.

All about Adsense -

Squidoo has ads on (virtually) every lens. The ads are nearly always google adsense ads but squidoo is always trying to find different ways to monetize the lenses to make more money for lensmasters so occasionally Squidoo wil introduce a new ad format (such as the Glam ads that were present for several months).

In order to prevent ‘click fraud’ – people clicking on their own ads in order to make money – squidoo takes all of the money from these ads and dumps them into a big pot. This pot then has 5% taken  for charity, then is split with 45% to Squidoo HQ and and the remaining 50% to all the lensmasters.

However, not every lens receives the same amount of money from the pot. The pile of money for lensmasters is broken down, with some lenses receiving more than others.

Currently, there are 4 major ‘tiers’ that you lens can fall into when HQ determines payouts for google and other CPC based ads. The tiers vary in payout each month depending on how much money Squidoo made.

The top tier has been paying out $8-$10 per lens for most of 2008. The next tier down usually pays between $1-$2. The third tier usually pays a few pennies (less than $0.10) and the bottom tier receives no money. For exact squidoo payouts stretching back to mid-2007 check out the Squidconomy lens.

The latest information available from Squidoo HQ states that the tiers are calculated off of the average lensrank of a lens for the entire month.

As a very rough guide, the top tier is usually about 2,000 lenses, the second tier is the next 8,000 best lenses, and the third tier is most of the rest of the lenses that rank in the top 100k.

This adsense money does not show up anywhere on your dashboard but can be viewed on the royalties tab as part of the total royalties for a lens in any given month.

Other money paid by Squidoo -

Squidoo has another way to earn money with them as well by using what are called the ‘moneymaker’ modules. There are several of these  for different merchants and in different formats. The three most popular merchants are definitely Amazon, Ebay, and Cafepress.

By adding modules from these vendors to your lens, you have the opportunity to earn a commission anytime someone visits that vendor by clicking a link to them on your lens. If they click through your lens and make a purchase (note: what the guest purchases does not have to be what is listed on your lens) then Squidoo gets a small commission.

Squidoo takes all of the commissions they earn through these programs and creates a bunch of little pots, one for each lensmaster. These pots then give 5% to charity and HQ takes 45% and the remaining 50% is distributed to each individual lensmaster.

I have received commissions from amazon, ebay, and cafepress modules that range from just a few pennies all the way up to over $20 for just my share.

These commissions do show up on your dashboard, usually within a few days of the purchase being completed.

When does the lensmaster receive their money?

The two types of payments are paid out at the same time through paypal, but the payments received often are for separate time periods, which causes a lot of confusion.

Between the 5th and the 15th of each month, Squidoo sends out a paypal payment to each lensmaster that is receiving cash for that pay period.

For example, in the next few days, September 2008 payments will be made. There is a lag time of 30 days on the google adsense money, meaning that the ‘tier’ payouts will be based on how lenses did during the month of July 2008. Money that was listed on your dashboard on the last day of July will also (usually) be included in this payment.

Since your dashboard shows all the money that hasn’t been paid out yet that means that your current dashboard shows your earnings from money maker modules from July 1 through today September 7. After the payout, your earnings in July will dissapear from your dashboard view and only August and September’s earnings will be shown. You can always look up past royalties on the Royalties tab of your dashboard.

When you sell items on Amazon, the specific item you sold will also be reflected in the royalty reports. However, Cafepress and Ebay royalties are not available on an item by item basis. This may change in the future, as reporting from Ebay’s affiliate program is set to undergo an overhaul on September 10th.

Common Misconceptions about Squidoo’s Payouts:

Payout Timing - If you start using squidoo in September, the first time you will receive a payment from Squidoo is in November, due to the lag time in the system. Squidoo can’t pay out money that it hasn’t received yet.

Dashboard Earnings – The earnings on your dashboard only reflect money from money maker modules, not your adsense share.

You can’t get rich on the Adsense Share from lenses - While the adsense share is nice and several lensmasters make over $100 a month with the revenue share, it’s not the path to riches with squidoo. Why not? It’s simply very very competitive to get lenses in the top tier. If you go through some of the top 2,000 lenses on squidoo, they are almost all high quality, high traffic, and very useful lenses. While you should strive to make all of your lenses with these qualities in mind, relying on your tier ranking can lead to trouble.

As an example, in order to earn $1,000 from the revenue share in one month you would need approximately 100 lenses in the top tier (5% of all the top tier lenses!) as well as an additional 200 lenses in the second tier.

It’s possible to make upwards of $1000 from a single lens in a month outside of the adsense payout and many lenses make $100+ a month from sales. Because of this, playing the ‘lensrank game’ often just isn’t a good use of time or resources.

All of that being said, creating high quality lenses and being rewarded for them in the form of the adsense payout is quite rewarding and can be used for other great purposes as well.

Did I miss anything? Are there any other basic payment questions about Squidoo that I can help clarify? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Now, in and of itself, this is not an unusual thing, as Lensrank usually shifts a bit more on Sundays due to some parts of the calculation only occurring once a week (Sunday). Apparently, there was also a slight bug in the algorithm that was factoring clickthroughs wrong that was corrected. Not too surprisingly, the SquidU forum went nuts.

There are a few things I want to stress here:

• Chasing Lensrank is not the way to make a ton of money on squidoo. If you have a lens in the top 2,000 and all it’s earning is $8 a month, or if you are just shooting for that $8 a month as your primary revenue from Squidoo, then you are making things a lot harder than they need to be. Instead of creating good content in niche areas and monetizing it, you are now trying to get in a popularity contest with 600,000 other contestants..
• Gil (From Squidoo HQ) said that there was a glitch and to give Lensrank a few days to settle down. Take a deep breath and build a lens.
• Affiliate Programs and Money Making Modules can make your lens portfolio much less Lensrank dependent. I’ve got lenses that are in the 70k plus range LR wise but they’ll still make $15-$30 a month pretty consistently. (If you want an example of this, stick around and I’ll show you how to make a money making lens this week.)

It makes me kind of sad when an awesome lensmaster like Poddys gets frustrated to the point of quitting squidoo just because of one lensrank update.

Yes, I understand that there is some money associated with Lensrank.

Yes, I understand that many think the CTR rate on lenses doesn’t seem like a ‘fair’ metric, but the more that visitors interact with squidoo, the more money squidoo (and by extension, you!) make.

As of right now, that LR update probably cost me around $250 if that were the be-all end all of updates. Luckily, there’s another update in just a few hours .

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.

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…