Squidoo Success Goals for DinosaurEgg 2011

By the end of 2011, I had gone way past my goals! Why? Well it was the strong seasonal effect, me getting better at what I was doing and the effort I had put in early in the year to reach my goals paying off.

Oh and you might want to check out my Wizzley earnings too.

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At the beginning of 2011 I'm at the point where I can see how to make money on Squidoo through hard work. I'll update here when I get my December payout from Squidoo but I think it should hit $200. I started making lenses in August 2010. Seems reasonable that I should be able to multiply this by 5 just by carrying on doing what I'm going.

I'm including affiliate income generated from Squidoo lenses - e.g. Amazon, Zazzle (should I manage to sell anything there!).

I'm going to work from actual payouts because you don't really know what you've earned before that. This means I won't know if I've reached this goal until Feb 2012 (unless I reach it before December).

I want a year round business. I'm happy for December to be my best month, but I want to make a good amount the rest of the year too. If my income increased linearly towards my goal then my earnings should look like the orange line on this graph. Seasonal variation will throw this off, but it's an interesting guide. January looks impossible to achieve at this point, but that gives me a challenge!

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As a rough heuristic, by December 2011, I'll need five times as many lenses as I had in December 2010, which was around 50 so that's 250 lenses. Hopefully I'll need less, as I should be getting better at this.

This lens will be number #85. So I need to publish another 165. Is that all? That seems doable. I want to save some time to diversify outside of Squidoo so that's okay.

I need to hit this number by the end of November to have the lenses count for tier payments (ideally a bit before). Although I can still make new sales lenses during December and have the sales count.

These lenses should also enable me to get to giant 100, hopefully in 1Q 2011. I'll plot actual figures on here at the end of each month.



13 Feb 2011 - Just realized that I didn't include traffic as a measure. That would probably be a better thing to measure as if I get more traffic with fewer lenses then that's just fine. Better actually. So in December I was getting around 2500 visits per week. I'm actually up on that at 3151 as of today. Will add a graph on that when I get chance.

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The dinosaurs niche was a complete accident. I came to Squidoo to write about solar power. I'll keep adding dinosaurs lenses. But I also want to focus on some other interests. I get bored easily. I need lots of things to jump between.

My kids love knights almost as much as they love dinosaurs. We've taken them to quite a few medieval reenactments and will continue to do this. Yes, we're a big-time geek family ;-) I have a strong amateur interest in history and I love my kids learning through play. I've written a few lenses around this subject. I can do lots more.

Solar Power was what I came to Squidoo to write about. A lot of my knowledge here is around the UK industry, but I think Squidoo can form a part of what I do here.

Science. I have a strong interest in science and how poorly understood it is. I'm a techie. Not sure exactly where I want to take this. We'll see.

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In December 2010 I had 3 lenses that will get a Tier 1 payout in Feb. Well I think so, one had an average of 2009! I hope it got in. So scaling that up I will need 15 Tier 1 lenses in December 2011.

I'm going to try and focus on non-seasonal Tier 1 lenses as they will pay out all year round. Plus a few seasonal ones that will be a side-effect of Christmas sales.

I'm concentrating on Tier 1 lenses because I seem to operate a mostly Tier 2 free zone. My ratios don't match those of other lensmasters. To me, a Tier 2 lens is a potential Tier 1 lens.

I've got 1 regular Tier 1 lens which is non-seasonal: Dinosaur Coloring.
I've got 1 that is dipping in and out but definitely has the potential: Dinosaur Games.
And I have a recent new entry into Tier 1: Dinosaur Cakes which I should be able to keep there.

Each month I'd like to add a new non-seasonal Tier 1 lens and keep the others there. If one drops out in a major way I may need to find an alternative.

I really don't know if this is achievable. The standard for Tier 1 is going to keep getting higher. There are often discussions on Squidu about changing the Tiers. Personally I find a high top tier payment very motivating. But if Squidoo grows to the point where the tier 1 payment can be kept high and Tier 1 can be expanded then I think that would be good.

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I think I'll always have a mix of sales lenses and lenses I create just for interest. But when I do make sales lenses I want to do it well. That means getting good ROI from my time. And yes, keeping to my standards for a good sales lens in terms of acceptable subject matter, personal content, etc.

My best sales lens so far took about 2 hours to make plus 1 hour to promote. It got a top tier payment in December. And probably has around $35 pending from December (hard to tell as the dashboard includes Nov and Jan too, and I won't know the actual amount until Feb). It has dropped out of tier 1 but made a few sales so far in Jan so it should do something the rest of the year. It will only need a quick update later in the year.

Of course, I made a lot of lenses that didn't do anywhere near as well. I need to work out how to make more lenses that get results like that or better.

At one point I checked and found that that lens had sold 50 items from 250 visitors. That seems like a pretty good conversion rate. But a pitiful amount of traffic. Interesting. So maybe I need to spend more time on traffic generation.

Last year, my reaction to a tier 1 lens was to focus elsewhere because that one was doing okay. That's a good strategy when chasing tier payments. But not for sales.

I'll explore using my own amazon id too. I've done this for some UK-centric lenses out of necessity and I have started using my Amazon.com affiliate id on lenses.

Basically, I have very little idea what I'm doing!

I need to come up with a way of measuring ROI for lenses in terms of time put in and predicted return (over what period? clearly this is an asset-based business, but one with a certain amount of risk.)

If I can use less time to achieve my Squidoo goals, then I'll have more time to invest elsewhere.