Adventures in Squidoo, SEO, CSS and Web Design
Wow! Where are these purple stars coming from! This is a HUGE huge huge thank you to everyone who has nominated my lenses for purple stars, Lens of the Day, and other Squidoo awards.
I also feel like bragging, although I am actually a little surprised at one of the purple stars I just found in my inbox. It's not my best lens. I suppose it's unique content, though!
So here are all my Purple Stars and other Squidoo awards, plus a few personal benchmarks for which I am proud.
Have you taken a look at Pastiche's Squidoo Stats Blog?
She doesn't give earnings, just her lens tier breakdown. 40 lenses in the top 2000 out of 120. FORTY. That's
one out of every three of her lenses earning top dollar. AND they'll be earning lots of Amazon commisisons, on top of ad revenue!
I have been aware of and lensrolled or featured some of Pastiche's lenses on clipart, but that figure still knocked my socks off.
It's worth taking the time to stop and admire Pastiche, and observe her secrets to Squidoo success:
1) Cover a niche very well, with lots of lenses devoted to seasonal and specific topics within that niche.
2) Make well-organized, attractive, easy-to-use and easy-to-read lenses.
3) Target keywords like crazy so you get a lot of traffic for specific searches. Don't just have a lens on clipart. Have a lens on clipart for vintage hearts, or John Deere Tractor clipart, or squirrels.
4) Clickthroughs. Oh my gosh the clickthroughs. Nearly everyone coming to her lens is LOOKING for something, and almost certainly will be clicking on some of her links because she gives EXACTLY what she promise to give with the lens title and opening blurb.
5) Amazon modules that target her reader's wishes and needs exactly. It's one thing to promote items related to your lens topic. It's another thing altogether to target a particular audience that is desperately wanting the thing you offer, and will be quite likely to buy it.
She's identified a corner of the web for which there is a steady and unrelenting command, and provides a service so that lots and lots of people looking for it will come to her. I know from my own lens on where to get free graphics that there's a bottomless demand here, but I haven't really done much to monetize or follow up on that. Pastiche has!
Of course, since she's cornered the market on clipart so well, the answer is not to try and target the same niche, but to apply Pastiche's winning Squidoo strategy to another niche-- one that's wide open.
Hats off to you, Pastiche!
Welcome back to the third and final segment of my “Lensrank secrets” study. In Part I we squeezed the Squidoo FAQ for every scrap of information it could tell us about lensrank. In Part II, we tackled the Squidoo Dashboard stats, on the theory that most of those factor into lensrank (the FAQ showed that many do). Whether or not they are all lensrank factors, they certainly give us a lot of clues about how to improve and promote our Squidoo lenses.
Now I’m going to finish up with an in-depth look at the “individual lens stats” part of the Squidoo Dashboard.
In my last post I dissected the Squidoo FAQ to squeeze out every bit of official information about lensrank.
There's another possible source of official lensrank information right under our noses: the Squidoo Dashboard. I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Squidoo is not expending great gobs of computing and hosting power calculating and storing lens stats for our sole benefit. Most of these stats measure factors alluded to in the FAQ. I suspect that most if not all of our Squidoo Dashboard stats are lensrank factors. We don’t know which carry the most weight, and the lensrank algorithm changes from time to time, but dashboard stats tell us a lot about what Squidoo, at least, thinks is important for an effective webpage.
So let’s dig deeper and see what the Squidoo Dashboard has to tell us.
Tier chasing or lensrank chasing is a bit like a dog chasing cars -- there are better moving targets to focus one's energies on, and why does it matter?! But that car bumper is very shiny.”
—Greekgeek, in SimeyC’s SquidU thread “Lensrank Buzz”
Lensrank has been a frequent topic of discussion in SquidU lately — more than usual, I mean.
I feel ambivalent about lensrank. I’ve seen a lot of internet communities in which post count, forum ranks, join date or some other arbitrary system gets used to gauge a member's worth.
Except that lensrank measures something more meaningful than mere post count. It’s an attempt to gauge lens worth, so that low-content lenses get pushed to the back row and exceptional lenses get to shine. That’s a necessary quality control loop on a site where anyone is allowed to submit content. Lensrank also yields benefits worth chasing. The highest-ranked lenses get extra search engine and visitor exposure on Squidoo's multiple “Top 100” lists. Squidoo's search box, almost the only way to navigate the site, returns results by lensrank.
Finally, of course, lensrank determines payout. Even though I want to keep Squidoo as a fun hobby, I can’t help fiddling with my lenses just below a payout tier cutoff! I track my Squidoo lensrank and payout stats each month. Yes, the bumper is shiny.
So let us examine this shiny bumper. Just what is lensrank based on, and... more importantly for you folks, I’m sure... how do I keep 10-20 of my lenses in the Top 2000?
I recommended ICDSoft to my Mom for HER business. That's how much I trust ICDSoft. $6/mo + $5/year for domain registration.