The tiers were as follows (I’ll update Squidconomy with these a little later today):

$11.04
$1.72
$0.08

Interesting Changes afoot in payouts:

This was the first month that Squidoo went to an official ‘averaged’ payout, meaning the average rank of any given lens for the entire month is taken into account when determining payout levels. As a result, things seem to have heated up for snagging a top payout.

Looking at my stats, since I was out getting married and honeymooning for 2 weeks, the first few days of July really pulled some of my average LRs down. Hopefully this month they will bounce back a bit.

Note: HQ is having a minor glitch with Paypal so if it’s a day or two before the $$ hit your account, don’t freak out. It’s coming.

As a side note, there is a pretty good discussion about how much money you can earn from squidoo going on in the forum. I throw in my 0.02 here.

On the note of earnings, I am not going to post my total Squidoo earnings in public any more. For the first year of this blog I have posted earnings reports every month detailing exactly where the income came from. While I’m still willing to talk about how much I earn in general terms in the squidoo chat room, I want to focus more on the process of learning to earn money with squidoo.

How was everyones earnings this month? Were you satisfied with the new payout methodology? Did you break $50 or $100 or $200 for the first time?

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.

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.