Now that we’ve established that rating swaps for lensrank are not worth your time, let’s talk about why doing (almost) anything for earnings from lensrank aren’t really worth it either.

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.