I feel bad for you though, Tony. It IS hard to make a living online, but it shouldn’t be that hard to get at least some tier twos and more sales than you’re getting.

I’m working on a new tutorial about sales, since I do actually make some sales every day (although nothing like some people do). But in the meantime, have you seen my lens on how to get more clicks, sales? At least some ideas there might be useful.

There is a lot of potential for income with Zazzle, also art sites like Fine Art America, Red Bubble and Imagekind. It might be worthwhile spending a couple of weeks and dedicating them to creating several niches on Zazzle. If you promoted them with lenses, blog posts, and also tagged them well so that other people hit on them and promoted them, the sales there might increase nicely as well.

I think Wizzley and Zujava are coming along nicely, but I have done almost nothing on either of them so far due to lack of time. Definitely worth dedicating a week each to I think, just to see what happens.

Wishing you luck. I just wish I had the time to develop my web sites more, as well as to publish more lenses as well. Just not enough hours in the day.

My Funny Signs lens thrives on that.

Even if the images are directly uploaded on your squidoo lens, with Squidoo headers, body text, and the “label” field on images uploaded into text modules, you can zero in on a topic and get a lot of image search traffic. So your photo essays CAN work on Squidoo, as long as you’ve done some keyword research. (tip: do some Google image searches and see what related search terms come up. These may be good phrases to use.

The problem with photo essays on Squidoo is that the “pin it” button lets people upload copies of the images on the lens to Pinterest. In theory, that should get traffic from Pinterest, but often, Pinterest members view the images on Pinterest and never visit the lens. Repins often break the links to the source site, and Pinterest provides embed codes so that pinned images may be displayed on any site on the web, like embedded Youtube files, except that the embedded codes point back to Pinterest’s copy of the photo, not the original.

For some people, they’re willing to embrace the risks of Pinterest and use it to promote their work — every now and then, something DOES get traffic from pinterest, instead of just adding to Pinterest’s growing library of copied images. But I don’t like that system. The “pin it” button on Squidoo gives pinterest members permission and encouragement to take my images and repost them off-Squidoo. That’s not just a problem with my own photos, but with Creative Commons where I’ve carefully given a link and credit to the original photographer or artist, but the pinned copy credits me and links to my lens, breaking the terms of use for the Creative Commons images.

All of which means I’m now posting photo essays on Hubpages, where they earn LESS money, because Hubpages lets us choose a “nopin” option in our profile settings that gives Pinterest members a copyright warning and blocks them if they try to pin a graphic from my hubs. I wish I could set it on a hub-by-hub basis, as there’s some of my own photos I wouldn’t mind having pinned, but for the most part I prefer to maintain copyright of my work.

I do have to say this about Zazzle and Cafepress: the time I invested there was well spent. I spend zero time promoting my products, and they still bring in hundreds of dollars (thousands during the holidays) per month. I did a lot of heavy promotion using Squidoo in the past for my Cafepress and Zazzle products, which still brings in some sales. With the election heating up, I have to make an effort to spending more time on those sites once again (2008 had ridiculous sales levels). My one tip for Zazzle/CP would be to diversify there as well, in terms of types of designs. Cater to everyone, and you will make money.

And, I know what you mean about the ebook vs. instant gratification of online publishing thing. I wrote an entire 55 page ebook and published it all for free (ebay help tutorials) because I couldn’t wait for the content to be read. It was a fun process though.

It’s funny; my Feb earnings for Squidoo were my second-best, but my reaction was, “Argh, I need to diversify, not keep riding the horse that’s giving me blisters!”

I will put that into the idea pot. If something occurs to me, I’ll definitely go for it! (In fact, I’m tempted to take ancient Greece Odyssey off Squidoo, where it really doesn’t fit anymore, and turn it into a Kindle book instead.)

And, perhaps, what kind of content each site is geared towards and favors.

After some time, I might give Wizzley a shot. And I really wish I knew how to improve my Zazzle income…