A Squid Named SusanVillasLewis

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.)

Twiddle, twiddle, twiddle. I’m working on niche articles and stuff, but I’d really like to see my lenses this morning. Sigh.

I have had more than 5,100 visits in the past week to my lenses. This has been a pretty steady number for a while, although I remember when I broke 3,000. The week after that was when Kung Fu Panda was released and everything went totally crazy for me. Within a short time, I had major traffic coming to that lens; I think my rolling total high was around 2,500.

Here’s the cool part. Traffic to KFP has dropped down to a more sustainable level, around 1,400-1,500. I’m sure it will drop more until time for the DVD to release. But while this lens has lost 1,000 visits, my total number has stayed the same or increased. Which means I’m picking up almost a thousand visits to other lenses now. Wow. I can see where numbers for Brendan Fraser and a few others have gone up dramatically, but mostly, it’s just lenses that have gone from 10 to 30 visits for a week. And new lenses getting good traffic. Loving it!

Lately, I’ve taken one of the Captain’s constant themes to heart and have been creating lenses that are branches off of others. So I now have the entire iCarly cast - I started with the star, Miranda Cosgrove, some time ago - and am considering a lens about the show because the one out there isn’t that great. But there’s a lot of competition in the space for iCarly right now, so I’m still debating with myself whether it’s worth it. But it would complete the set.

I’ve completed more than 50 lyrics lenses in my other account. It was fun, I’m seeing a tiny bit of traffic on some of them already, but I think I’m burned out now. I’m sure I’ll get in the mood again later and do more. Or go back and add ringtones to each. Didn’t think about it the first time through. But I ended up doing quite a bit of branching there as well as I did my keyword research. So I have a string of Elton John, Tim McGraw, Madonna, Carrie Underwood, Bee Gees and Wham songs. Chosen because people were actually looking for them, so I’m feeling pretty good about their chances overall.

My other branching of late has been on the store front, mostly to avoid creating an overwhelming experience for the shopper. So I broke out two more cycling jersey lenses, so I have four now. Then, after I started my LittleMissMatched lens, I realized that I could break out the furniture line separately, so that’s done now. And I finally broke up my Skelanimals lens and started a shop with just apparel and accessories. More lenses to manage, yes, but the more frequently changed items are off on their own, which makes it easier to keep up with them in general. So instead of just three shops, I’ve gotten eight lenses out of this batch and eight opportunities to make a sale.

In fact, five of my seven WIP lenses right now are branches of current lenses. It’s an easy way to come up with a new lens idea and establish yourself in a niche of some sort.

Page one of Google after a day?

Wow. My brand new lens on the LittleMissMatched socks company is already on page one of google for the search term. Was looking for some additional info to add and there I was. Amazing. Fabulous. Marvelous. Weird.

I haven’t even really started to promote this much as yet. Did a SquidCast, posted over here and that’s about it. Of course, thanks to all the things I have set up, both of those items will be in my FriendFeed, FaceBook, etc., so there are lots of other links that were built just from doing those things. Wow. Not that it has resulted in any traffic as yet, mind you. So we shall see just how powerful all this turns out to be.

I appear to have angered the SquidTop somehow. I’ve tried to leave comments in four different places in the last hour with no luck. Am I alone? Does it just hate me? Has everyone banned me from leaving comments? (Actually, was trying to leave responses on my own tops, so that can’t be it.) Help?

OK, I did it. Started two new cycling jersey lenses and got them both published. One for colleges and another for beer. (Hey, they’re novelty designs.) Hooray! I think that might put me to 100 lenses now.

college cycling jerseys
beer cycling jerseys

Well, after all my excitement about being back in the Google index for my cycling jerseys lens, I’ve dropped out again. Boo!! I get really good traffic with this guy when it’s in the index, like 30 hits a day. And these people will buy stuff, which is also good. Not happy about this at all. Back to being patient and I think I’ve answered my question about breaking out lenses. At least if I have four or five of these guys, at least one will be in Google at any given time. I hope.

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.

Still looking for more great stuff to add to my Texas group. There are a lot of holes if anyone has some interest in writing about Texas history, music and towns other than Dallas and Austin. I’d like to get as much good stuff into the group as possible before I start a real promotion push.