A Squid Named SusanVillasLewis

Another revamp, but a new lens to go along with it. The first is about the Think Fun 36 cube, which Seth received in the mail last year after the TED conference. Drove me nuts trying to solve it, but I eventually did. It got a lot of traffic right after Christmas – from people looking for the answer. (Work on it people! You can do it!) I’ve added more ThinkFun games to it and a bit more content, as well as a big image. Let’s see what happens!

To go with that lens, I did one on the ThinkFun Rush Hour game as well, following the 52-week formula. Thinking that I need a third set of games on there, just not sure if it should be more ThinkFun games or some different kinds of puzzle games. Hmmm.

And, as part of the formula, I set up a blog on Blogger to talk about family games. (Along with a couple of others on other topics. Whee. More blogs to write for and maintain. Sigh. I’m such a glutton for punishment.)

Or rather a not-yet-success lens, right? After all, failure is a necessary step toward innovation and success rarely comes on the first try.

End of zen lesson.

So I’ve been intrigued with the program Tiffany Dow started this year to get people to make 52 lenses this year, one a week with a very set method designed to not only create a solid lens, but also all the necessary juice to get traffic and attention. Me – I see so many places to start that I hadn’t actually started anything as yet. (That ever happen to you? Choice is good, too much choice not so much.) So I finally got started this weekend by revamping one of the few lenses I have that are on a single product. It’s sitting down in the 130K lensrank range, had a total of maybe 10 visits in its life and made a whopping 30 cents or so. Now, it has some stars and comments from when I first created it but it never took off. Sigh.

So, complete overhaul – well except the intro, just added to that a little – of my review of the VacuVin wine saver, a gadget that I don’t think we could live without at our house. I just wrote without really thinking about keywords and the like, so still some tweaking maybe. Following Tiffany’s instructions so that includes figuring out blog post and article still to go. Will report back on this guy as it’s a definite opportunity to see what kind of difference her system makes.

And I get to discount them since I didn’t set them until the end of January. Right?

• 350 lenses (I’m at 238 right now, including 9 WIP. Might hit it if I stop deleting never-performing lenses.)
• Get to $1K per month overall (Making ~$500 a month in sales right now, so that’s doable, but sounds big. I’m pretty sure I’m undershooting this based on how long it took to get to $500.)

Oh, wait. Is there anything else to make a goal on? Funny how things like traffic numbers, purple stars and so forth have just become unimportant to me. It’s all about the money now.

Dang. Sometimes it’s tough to know where you want to go. Having just come off a stellar month (for me), I’m uncertain just where to set a goal now. What’s realistic? I think the $500 a month should be realistic, right? But I’m going to need to make a few changes to make it happen. So I guess to get to that as a goal, I need a few mini-goals.

More lenses – 200 is the next mark and I’d like to be there by the end of the year. I currently have 160, including my group and all my WIP. So that’s a doable goal as long as I don’t get sidetracked doing research.

Use all my affiliates – I have a lot of affiliate programs I got accepted into that I only use one or two products from. This is not fair to either of us. Need to use them to develop more lens ideas and get more lenses that have selling potential. Either that or ditch them.

Think shorter!! – I tend to do a shop lens that is meant to be a one stop shop for some category. And I do that well with items from lots of different stores, so it truly is a one stop trip. But I need to test my theory that I might do just as well creating a lens that sends them on to the store where they can do the shopping rather than trying to put every item on the lens. This is becoming highly inefficient in terms of my return.

Get organized – I want to plan for doing market research for a set period of time every week, then spend the rest of the week working on lenses based on what I find. I love reseearch, so I do find that it can distract me from my regular work as well as from actually making a lens. Spend too much time looking for the exact right phrase and never get around to working on it. (If I could do shorter, spend less time overall with the research and the creation, my ROI would be much higher overall. Duh!)

to having my first $50 sales day today. Came up $2 short. But wow! I’m already on target to make $500 for the month, including estimated adsense sharing at Squidoo, which just blows my mind.

It took me forever to see any kind of sales at Squidoo. Forever. What helped me turn the corner? A little luck, good instincts, paying attention to my stats and learning keyword research techniques. The luck comes in with my political lenses, which are leading the pack. Follow this with new keyword research, which gave me a great Halloween niche. Good instincts brought me the Kung Fu Panda wave, while closely following what people search for brought in the cycling jerseys series that has been a steady producer.

Now if I could just keep Google from dropping lenses right when they should be hitting their peak!! My election party and Tinkerbell costumes lenses are MIA right as they should be getting their best (last-minute) traffice. Sigh.

I never would have thought that I would be doing political/election lenses. They just kind of landed in my lap. I would have been working on them long ago to get the SEO going and promotion and so forth. But it is what it is. I just never would have imagined the kinds of things that were out there for sale. And of course, I’d like to do some for next time that are more serious, like supporting third-party voting and looking at party platforms, etc. Those just take a lot of time to develop and I don’t feel I’d get the ROI on them right now. I’d probably finish the the day before the election.

So what do I have? Sarah Palin, of course, which I started back in March. In the last few weeks, though, totally based on some cool products I found, I did a lens with items for Democrat donkeys and Republican elephants and one with supplies and ideas for throwing an election night party. Biggest challenge was figuring out the right keywords for the URL and titles.

Having gone through this, I really wish that Squidoo had done a 2008 election front door. Would have been fun to see all the lenses in one spot. Or maybe not. I think I’ve had 15 people try to leave the links to their Sarah Palin lenses (created after she was nominated) on mine. There were a lot of people trying to grab that opportunity. Kind of surprising to me. Unless I was already in that vein and working on related lenses, I don’t think I would have bothered to do one on her. Wouldn’t have seen it as worth it at that point. Too hard to build an audience after the fact.

Sarah Palin is #1 today. Wow. I really didn’t think it would be possible to knock Janet out, however temporarily it might be. Traffic has hit what should be a stable 40K a week for a while until the debate in Oct.and election in Nov.

So have I done everything I possibly could now at Squidoo? I’ve had #1s in three categories (non-profits, people, movies) and now #1 overall. I’ve got a couple of LOTDs. I’ve got sales, I’ve got traffic. What am I missing here? I need something else to shoot for!! (Not that I’ve really shot for top ranking or LOTD.)

It’s easy to get caught up in the hubbabaloo over Sarah Palin and miss what’s happening with the rest of my dashboard. So here’s a few random things I’m noticing.

• Of my 133 live lenses, only seven of them have had no traffic in the past week. Given that one’s my testing lens and five are events that are long past, that’s pretty good. Another nine have only had one visit, so that’s a little over one percent that are really struggling. I’m good with that.
• I’ve got two lenses that have dropped below the 200,000 mark. Both are still featured.
• My iCarly related lenses have apparently returned to favor with Google as the traffic is picking up again. Looking at the dates it’s been almost a month since any of them have been looked at though. Yikes!
• Halloween traffic is definitely starting. My Tinkerbell costumes lens is getting more than 500 hits a week now and my lens on the renaissance festival held here in the Dallas area (which has a few costumes on it) is getting almost 200 despite not being a true costume lens. People mostly like to look at the pictures, though.
• My lensography has suddenly taken off. While there has been a dribble of traffic from Sarah Palin, there hasn’t been any consistent reason I could see as to why. More traffic to my twitter and blog though as a result.
• First women in politics is getting some nice traffic. Unfortunately, haven’t touched it since June, which is probably why it’s not getting above the 10,000 mark. Missed opportunity there before the end of the month.
• Think I missed some opportunities with my green chile lens as well. Traffic just didn’t pick up there as I hoped, but I didn’t get on the promotion enough before the Hatch festival.
• Things I see that make a difference in lensrank – ratings, sales and clickouts. I’ll have two very similar lenses in terms of freshness, clickouts and traffic, but one can be ranked 30K higher just because it has stars. I quit announcing every time I had a new lens because that gets annoying after a while for others, but I’m beginning to wonder if I need to do a little more on that. Squidcasts on every new lens? If a star is the one element needed to bump something from third tier to second, that’s probably an effort that’s worth $1.35, right?
• My oldest WIP was started in December last year. Actually, I have a WIP on my hubby’s account that’s over a year old. Guess what my new goals for the month are?

At least, my very first lens is. I think Seth had another post about Squidoo that day, which reminded me that I wanted to come over and try it. I’m pretty sure it took me several days to actually get around to publishing the thing because I did a lot of research on it and it did pretty well because it’s seasonal and I hit at just the right time. I have gone back occasionally to add to it and touch up and it’s back in the top 10,000 because it’s green chile season again. It’s funny because when I look at the dates, it took me a month to put together those first three lenses. I got better.

First lens ever

• Green Chile (someone one-starred this guy almost as soon as I published it. and I got my first suck-it-up comment from Glen.

Then the two for my husband’s account related to his TrackAddict forum

• Skip Barber Racing School (I am still really proud of this guy. I did a great job for having no clue. Only updates have been to add links to forum posts and change that Kevin went.)
• Car Clubs
• (Just noticed that I had started a lens for him that shows a date of 8-24. Never got back around to finishing it!!)

Second lens I did for me

• How to Donate Your Hair (have done one complete re-vamp of this guy. Considering another one)

I am a spam magnet today. What gives?