Squid Theory

I love the Amazon module because it lets so many types of retail product be added to a lens. To get the most out of your Amazon module takes a bit of personal effort, but it really does add up to more sales down the road.

1 - Pick the products. Don't use the auto-select feature as it invariably winds up picking some strange stuff at some point. Most often when you didn't expect it. I hand-pick most of my items from the Amazon site itself and enter the ISBN/ASIN numbers manually. This lets me offer exactly what I want, and not just items that match a particular search phrase.

2 - See what Amazon says about what you selecting. Is that item in stock? Does that item have a high-star rating? Does it have a really high sales rate? That's that sentence that reads "some % of customers who visited this page bought this item!" I try and go for items that have an 80% sales percent or higher. I also think a lot about what I myself would like or buy, and try to have my products offered be items I own or would use myself.

3 - Add original content. Use the text box in the module and the custom description fields in the module to offer info that shows why the items where chosen or grouped and why you think they are good items. Remember, the cornerstone of Squidoo is personal recommendation.

4 - Make weak feeds look better. With just a touch of effort, you can input info for when you find good items from Amazon but the price feed doesn't seem to be coming through. You can use the 'strong' tag in the custom description to highlight handwritten price info and imitate the Amazon feed fairly closely. This really helps sell the stuff which you know is a good choice, but where the module just isn't pulling enough info. Adding descriptions to these items is also key.

A lot of the time lensmasters worry about adding new content to a lens and keeping it fresh. But you can also help your lensrank by getting rid of something that's not active or stale too!

Did you know that you can give a lens a boost by taking away a module?

One of the factors that goes into lensrank is the number of clickouts. Part of that equation includes how many clicks, divided by how many modules there are on your lens. By getting rid of modules that don't really offer highly-active material, your number of clickouts per lens goes up and it can give a bit of a boost to your lens.

I discovered this when I was playing around with some lenses and decided to combine some info that I had in more than one module into one really informative module. With the old stats reporting, they used to show you number of clickouts per module. I noticed that when I deleted tired modules, my overall clickouts on the lens stayed the same but my clickouts per lens went up and shortly thereafter, the lens would climb in lensrank.

If you want to experiment with this yourself, pick a lens that's been falling in rank for reasons you can't determine and give it a try! See if there are two modules where the content can really be combined into one. If you have a seaonal lens and it's the off-season, try reducing your retail modules. If you put up a guestbook but absolutely no one has ever commented and it's been sitting there for months, why not take it away?...

Before Squidoo launched their lens stats, a lensmaster could see some retail aproximates, but no one knew what the AdSense totals were. You just knew that what you would get paid out would be higher than what the retail sales totaled.

Then the improved stats came, and now Squidoo shows you exactly what a lens earned when the payout comes, but rolling earnings and retail specifics have disappeared.... or have they?

Ready to tell your retail earnings and AdSense apart?

The old stats URLs are still active, and they still display your Amazon totals, plus all other affiliate sales via modules as a second amount.

You'll want to type the following URL in a browser window and make the italicized part be the name of one of your own lenses. (please note, this only works for lenses you own)

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/report/NAMEOFLENS

Voila, there is the old stats page! I'm not sure what is up with the freaky bar graphs, but scroll down to the bottom of the page. There are the old monthly totals again, showing month to date sales.

Once a month has ended, the old totals get archived and can be found by using the below URL (note, there are no line breaks or spaces in this URL)

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/report/NAMEOFLENS?date=xx/01/xxxx

If you change the month and year (within the lifespan of the lens) you will be shown the retail sales for that month. The day should always be left as "01" or it won't work. You get a total for Amazon for the month. With eBay, CafePress and the others, they get lumped together, but at least you get some sort of split.

Once you get paid out, if you subtract the montly retail total from a old stats page from the total earnings of a lens, that remainder is the exact AdSense earnings for that lens. Remember that earnings are paid out two months later. For example, January earnings are paid in March, February earnings get paid in April, etc.

In early March 2008, Squidoo launched a new layout and color scheme for lenses set to "Max." When this feature was first introduced, it turned lens layouts into a three column style versus a "minimum" setting that used two columns. Essentially, what is "max" is now new, and what is "min"is the old max.

Some of the differences between Min and Max are....

If you pick "min" for your lens layout:
- the background will be white
- your lensmaster bio will be in the righthand column and will show link and images you have included in it
- whoever favorited the lens does not show
- the lensroll is titled "lensroll"
- you'll get a list of "what's here" links in the righthand column

If you pick "max" for your lens layout:
- the background will be dark blue
- your bio will run at the top of the lens and won't show links or images unless the "more" pop-up is clicked
- lensmasters who marked the lens as a favorite are displayed by photo
- the lensroll is titled "You might also like:"
- the layout will shift slightly depending on if the page visitor is brand-new, a repeat visitor, a registered member or the lensmaster who owns the lens (all this involves changes to the highly-debated second floating column and can be explored via the "views" link found on the published max lens view.)

Testing The "Min" Look Vs. The "Max" Look

Although the changes aren't permanent until you hit publish, I just realized you can sort of view the difference between "min" and "max" settings while editing a lens. Give this a try and see which one you like best:

- Open whichever lens you wish to edit in workshop mode
- Set the min/max setting to "min"
- Open a published view of the lens in a new window or browser - tab by clicking on the "view this page" link.
- Now change the min/max setting to "max"
- Open another published view of the lens in another window or tab again using the "view this page" link.

When you switch from min to max, those changes are grabbed by the page view on the fly and whereas other edits to the lens won't show until published, you will get to see your lens in both the min and max view so you can compare and pick the one you like best.

Best Use Of This "Trick"

Want to build internal links for your lens, but don't want to use the Table of Contents module? The Min layout includes a "what's here" section over on the right, essentially a built-in table of contents. Click the lens to "min" in the workshop mode, open the published view from the "view" link and the "what's here" section will give you the URLs for all the lens modules!

You might have noticed that sometimes a Squidoo lens will have a special color header or layout. These are the Squidoo Co-Brands, which means they are special groupings of lenses based on their type or topic. These let lensmasters group certain types of lenses together on the site, offer extra doorways for visitors to find lenses and have their own top 100 listings.

SquidWho - for lenses about people

SquidFlix - for movie lenses

SquidBid - special layout for eBay sellers

SquidKnol - build your own entry in the world's database of information

SquidBoo - all about Halloween

SquidLit - a community for literature and books

SquidVid - your favorite videos

SquidZipper - the best local resources

The Ever Project - the bestest lenses ever

CafePress - HQ for CP sellers

Ink City - body art community

PhotoPhights - a Flickr module showdown of your best images

People Who Matter - you know... THEM...

Hey Monkeybrain! - the great debate about life, the universe and everything