Thanks for the detailed feedback on what’s working for you!

ETA: Wow, I’m not surprised your Gaudi Christmas Ornaments lens is doing well; it’s a very visually appealing lens. The only trick is “will people search for it?” but, evidently, they do!

http://i2.squidoocdn.com/resize/squidoo_images/590/draft_lens12769581module118137901photo_1302857963zazzle-sales-earnings-ref

[Edit from Greekgeek: apparently my blog can’t figure out Squidoo’s image urls when they’re missing the .jpg at the end. There, it’s a live link at least]

Heh, the mermaid one used to be a page break lens and did worse after those went. Still it gets lots of clickouts. Sales are rare, at least of stuff I feature there, but I’m pretty sure it’s responsible for other referrals! (Maybe five sales a year? Enough to be worth it, not enough to be ‘Successful’).

The narwhals one is a lot more recent, and does a bit better (maybe a sale a month), but it tends not to get as much traffic. And thank you for the compliment on the picture I should dig that sketch out and finish it properly. It’s also not got Zazzle in the title because I feature stuff from Cafepress and Amazon too, and I don’t think people see Zazzle as an automatic ‘yes, buy from them!’ place yet (also because there are so many ‘awesome Zazzle lens that is actually just my stuff cause someone told me to do this’ lenses out there that I try and not look like those). I couldn’t do that with the mermaid one because mermaid posters was a huge topic, while narwhal t-shirts is a bit more specific. I will say that MY narwhal t-shirt is one of my best sellers now, not sure if that lens is responsible or not!

My most successful Zazzle lens, I think, is the Gaudi Christmas Tree Ornaments one; highly, highly seasonal, but delightfully niche, so I pulled in most of the traffic on that topic (never more than 50 hits a week). And of course, many of the ornaments are my mother’s – I was trying to promote them, as I already knew they sold well (sold about 20 ornaments in a month, half of which were hers; as they are pricey, the commission was definitely worth it).

I did one on Rapunzel posters; Zazzle and Amazon. Sold mostly Amazon ones, but the Zazzle posters were more interesting and attracted more traffic/clickouts. It’s fallen now, but it did pretty well for a while on visits and clickouts and picked up a few commissions.

I tend to make much steadier money with the lensrank; they pull in image traffic and encourage clickouts, but the sporadic commissions can range from tiny to quite large. And looking over my referral history, all my referrals pretty much are via Squidoo, and the ‘Zazzle lenses’ are a chunk of them.

I actually started out making image collection lenses from DeviantART – originally for ArtRage (which is what really got me started on Squidoo) – of little thumbnails, for ease of finding artists. That transferred very well over to Zazzle (though obviously I got a lot better at it as I went along).

Basically: 1. Go NICHE. Like every other picture or product or link lens, find a corner that needs organising, ferret out all the relevant items and make them look good. 2. Image traffic matters. 3. If there are alternatives on other sites, find them. If the lens is too big, then you need to focus in a bit more tightly, whether by product type or subject matter. 4. Move on, build more. 5. Don’t limit yourself to certain ways of selling Zazzle stuff. I suspect my random art scattered across all my other lenses is responsible for as many referrals as the specific nichey image collections.

Oh, if you saw my ‘Zazzle Sales & Earnings’ lens (which really, really needs updating!) there’s a graph …. we’ll see if this works. Probably not.

But the referrals REALLY kicked off after I started linking from all over Squidoo. So while any single lens may not become a magic, obvious seller, they do add up. It helps that the cookie lasts so long.

And that is where I think we have the potential for success – both CafePress and Zazzle sell officially licensed merchandise that you cannot get elsewhere.

However, what would be interesting is if the Lensmasters who own these lenses would actually be willing to say how much of their traffic actually converts to sales, because as we know its not the actual number of visits, it is the conversions.

So 20 visits a week that result in 10 sales may result in more income than 200 visits that result in 5 – in both cases the lens will probably rank in Tier 3 so it will be the sales that make the difference in income not the tier payments.

But the most pertinent point I think you are making Ellen is about the keywords – it frustrates the heck out of me that the people in the position to influence and who people naturally will listen to the most, are missing the whole point about keywords, particularly in lens titles. We are being encouraged to use catchy lens titles etc.

(I know we want to have some fun while we are writing, but getting traffic is a very serious business for many who are relying on their lenses to make an additional income and for some it is their only income.)

But sadly, there’s no mention about keywords in lens titles at all and it is no wonder that people then find that they are not getting traffic despite the effort they have put in to those lenses. *sigh*