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Greekgeek's Squidoo Stats

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Tracking My Squidoo Tiers, Traffic, Earnings

I've been tracking my Squidoo stats intermittently since 2008: traffic, total lenses, and tier payouts. My results may not be typical, but they'll give you an idea how one person has fared on Squidoo.

From 2007 through 2010, I treated Squidoo as a hobby, disappearing completely from Squidoo for eight months in 2008 and about half of 2009 while working in graduate school. Back then, lenses didn't drop much in rank if you left them for more than a few weeks. In 2011, I committed to Squidoo and online writing as a real job.

It's still paying less than minimum wage, but I've made steady progress in the past year:

My Squidoo Earnings

Click the squid to view a chart of all the payouts into my Paypal account. These do not include my charity lenses.

2012 Squidoo Traffic Stats for All My Lenses

Once a month comparison (stats sampled on Pay Day)

Every Squidoo Pay Day, I survey the "weekly traffic stats" on all my Squidoo lenses on that particular date. It's just one 7-day window of stats, but over the long haul, it gives me a general sense of how things are going, like taking blood pressure and pulse.

Wkly Traffic

Jan 11

Feb 13

1000+

1 lens

3 lenses

500-999

4 lenses

300-499

5 lenses

3 lenses

200-299

11 lenses

10 lenses

100-199

15 lenses

22 lenses

50-99

49 lenses

58 lenses

20-49

84 lenses

76 lenses

1-19

196 lenses

191 lenses

none

21 lenses

20 lenses

Total lenses

386 lenses

391 lenses

Total traffic

17,857

22,949

2012 Weekly Progress Report

(Tracking this stuff helps motivate me. See my five goals for 2012 lens for more info.)

2011 Squidoo Payouts and Earnings: First Half

Squidoo Earings Stats, Including Charity Lenses

See Christene's fabulous Squidoo Payday Q&A for an introduction to Squidoo's tier system.

On this chart, I'm listing tier payouts for the Adsense Pool for tiers 1-3. Tier 4 is lenses that made no money with Adsense, but earned something with Chitika and/or Infolinks. Duds earned nothing.

Tier

Jan 11

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Tier 1

10 lenses

11 lenses

12 lenses

5 lenses

Tier 2

26 lenses

43 lenses

46 lenses

31 lenses

29 lenses

32 lenses

Tier 3

119 lenses

148 lenses

181 lenses

186 lenses

198 lenses

204 lenses

Tier 4

6 lenses

16 lenses

9 lenses

12 lenses

15 lenses

14 lenses

Duds

142 lenses

29 lenses

7 lenses

14 lenses

11 lenses

25 lenses

Total Earnings

$495.33

$586.46

$626.53

$608.61

$622.33

$443.21

For Charity

$19.13

$21.44

$17.25

$19.05

$19.19

15.38

For Me

$475.97

$565.02

$609.28

$589.56

$603.14

$427.83

2011 Squidoo Tier Payouts: Second Half

Squidoo Pay Day Stats, Charity Included

Milestone on September Pay Day (for July earnings): My total cumulative income from Squidoo (not counting charity) just crossed the $10K mark.

Tier

Jul 11

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Tier 1

10 lenses

8 lenses

5 lenses

7 lenses

5 lenses

Tier 2

21 lenses

23 lenses

33 lenses

26 lenses

28 lenses

21 lenses

Tier 3

196 lenses

201 lenses

200 lenses

223 lenses

227 lenses

218 lenses

Tier 4

15 lenses

18 lenses

19 lenses

22 lenses

23 lenses

21 lenses

Duds

42 lenses

45 lenses

55 lenses

61 lenses

66 lenses

82 lenses

Total Earnings

$665.59

$720.41

$747.18

$693.57

$773.76

$652.91

For Charity

$8.92

$11.26

$11.16

$12.89

$13.74

$13.57

For Me

$665.59

$709.14

$736.02

$680.68

$760.74

$639.34

2011 Progress Report: Treating Squidoo as a Job

In 2011, I more than doubled my traffic, clickouts, sales

I failed to reach most of my my 2011 Squidoo goals, but my stats show a lot of progress!

On this chart, my "tier" figures are an estimate: I'm assuming lensrank 1-2000 is Tier One, lensrank 2001-10,000 is Tier Two, and lensrank 10,001-85,000 is Tier Three. In reality, "top tier" payouts go to the 2000 lenses with the best average lensrank in each month. Since lenses change rank every day, the lens with the best average may actually average out to LR 4 or 6 over the course of that month, and so on down the ladder, meaning that the actual tier cutoffs are always a little more generous than 2000, 10,000, and 85,000.

Old Squidoo Traffic Stats for 2008 through 2010

A Study in Neglect

I was very erratic in recording traffic stats prior to 2011. During the stretches when I wasn't recording stats, I wasn't on Squidoo very much either!

Weekly Traffic For My Squidoo Lenses

The columns represent a range of traffic. For instance, in 2010, I started getting lenses with 400-500 visitors a month. In 2011, I started recording total weekly traffic for all my lenses, and i added the stats for my two niche accounts.

Here's what the dashboard used to look like a few years ago, before we had monsters, points and quests added to distract us. Then as now, $$$ was only for commissions... back then, I didn't make any!

Chart of My Squidoo Tier Payouts 2007- 2011

How many lenses earned each Squidoo Tier Payout?

At the beginning of 2012, I created a table of my monthly tier payouts, then graphed them. Those doesn't show the actual amounts each lens earned, but rather, how many lenses I had in each Squidoo payout tier, month by month.

What I was really interested in figuring out is whether it's getting harder to keep lenses in top payout tiers than it used to be. So, finally, using the data above, I created THIS graph:

Percentage of my Squidoo lenses in each tier:

Prior to 2011, I could leave lenses along for 2-4 months before there was any danger of their falling out of their payout tier. That seemed to change in early 2011. In the second half of 2011, despite my traffic, sales, clickouts, and total number of lenses doubling, I found it increasingly difficult to maintain long-time Tier One and Tier Two lenses.

Poll: Should the Tier System Be Adjusted?

(Below: Chart of actual $$ paid out to each tier, each month)

Over time, tier payouts have steadily increased, partially offsetting the fact that it's much harder to achieve the top tiers:

"Ad Pool" = default ads like Google Adsense. "All Ads" includes Ad Pool plus optional ads such as Text Links Ads which may be turned off. Stats are based on Christene's Squidoo Pay Day Q&A figures, which I combined into a single table and then graphed.

Lenses which outperform most Tier Ones of two years ago (as measured in clicks, sales, traffic) are now being paid Tier Two, at best, and lenses with 200+ visitors have been pushed to Tier Three. That's partially compensated by the fact that Tier Two and Tier Three pay more than they used to, just like Tier One. However, good-quality lenses that bring 10-20 visitors to Squidoo each week no longer get paid, even though many are earning ad revenue which is then distributed to the lenses above them.

In late 2009, I proposed that tier one be capped at $20, and any excess money be distributed to tier two and three.

Other Squidoo members suggested that the tiers be expanded to reflect the fact that Squidoo now has millions instead of thousands of lenses, as it did when the tier system was fixed to reward the top 85,000 lenses. Maybe, instead of having fixed cutoffs, they could be proportional -- the top 4% of all lenses are tier one, the next 6% are tier two, and the next 10% are tier three, for example?

What do you think?

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How to Boost Traffic, Earn Money

Also see my Hub on Hubpages: How I Make Money on Squidoo where I've boiled down most of my tips/techniques as best I can.

My Latest Tweets

What I'm up to on Squidoo and beyond

Guestbook for Fellow Squids

Feel free to drop a note! And please share this lens with other Squidoo members; I'm eager to see your opinions about tier breakdowns.

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Reply

Hypersapien Jan 26, 2012 @ 11:10 am | delete

Thanks for sharing. This is encouraging for a newbie like me.

Reply

mauros34 Jan 24, 2012 @ 8:22 am | delete

had some great progress here payout due in february hope to start my own earning lens.

Reply

JC2011 Jan 23, 2012 @ 11:34 am | delete

I really like this lens. It helps show those of us just starting out that it takes a lot to be successful. It is easy to get discouraged when I can't get a lens out of tier 3, but over half of yours are tier 3. This helps the new people realize that most of our lenses are not going to be "hits" and to keep at it.

Reply

MillBucks Jan 23, 2012 @ 6:21 am | delete

Nice to see someone who has uncovered the secret for success on Squidoo, I hope someday I can see these types of earnings as well. I have just started my 3rd week since I joined and am currently working on my 6th lens, trial and error so see what happens. Keep up the great work!

Reply

TrentAdamsCA Jan 15, 2012 @ 7:26 pm | delete

Thanks. I always enjoy your cheery posts. So far, I'm doing zilch here -- barely any traffic and no sales. Disappointing, but I'll leave them up and see if they ripen. I'm getting better traffic on Blogger for a fraction of the effort I've put into promoting my Squidoo lenses. Good to know you're doing so well.
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