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, Okay, I know I’m late with this but the first few days of the month were crazy go nuts busy.
Overall income saw a bit of a drop this month, but not the end of the world by any means as I had a few new affiliate programs start to pan out after going through a bit of a dry spell for finding new ideas. I actually have a new project that I hatched yesterday that I might share with you folks once it pans out.. we’ll see.
May 2008 Earnings: $1,575.64
In April I was trying out some things with PPC and other marketing methods. While the volume was a little higher, the return I was getting on the PPC wasn’t worth the added risk in my opinion. I may give PPC another shot when the mood strikes me in the future, but not right now.
Earnings did increase by about 10% over March Squidoo earnings.
In other news, one of the Lensmasters that Haunts our Chat Room, Zach, has started a new blog about squidoo - Squidüber. He’s off to a pretty good start, you should drop by and see what he’s talking about or snag his RSS feed. Zach is the co-creator of SquidTop with me and is good for bouncing new Squidoo ideas back and forth. Good luck on the new blog Zack!
April ended up being a banner month for the Captain and his Roving Band of Squidoo Piracy. Earnings have continued to increase each month I have been a part of squidoo and reached a new record high in April. Some of these earnings came from websites that I have used squidoo exclusively to promote but Squidoo is the lynch pin that holds the entire earnings picture together.
Net earnings (after advertising, hosting, and other costs) for April Came out to:
$2,384.81
Not too shabby if I do say so myself.
Back in January, I announced that one of my goals was to make $10,000 with Squidoo in 2008. At the end of April I am hovering right around $4,000 for the year, which puts me ahead of schedule.
A few more months like April and I will really be in good shape!
In other news, look for the last half of the Squidoo SEO lessons on Tagging to cross the blog this weekend sometime.
I’m also beginning to put together an about/services page for Captain Squid, which it sorely needs. Is there any information or services that you folks would like me to add in particular?
I was going back over some of my payout records for squidoo and I realized something that made me do a very hard double take. I believe that it’s actually better for lensmasters and they make more money when squidoo uses the tiered adsense sharing program they currently have in place.
Before I explain why, here is a little terminology I’m going to use.
CPM - This is the amount of money you earn per 1,000 impressions.
I realized that on average, each month I am earning anywhere from $6-$10 CPM from the ads on squidoo. This is insanely high compared to anywhere else you can publish on the internet that I have found. In my experience a CPM of $2-$5 is considered very good. If you take away my highest traffic lens, I’m earning over a penny a visitor that comes to my lenses. wow!
I’m not saying this to brag, but instead to illustrate why the revenue sharing system that squidoo has set up is far superior to a system like Hub Pages where the impressions are split, not the revenue.
If you were able to use your own adsense code, you would only receive earnings based pretty much on the volume of your traffic, instead of the quality of your traffic. The current tier system means that your lens has to be judged to be of high quality as well as draw traffic in order to be rewarded. I truly believe that in the long term this is a win for both the lensmasters and for squidoo. As more and more high quality content drifts to the top (can you imagine the day when getting into the top 100,000 will be like getting into the top 100?) the amount squidoo can pay each month to these lenses will only increase as well (Imagine a top tier of $80 instead of $8 ).
I’m willing to listen to arguments as to why we should be able to use our own adsense code, but you are going to have to justify three things if you change the current adsense sharing system that squidoo uses:
1) Does your system make $8-$10 CPM?
2) How do you prevent click fraud if users are allowed to input their own accounts?
3) That’s it. Just two things I decided.
So? Is Squidoo’s adsense sharing the best way? or is there another way?
