A Squid Named SusanVillasLewis

Well, I was getting down on myself because I only have 236 published lenses and 246 total (gotta get those WIPs cranked out!!). Then I looked back at when I was setting my goals and noticed that at that time I had 238 total, including nine WIP. So despite deleting non-performers and WIPs I’m never going to get to, I’ve actually made some progress. Nothing like what’s needed to get to 350, but still, progress! And realizing that I need to have at least 11 new lenses a month for the rest of the year. Not impossible, but sounds overwhelming. Especially since I’m in a circle-running mode at the moment. Stupid lizard brain!

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.

Well, part of it at least. I have officially passed the 125 mark of published lenses. And I’m pooped. But I got it done before the Thirty Day Challenge starts Friday (or Thursday night, I’m not sure because of time differences). Hoping to learn good stuff there that will help me get to the other half of the goal, which was to make $200 a month in affiliate income. Most of what I make is still from Squidoo’s ad pool, and that’s nice, but I’d rather have a little more control over making stuff so I’m not dependent on lensrank. (Expecting Jennifer or Karl to come in here to tell me to buy the Squidoo Cash Machine.) Anyway, my deadline was Labor Day, so well done me on the lenses. Since 30DC will be taking up my August, we shall see if I make the other half.

One of them at least. I had set two goals for my lenses for the Labor Day weekend – have 125 published lenses and be making $200 a month in affiliate sales. I’m up to 116 published now, with nine sitting in WIP. At least three of those are under assessment for deletion, so I’m in need a few more good ideas to get going. But I’m close on that goal. Close enough that I should be able to reach it by the end of this month. Which is good since August starts the 30 Day Challenge and I might not have time to focus on making new lenses.

The money thing is trickier. I added up what I have mentioned in my daily updates for July so far and I’m at about $25 for the month. So extrapolating out, that could mean $50 for the month. So I’m not sure that $200 just from affiliate sales is realistic by the end of August. But I should definitely be hitting $200 total coming from all Squidoo activities by then and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

On the blog front, The Life of Lewister is at ~340 readers per month, which isn’t awful considering I’ve never set any goals for it and have only recently done anything to promote it. But I’d love to get it to 340 readers a day. Is that a reasonable goal? Yes. By the end of the year? Certainly. (I also have some goals for my niche blog on baby quilt patterns, but I need to really think about it and what’s realistic. Part of that is going to be heavy promotion, completing the first set of articles/posts and maybe one more lens. Once I get those done, I can get serious about goal-setting.)

Wow. I’ve hit a wall. I’ve been doing keyword research on my WIP lenses and have decided not to proceed with some of them. Done the same thing with most of my current lenses and am making hard choices about where to put my time.

So now, I’m kind of frozen as to what to do next. I’d like to get to 100 lenses by the end of the month so I can get into the 100 Club. But I also don’t want to jump on some of the good niches I’ve found because I’d like to use them for the 30-day challenge. So just not sure what to do next.

Just got emails that two of my CJ companies are changing affiliate programs. This is where having a system would be helpful, huh? I can’t remember if I ever actually created links to anything on those sites, much less where they would be. Sigh. I know where I used one, but I can’t be certain it’s the only place. Another to-do for the list.