October 2011 Squidoo Earnings

Here is my Squidoo payment for October 2011 (earned  in August 2011). I can proudly say that this is my biggest payment on Squidoo ever. Almost $400! Awesome :)

My October 2011 earnings are as follows from 103 featured lenses:

Grand Total ~ $381


Follow tips and articles on this blog to learn how you can make money on Squidoo yourself. You can see that I know what I'm talking about :)


This was the biggest payment for Tier 1 lenses since I am a Squidoo member. Lenses ranked from 1 to 2000 received $47,68 and this is really large amount of money for one single lens :)

It's Still Time to Make Halloween Lenses!

And you should definitely make one or two. Or a bunch of Halloween lenses. Halloween is one of the best holidays and one of the best niche for selling stuff on Squidoo and elsewhere online. This is the time of year when you don't need to worry about your lensrank because you will definitely make some sales even if you're not in Tier 1 or Tier 2. Believe me! In this post I want to share some quick tips for making good Halloween lenses on Squidoo and increase your earnings in this spook time of a year.

How to Make a Halloween Lens
If you want to sell something on your lenses you need to explore the market and see what people are buying online for Halloween. Costumes and costume accessories is a wonderful niche and it will surely make you some sales and bring some traffic to your lenses. But my advice is to dig deeper and choose a more specific niche such as Lady Gaga Halloween Costumes, Thor Helmets for Halloween or maybe a lens called How to make Frank Sinatra costume yourself. These are titles that will get your lens found quicker and you will compete with these keywords. But forget about titles such as Halloween Costumes or Buy Costumes Online.

Happy Halloween Magazine

Few posts ago I made a report about the new Squidoo magazine called Happy Halloween. This is an official Squidoo collection of the best Halloween lenses and posts. You can ad your lenses to this magazine by setting topic for your lens to Holidays and Celebrations -> Halloween. Your lenses will be automatically included in this magazine when you do so.

Some lensmasters however don't want to include their lenses in this new magazine because a lot of them report that they are loosing traffic and earnings because the magazine is two weeks old and it does not rank so well yet. So it's your decision. I suggest you to opt some lenses in and leave others out to see how they are doing.

Include Zazzle Modules

If you have a Zazzle store then you should most definitely make some cool and spooky designs and promote them like crazy right now. Folks buy tons of stuff on Zazzle for Halloween and if you work a little bit on your designs you can make quite a lot of sales. But be sure to also include some Zazzle products such as invitation cards and merch on your Squidoo lenses. This will make your lens looks better plus you will maybe make some sales via Zazzle modules. It's worth trying.

Act Now!

This is the most important part if you want to make some profit! Act now and create some lenses! Right now, start right now! Not in a week or after few days! Act now! The Halloween is coming, there are already plenty of nice lenses and dozens of them are being made every day so be sure to catch this train and increase your Squidoo earnings.

Status Icons are New Squidoo Dashboard Feature

Another new cool feature has been added to Squidoo and it really helps you to see what is going on with your lenses and shows you what is need to be done. Status icons on your dashboard show you statuses of your lenses  - green lenses, WIP lenses, locked lenses and lenses with warnings. Check out the screenshot below.

How are these icons going to help you? They help you to do your TO DO list for Squidoo and see what is need to be done. You want most (the best is all) of your lenses marked green in order to have the best Squidoo experience and make money from every lens. Green lenses are features lenses and these are the lenses that make you money on Squidoo.

WIP Lenses

WIP lenses are Work in Progress Lenses. These are Squidoo lenses that are still under construction or lenses that need to be approved by Squidoo team if they get caught in Squidoo spam filter.These lenses are marked with red on your Squidoo dashboard. More lenses you have marked with red the more lenses need to be turned into green!

Locked Lenses

Squidoo lock lenses if they are considered spam, over promotional or maybe just copied content from somewhere else. Once a lens is locked you can still save your lens from being deleted and this new icon will kindly reminds you how many lenses need an urgent modification and edit!

Read the official Squdioo announcement about this new feature and express your opinion about these icons in the comment section below! Do you think this will help you?

100,000 Points on Squidoo

Not a big achievement but it's a cool fact to share with you all :) I just reached 100,000 points on Squidoo. Nice number :) I'm going to reach 200,000 now :) Below is the screenshot.

5 Tier 1 Lenses! WOW!

Today is anoter day for celebrating :) I will surely drink a beer or two to celebrate the latest lensrank update on Squidoo :) I now have 5 lenses in Tier 1! 2 new tier 1 lenses in one lensrank update. Ben 10 Coloring  Pages and Me Gutsa Meme climbed up to tier 1 :) Awesome :)

So what have I done to reach this?

I think that two things count the most to get the best rank on Squidoo. Traffic and clickouts. I've done a little analysis of my top 5 lenses on Squidoo and this are the two things that they have in common. Traffic and clickouts. My top lens that is ranked #130 doesn't have a single sale in almost a year. It doesn't have much backlinks! But it receives 10.000 views per week and few thousands clickouts per month. And it's my best lens.
I compared this lens to my other 4 tier 1 lens and they all have quite a lot of traffic and a lot of clickouts. Not as much sales, backlinks and likes. So I guess this is it.n Clickouts and traffic.

Increase Clickouts and Traffic to Improve your Rankings

I will surely work hard to improve next 5 lenses that rank best in tier 2 to get them into Tier 1. And you should work on your lenses too to get better rankings and get more money from AdPool. And you can see that sales and likes don't count that much in terms of overall rankings so be sure to concentrate on traffic and clickouts. Be sure to add Link List Module, Link Voting module, Amazon Modules and include related and interesting links in your text modules, pools and intro. This will surely increase the number of your clickouts and improve your rankings. Try it and observe!

My New Squidoo Lenses

It's time to update you with my new Squidoo lenses. Published in the last week or so. I'm working hard creating new lenses and I am working on a lot of lenses related to digital photography and DSLR cameras.

My new lenses on Squidoo

• Underwater Photography
• Sexy Anime
• Zoo Tycoon 2
• Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb
• Make Money with iStockPhoto
• Top 10 Microstock Sites
• Best Watches for Men

Any comment is much welcomed. Here or on the lens.

Best AdSense Ad Ever!

I was working on one of my lenses today and I stumbled on a very cool ad from Google AdSense. Quite awesome, it screams for clicks and it seems like it is designed for Squidoo.

Click the screenshot above to view the image in full size. Now see the "Don't click" AdSense ad just below My Toolbox etc. See how colours match and it's quite the same button as default Squidoo "Create a lens!" button. And there is a psychology effect that most certainly generates a lot of clicks. Forbid people from doing something and they will want to do this even more! Quite interesting.

A Few Fun Facts About Squidoo

Below are some cool and fun facts about Squidoo.

1. Squidoo has been reviewed by the New York Times, Mashable, BoingBoing and sites and papers around the world.
2. Squidoo was founded in 2005 and was live to the world in 2006. The founding team consisted of just four people. In 2011 they are only at 6 full time people.
3. Squidoo is on the list of the most 100 most popular websites in the US, ranked by Quantcast traffic.
4. Squidoo generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual royalties to charities and to our users.
5. There's a Squidoo cookbook! In early 2009 Seth and Megan wrote The Joy of Squidoo: A Recipe Book for Great Lenses.
6. Many lensmasters earn more than $10,000 a year from Squidoo. Some make $100. Others are happy with $40 or $4. Lots give it to charity.
7. As of October 2010: More than one million people visit Squidoo (that means your lenses) every day. The more traffic one lens brings in, the greater the chances that visitor will see your lens as well. That means it's good for you when your competition on Squidoo succeeds.
8. Squidoo is free to use.
9. Many of Squidoo lensmasters earmark their earnings for charity, and the Squidteam also makes donations to worthy causes throughout the year. So far, Squidoo has generated more than $500,000.00 to charities around the world, including Acumen Fund, charity: water, Room to Read, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and literally hundreds of others.

Source: Getting Started with Squidoo

New Milestone Reached - 10.000 Weekly Visits

New success on Squidoo! I finally reached more than 10.000 overall visits of my lenses. The best lens generated more than 6000 views and others add to the 10k milestone. Below is the screenshot for proof. Click on the image to view it in full size.

Another Tier 1 Lens!

Great news! Another lens of mine just climbed into the Tier 1 and now I can count 2 of my lenses in this tier :) This is indeed a great reason for a little celebration.

This is one step closer to my goals for Squidoo 60 Day Challenge. I know I won't reach 10 Tier 1 lenses till 1st of July, but I have two Tier 1 lenses now and other are ranking higher and higher every day. So I'm really optimistic about other lenses as well. I think I can reach 10 lenses in Tier 1 till the end of this summer.

The lens I'm talking about is 10 Best Selling Laptops 2011. Why it's in the Tier 1? Backlinks with proper anchor tags, quite a lot of sales, nice traffic stats and constant updates. I redesigned a lens a little, added some text and new modules and implement RSS feeds for best selling laptops from Amazon directly into the lens. And the lensrank sky-rocked by the night :)

I will do some studies to see which site brings the most traffic and which backlinks are performing well and then I post my experiences here.

2 New Lenses

I want to present my two new lenses. Brand new, pretty cool and filled with information and content.

1. Sexy Anime Figurines

Anime figures and manga figurines are making me quite a lot of money on Squidoo and sales are pretty great. Traffic is rising day by day and lenses about the topic rank high. That's why I decided to make a small network of lenses for this niche. I hope I will increase my earnings by doing so.

Sexy Anime Figurines is a lens about cool and attractive anime figures that you can buy online for affordable prices. These figurines are really awesome, high quality products and designed in details. If you love anime and figurines combined with beauty and babes than this page will fit you just fine! Browse the lens and find the best anime figurines.

2. Top 10 Digital SLR Cameras 2011

I made a list of best selling and top rated DSLR cameras in 2011. I love photography, I'm experimenting with stock photography and I'm making money online selling photos and stock photos. And every photographer knows that a quality digital SLR camera is one of the strongest weapon in photography if you want to make high quality photos.

Check out the lens Top 10 DSLR Cameras and find the best digital SLR cameras available on the market right now. You'll see that these cameras are really affordable and are worth their price!

Introducing The New Giant Squid Club

Some big changes are coming to Giant Squid Club on Squidoo. Squidoo recently sent an email to all who sent an application to join Giant Squid Club and introduce the new changes in the program and new minimums for joining the program.

In this post I want to present these new changes and new standards for new Giant Squids.

The 3 things you need to know:

1. Squidoo is asking all those who recently sent an application to join the Giant Squid Club to fill out a new application form. Anyone who doesn't apply here won't be considered for the Giant Squid Club.

Here is the application to fill out: https://squidoo.wufoo.com/forms/join-the-giant-squid-club/

2. You only have to have 25 lenses, not 50, in order to apply! But wait. That does mean it's easier to get in. In fact, Squidoo have even higher standards of quality for those 25 lenses. They also need to be published, featured (not Work in Progress), and so good you want to share them with the others.

Let's say you have 54 published & featured lenses, but maybe you rushed a bit to get them done by the June 30 Giant Squid deadline. Maybe they're not all quite as good as you'd like. You caught a break! If you have at least 25 that are insanely great, then you're ready to apply.

On the other hand, if you've been working since March and have 115 superstar lenses, then you can apply for 'Giant 100' right away and get the perks for that level if you're approved.

3. There are no more deadlines. You can apply whenever you are ready, whenever you are certain your lenses are really strong. So take your time, no rushing, no all-nighters. Just good solid lenscrafting.

Read more about the changes and new Giant Squid Club in this post on Squidoo HQ blog.

Google +1 Button is now live on Squidoo!

Google recently offered bloggers and sites to add its +1 Button to their articles and content. Google +1 button is a simple bookmarking button, very similar to Facebook Like Button, that can help both bloggers and users to promote and explore good content. If you want to know more about this new Google feature please read my article Google +1 Button for Bloggers on my blog Blog of Zoso.

Google +1 Button is currently available just for Giant Squids.You can read the official announcement about this new feature and testing on Squidoo HQ Blog.

How Can This Improve My Lenses?

If you +1 a lens it will be recommended to your community and friends. So if your friends search for a specific keyword related to your lens, your lens will appear higher in search results and Google will show your recommendations to your friends and your network. This can help you to increase your traffic and gain some quality readers that are interested in the topics you're covering. People will more likely to check out something that someone has recommended to them.

What Google says
Here’s what Google has said about their goals and how this might positively affect SEO:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1′s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Example
You’ll see the +1 button on Giant Squid lenses, next to the existing Facebook and Twitter social sharing buttons. New button looks like this:

The Google +1 button on a Giant Squid's lens

What do you think about this new feature? Do you think this new button will help to grow your traffic and rankings? Share your thoughts in comments.

3 New Lens Themes

Squidoo introduced three new lens themes and now has 24 lens themes total! This is great way to breathe some freshness in your old lenses or make a new lenses with these brand new designs.

Read the official announcement of this update here.

Below you can see these three new lens themes, their screenshots and some cool features.

1. Big Squid

Big Squid is a brand new lens with Squid in it. Awesome and clean design which is the best choice if you're making a lens about Squidoo, Squidoo tips and topics related to Squidoo.


2. Algae

Algae is a very clean and easy to read theme.

3. Blueprint

Blueprint is a blue theme with blueprint design. Great for lenses about science and technology.

My First Tier 1 Lens

My hard work and a lot of coffee finally took me somewhere on Squidoo. By following tips from some succesful lensmasters and building a network of quality backlinks I manage to move one of my lenses to Tier 1. For those who don't know what Tier 1 is, this is a group of Squidoo lenses with rankings from 1 to 2000. These lenses get the most from advertising revenue each month and April payment for tier 1 lenses was a little less than $30. So you see, it's really good to have some lenses in the highest tier on Squidoo.

The lens I am talking about is Funny and Cool Facebook Status Updates where I made a list and resources of ideas for funny and inspirational ideas for Facebook status updates. Facebook is a trending topic right now and people search for pages with stuff for their Facebook wall. And it seems that a lot of folks like my lens.

5 things that made this happen

1. Backlinks. I made a lot of quality backlinks on different sites. I wrote a unique description on each bookmarking site and add a link to my lens on Squidoo. I also submit these other links with more unique description so I build a small but powerfull network of links pointing to my original lens.
2. Promotion. I promoted the lens on Facebook and Twitter and the news is spreading real quick. My traffic skyrocked and I am happy to announce that I will hit 3000 weekly views.
3. Fresh Content. I added some fresh content to the lens and reorganize my modules so it looks better. New content really boosted its rank.
   
4. Links. Added two capsules for featured links on the lens where I listed links with more sites that offer ideas for Facebook updates. Because the links are related to my lens and people are interested in them the lens have a lot of clickouts and high CTR. This really improve raking.
5. Tags. I first made some research about tags on Squidoo and modified tags for this lens a little. I used tags really related to the lens and traffic really increased because of this.

I hope you will find some of these tips useful. I am still learning about Squidoo ranking so I can't tell for sure what is the most important for a good ranking but when I'll know for sure I'll be happy to let you know.

Getting in Tier 1 is a first big step in my Squidoo 60 day challenge where I intend to build 10 lenses in Tier 1. So this is a first step and 9 remain. But I am exited and really happy to have a lens in Tier 1! And some other lenses are climbing really fast so with some work I expect to have at least 3 more Tier 1 lenses in a week or so.

Squidoo 60 Day Challenge

I'm working on my own Squidoo 60 Day Challlenge.A challenge when I want to see if I can really achieve something real with this Squidoo things and increase my earnings to some nice monthly number.

Check out my lens Squidoo 60 Day Challenge for more info, updates and inspiring comments :)

My main goals in this challenge:

1. I want to Make 10 Tier 1 lenses
2. I want to Make 30 Tier 2 lenses
3. I want to Make 40 Tier 3 lenses
4. I want to start selling at least 2 Amazon products per day
5. I want to start selling at least 1 iTunes song per day
6. I will try to become a Giant Squid with my work during the challenge
7. I want to reach the Highest Level on Squidoo
8. I want to grow my fan club and get 500 Fans on Squidoo
9. I want to get a Purple Star :)
10. I want to increase my weekly traffic to 10.000 or more per week

So these are my main ten goals for this Squidoo 60 Day Challenge. I will work hard and try to achieve most of these goals in 60 days or less. And then stay there :) On the lens about the challenge you can find my progress and see where I'm going with tiers and stuff.

And a little more about earnings. My ideas is this: If I create 10 Tier 1 lenses, 30 Tier 2 lenses and 40 Tier 3 lenses I will increase my earnings from Squidoo ad sharing to app. $400 per month.

I hope you like this challenge and you'll check out my lens to see my progress and experiences. I will share my experiences and updates here and on the lens so bookmark them for further reading and updates if you're interesting in this challenge yourself.

Tools and Resources for Squidoo Lensmasters

Ok, let's first list some tools and resources that will surely help you to make better and wonderful Squidoo lenses and optimize them well. Squidoo can be quite difficult if you want to add some style and design to your lenses because this requires some CSS and HTML knowledge. So if you're not familiar with coding or if you want to simplify your Squidoo experiences these tools can really help you to make better lenses.

Check out my lens Tools and Resources for Squidoo Lensmasters and find the best tools to use on Squidoo. I listed a lot of really helpful lenses from fellow lensmasters where you can find a lot of useful and helpful tips and tools for Squidoo deigns, graphics for Squidoo and tips that will help you with CSS and HTML.

On the lens you can find the following:

• Tools for Squidoo
• Best Tools for Squidoo
• RSS tools and tools for Selling modules
• Traffic and SEO
• Squidoo Directories
• Submit to Search Engines
• HTML and CSS
• Graphics for Squidoo
• Making Money on Squidoo
• Best Money Making Squidoo modules
• Best Tips for Lensmasters
• Squidoo tips from Bloggers
• Addons for Your Lenses
• Books about Squidoo

 Image credit: SquidArt Too by Steve Thompson

Welcome to Daily Squidoo Tips

Hello and welcome on Daily Squidoo Tips!

This is the very fist post on this blog so I will introduce myself and made few intro points regarding this blog.

My name is Tilen Hrovatic and I'm an active Squidoo lensmaster. I made more than 150 lenses, a majority of them are high ranked and I'm making money on Squidoo. You can view my Squidoo profile here.

This blog is dedicated to Squidoo and those who like Squidoo and want to learn more about it. I will share my tips about making money on Squidoo, SEO for Squidoo and other Squidoo related tips here. I will try to share my experiences and things I've learned from being an active Squidoo lensmaster for some time. I want to share tips that will help you to make some real money on Squidoo and optimize and promote your Squidoo lenses so they will be attractive to visitors and search engines.

Expect daily posts on this blog. This blog is called Daily Squidoo tips and I will stick to the schedule and post every day, so there will be a lot of useful articles and resources here after some time :)

I hope you'll like this blog and my posts. You can subscribe to the blog (widget in the sidebar and FeedBurner E-mail subscription) to receive the updates and stay informed about Squidoo tips.

Have a nice day!