Greekgeek's Online Odyssey - Hubpages and Online Article Writing Tips

So There You Have It…

As expected, the earnings for June were discouraging for someone who decided at the beginning of this year to take a sabbatical from academia and become self-sufficient through online income by year’s end.

Here’s my Squidoo stats for June earnings and today’s traffic.

October 2010 was the last time I earned less than $500 on Squidoo. I had half the lenses then than I did in June. Some of June’s lost tier ones (I lost seven of my twelve) were my top tier page break lenses getting broken. At least one is probably dropped traffic from Squidcasts, but I can’t account for the lensrank crash on all of them.

It’s scary. Squidoo was a lot more fun when putting in 60-70 hour work weeks meant my pay was going up most months. Still below minimum wage, but the long-term dividends made it worthwhile.

I’ve started working on the other  legs of my Five Goals, looking for alternatives, but nothing’s really effective yet. I have at least struck gold in my alternate Squidoo account with a niche that seems to get clickouts through the roof : 800+ clickouts in the last week on just one lens. Even so, most of the lenses in that niche aren’t getting insane clickouts like that one; they’re mostly turning out tier three with a few tier twos– translating to about $10 more dollars of earnings a month. This is definitely not the efficient way to become self-sufficient through online income.

I’ve got lenses with ~600 visitors a week that are tier two, and occasional sales don’t get them to tier one. Clickouts seems to be the magic bullet — for now. Frustrating for me, because my lenses with tons of clickouts actually have less interesting, meaty content than other lenses with more traffic. But of course, if people are looking for free clip art or photoshop brushes or the like, they don’t want an essay and they don’t need information or a step-by-step how-to. This has only been since June, mind you — before that, my clickouts didn’t seem to edge out all other ranking factors quite so strongly. But one learns and adapts.

 

After Squidoo pay day, someone always asks, “So, how are you spending your Squidpay?”

Paying for a rental and car repairs after my first auto accident since 1988.

It’s been one of those weeks. We all have ‘em, eh?

One Comment

  1. Sorry to hear that. Hang in there! Summer time is always slow on Squidoo, but traffic and royalties should pick up in the fall.

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