SEO traffic and Squidoo earnings, A Squidoo success story

Total income: $1131.77, my all time highest payout.

As you can see ad income is still the highest portion of my squidoo income at 60%. Affiliate income is however starting to come close to what I make on squidoo.

I vowed a year ago that I would not seriously start teaching people how to get affiliate income till I made more in affiliate income than I did in ad income off Squidoo, however that line keeps inching further away, because as I make more affiliate income on squidoo, I also make more ad income. Squidoo complicates things by rewarding high sales lenses with a higher lensrank.

The percentage of amazon sales (30%) is however higher this month than it's ever been, so one might say I'm getting closer to my goal as an affiliate marketer. This is the first month that eBay has made a mark on my earnings, responsible for 3% of my earnings, easily outdoing Chitika which only made me 1%.

Infolinks only contribute 6% to my online income, due to most of my lenses having them turned OFF. Squidoo made a mistake this month by not calculating this stuff correctly and it turns out that I loose about $100.- a monthy by having that turned off. That would mean that I could be making 16% of my income through infolinks.

The distribution of this income shows that I'm still better at generating traffic than sales, but I think my January stats will be very different.

At the moment I have about 25 lenses in top tier out of 444. That's a high number for me, on average the amount of top tier lenses has fluctuate between 15 and 25 over the past month.

Top tier payout was $18.02 from the adpool. Top tier infolinks payment was $5.11. Second tier hardly registers in comparison to that, however - 50 lenses in second tier still make 50*$3.06=$150.-, which is still a good amount of money.

I've recently started exploring the new squidoo stats tab (not so new, a few months old - still new for me). Long term graphs are always more interesting to me than short term ones.

Up here is my earnings on my main squidoo account.

As you can see: a roughly upgoing graph, with hardly a peak in December.

There are two reasons for that. I didn't start really get making sales online till last year. And pretty soon after that, I created my calendarsblog account where most of my sales lenses reside. The rest of the account just does better month after month because of increasing traffic. The Calendars account is very seasonal of course, but that is not in this graph.

Notice also that the main account makes me more than the one devoted to calendars. I do expect the calendars to do well enough this winter though to catch up to the main account.

A shorter term graph shows that earnings inch up. That is: they may increase long term, but short term they seem almost stable.

This is, again, partly because I moved many of my sales lenses over to another account.

The May payout (paid out in August) was only 20% Amazon sales. The rest was mostly ad pool.

The earnings from this account are much more volatile, as should be expected. Calendars are a seasonable product after all. still - even out of season it's doing well, as you can see.

Another difference: on this account I have not only chitika, but also infolinks turned on.

Because this is an account with mostly sales lenses, amazon sales roughly equal ad pool income. Still, clearly, even here the ad pool is a large percentage of my squidoo income.

Squidoo has recently put a new feature on the stats page: a cumulative overview of what you've made. Reading graphs like that takes a bit of skill. As long as they direction of the graph is more sharply up with each month, your earnings are increasing. The graph can never go down. So less earnings show up as the graph becoming more horizontal.

The red line is what I've been donating to charity. As you can see, it doesn't grow nearly as much as my own earnings have. That's because, frankly, I can't afford to give all that much to charity (and let's face it, squidoo already gives a decent percentage of our earnings to charity anyhow - and that's not reported here).

Since it's very hard to combine graphs like this, I'm only showing the graph for my general spirituality account. That means, of course, that overall I've actually made more than $5000.- overall from squidoo.