Driving traffic to your lens

I started my first squidoo lens as I had read that squidoo was a great way to promote my zazzle page.

After adding the content and realising that the grey minus sign next to the lens meant no one was going to find it, I started to think why am I wasting my time ! I read about the help guide about to get rid of that pesky grey minus sign and turn it green . . . which lead me to Squidu.

After posting a thread entitled "my first lens" I got a few hits and was happy to see a green tick next to my lens - yay first success! A few days later, my first message came through on my guestbook - congratulating me on my lens.

Positive feedback always spurs me on so I kept adding more content to my lens hoping to increase traffic. I wasn't sure how much of the traffic was flowing through to my zazzle page, but I was starting to enjoy the feedback and was visiting My Dashboard a little too regularly to see anyone else had visited my lens.

Reading more about how to drive traffic to a lens, I decided that rather than working on my one and only lens, I would create more lenses and add links between the lenses - cross promotion has to work! So I started a couple of lenses on my hobby of travel and also joined a couple of Groups which helped but I was still only getting a couple of visitors a week.

Read more below . . .

When the above message magically appeared on My Dashboard, I thought someone must have followed one of the eBay or cafepress modules and bought something - hence royalties to me. Looking down the lenses, they all showed a very uninspirational "$0.00" in the $$$ column so I was intrigued.

Doing more research, I discovered that you don't only get paid for people clicking on eBay, cafepress products but also, and here's where the addiction started:

Squidoo places Google Adsense ads on all lenses on Squidoo to generate revenue. Some of this money goes to charity and the rest is split 50/50 with the Lensmaster!

So I was getting paid for those ads that most people don't even click into and what's more, the higher the lens ranking the more I would get paid (within certain bandings).

Well that was it, I decided the more lenses the better and the higher the lens ranking, even better!

Read more below . . .

The reserve hopper is the balance of your earnings that are below your "Cash Payout Threshold". You still see how much you have in it under the "My Lenses" tab in your dashboard. The amount rolls over each month until it reaches the Cash Payout Threshold and is paid to your nominated paypal account.

The default Cash Payout Threshold is $10 but you can increase and decrease it here. Make sure you don't make it too high as if your earnings don't reach your Cash Payout Threshold in 12 months, it is assumed you've abandoned Squidoo and your money is lost forever !

Increasing my lens ranking then became the mission. I again stumbled across the free "LinkReferral.com" which although takes a little time each day, certainly drove traffic to the lens I had registered on it. I then added 2 more lenses to LinkReferral which then started taking more time each day to maintain the traffic flow.

The addiction was growing - whilst I was still only had earnings of $1.63. It takes 2 months for the cash to hit your "reserve hopper" - so the hours I was spending building & improving my lenses and using LinkReferral takes two months to hit my Dashboard !



Read more below . . .

So I am up to about 20 lenses and a couple of groups. Nothing in comparion to those Lensmasters who have hundreds of lenses.

So while I am hopeful the effort while turn to cash in a couple of months, I realised it's the joy of creating lenses, receiving feedback and having others share in that journey that is the true addiction.

The money will never let me retire early, so you have to enjoy the squidoo-ing and the topics on which you are squidoo-ing to make it worthwhile.

On that note, I'm going to log off, get out of the house and head to the gym - my squidoo addiction is a great excuse for avoiding that !!

But I'm sure I'll be back soon . . . and thanks for visiting this lens!

Feel free to favorite this site as I'll be letting you know more about what I learn about enjoying and earning on Squidoo.

Well I did come back - unsuprisingly and an nearing 40 lenses and earnt about $15 in the last squidoo payout and had money transferred to my paypal account which was exciting. I hope this becomes the base payout from now on - that would be awesome !

Anyway, next challenge will be to become a Giant Squid for which you need 50 good lenses - so still a way to go !!