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Making Money on Squidoo - A Case Study

Updated on August 14, 2013

Passive income and earning money on Squidoo

How would you like to make hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month with minimal work? Sounds like a scam doesn't it? But it isn't. It is called passive income.

I first came across Squidoo in an article about generating passive income. Passive income is an income you earn on a regular basis with minimal effort to maintain it. It is not easy money as all the hard work is done up front but hopefully continues to generate income for a long period of time.

Examples of normal passive incomes that most people know of are rental from properties, royalties from publishing a book or even pensions.

I was introduced to Squidoo by an article about generating passive income. One of the tips given in the article was creating Squidoo lenses and the writer shared that he had made US$0.43 on one of his lenses that he had spent 30 minutes writing. That is a minuscule amount by any standard but this caught my attention because I love writing and here is an opportunity to get paid for writing.

In the past I used to run a few websites which gave me lots of opportunities to write. Later on in life, I got hired as a freelance writer for a local tech magazine on a part time basis.

It was a great job as I got to write about what I like, get paid for it and in return the income generated allowed me to indulge further in computers, electronic gadgets and video gaming which I will then use as topics for my future articles. It was a perfect cycle but unfortunately the good days did not last.

“ I signed up right away and I wrote and published my first lens on that very day itself ”

So I decided to check out Squidoo and I liked what I saw. The few lenses that I clicked through looked good so I presumed that the tools provided were robust and flexible enough to give the Lensmasters enough freedom to customize and tinker their lenses to their liking. I signed up right away and I wrote and published my first lens on that very day itself. The rest I hope will be history :)

Unlike some of the other "making money guide" lenses, I will not be putting much emphasis on choosing keywords (or SEO - Search Engine Optimization) or on creating sale lenses. There are already many excellent lenses on Squidoo that cover these topics. Furthermore, I am not an expert and whatever I know, comes from reading these excellent lenses so there is no point of repeating them here.

This lens is about a few strategies that I have used on my own lenses and the success and failures that I have observed. These strategies may not work for every type of lens. I am just sharing my limited knowledge and the results of my experimentation.

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I update this article on a frequent basis with new information. Follow me on Twitter for update notifications on my Squidoo activities.

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Image credit - Roy Yap

If you love writing and being paid for doing it,

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Regardless of your motivation for writing on Squidoo, do you have a target set for yourself on how much you aim to earn a month from Squidoo and any related affiliate programs that you are a part of? If you do, please share your goal in the poll below. Thanks.

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The success of my first lens

(or what I now define as beginner's luck)

Since I jumped right in to publish my first Squidoo lens, I of course did no research on how to write a popular and high ranking lens.

I had just gotten myself a palm sized Android device called the MK802 Android 4.0 Mini PC and I had been meaning to write a short review on it on my Facebook page so I just expanded that into a full review for my first Squidoo lens instead.

I was incredibly fortunate because I did a few things right without realizing it at that time. First of all, the MK802 is quite new and there are not many existing reviews. Secondly, there is a fairly active forum on the device manufacturer, Rikomagic's website with quite a large number of new and potential users. I published my lens and I made a post on the forum asking the forum members to read the review and post their comments.

“ My lens has just gone from no tier to Tier 3 to Tier 2 in just 2 days ”

Screenshot of MK802 Review lens' Lensrank for the first week.

Image Credit - Roy Yap

Within the first few hours, I got dozens of visitors to my lens and by the end of the day, I had 40 visits, most of it coming from the forum.

On the second day, I posted more links on a few other forums and sites and by the end of the second day, I had 190 visits.

I was getting a huge percentage of hits from the forums plus another 20% or so from Google through various search keywords.

My Lensrank jumped from 312,987 to 53,447 and to 8,825 by the 3rd day. Although I didn't know it then, my lens has just gone from no tier to Tier 3 to Tier 2 in just 2 days.

Over the rest of the week, traffic fluctuated between 52 and 125 visits per day, giving me an average of 92 visits per day for the entire week. Meanwhile my Lensrank slowly increased until it reached 5,040 at the end of that week. During this week, I got a lot of feedback on the forum and I incorporated most of the feedback into my lens.

At the same time I was exploring Squidoo and my rank went up a few levels which unlocked some modules for me. I then utilized some of the newly unlocked modules to improve my lens.

Image credit - Squid Art

Squidoo Revelation
Squidoo Revelation

Squidoo Lensrank and Ad Pool Tiers

All I did for the first week was to monitor the "$$$" column on the Lens Dashboard as I had no idea how the Squidoo payout system works. Okay, I wasn't expecting to see anything except "$0.00" at least for the first few weeks.

It was only about a week after I published my lens that I came across the Squidoo Payday Questions & Answers lens and I was enlightened about Lensrank and the wonderful but confusing world of Ad Pool Tiers.

If you do not know about Lensrank and Ad Pool Tiers, I strongly suggest that you take a break here and read the above lens first and continue once you are done. You will also have a better idea of what I am babbling about here.

“ Looking at the monthly payout statistics for 2011 and 2012, I suddenly realized that there is real money to be made ”

Not only did I realize that my very lens was currently in Tier 2 but it was also tantalizingly close to making it into Tier 1 with its then current ranking of #2936. Looking at the monthly payout statistics for 2011 and 2012, I suddenly realized that there is real money to be made.

I of course made the connection between the number of visitors and the Lensrank numbers so my thoughts immediately went to how to increase or at least maintain my number of visitors for the rest of the month

While the number of visitors is an important factor, I came to learn about other factors that affect Lensrank while wading through the pool of lenses that cover this subject. Sales, Click-Thru-Rate (CTR) and number of backlinks seem to be factors as well but there is no consensus among lensmasters on how strong each factor is in determining the Lensrank..

Image credit - Roy Yap

Improving and maintaining Lensrank

While I was ecstatic about my lens' Lensrank performance, I also knew that it is probably not going to be easy to maintain or increase the number of visitors over time. After all, the Tier payout is based on an average Lensrank for the entire month.

Also, the whole point of having a passive income is to generate income with little or no personal input but I also understand that more work and input is required up front in order for me to enjoy the fruits of my labor later on.

“ the whole point of having a passive income is to generate income with little or no personal input ”

The early hike in visits can be attributed to a large number of Rikomagic forum members who have not read the review but after awhile when most have already read it, the number of visitors will drop significantly as it will only be of interest to new members of the forum. The lens cannot be limited to just the members of the forum.

My aim must be to drive the traffic manually initially until it reaches a point when the traffic from the search engines especially Google is high enough to keep the traffic going.

Currently Google is driving 14% of the traffic to my lens and I need to increase this to at least 30-40% before I can take a more hands off approach with this lens. I decided on a 3 step approach.

Yesterday, the Rikomagic forum that was sending the highest volume of traffic to my lens was down for the entire day. By the end of the day, I noticed that I still have more than 80 visitors and about 30% came from Google search.

After going through the Referrals list, I picked out all the various Google domains and added them to the original 30% and I am happy to learn that the figure has increased to 61%. I am going to monitor this for the next week and see if Google can continue generating traffic for me.

  1. Look for new sources of potential visitors and link back to my lens
  2. Add new content to the lens and attract repeat visitors
  3. Lens clustering

Creating high quality backlinks

(or driving more traffic to your lens via external links)

First of all, I did some searches on Google using the keywords that are relevant to my lens. For example, I searched for "MK802 Review" and the top 3 links returned were:

I went to each of the link and I found out in this case that all 3 sites have some sort of comments system or in the case of the AndroidCentral, it is a link to its forum. I then proceeded to make a posting about my MK802 review on Squidoo.

Normally this would not be considered spam if the linked article is well written and is relevant to the page topic. It is important that you do not spam the comments and forum posts. I also added a link to my lens in my signature so that it appears whenever I make a post on a forum.

So basically what I have done is create a link to my lens from the top pages returned by Google for the keyword "MK802 Review". So how well has this strategy worked for me? On the first few days, my Squidoo lens does not appear within the first 10 pages. After about a week, it was on page 5 which is not bad.

I made it on Page1! After about 6 weeks, my lens now appear on Page1 on Google for "MK802 review".

I just checked today and my MK802 Review lens now appears on page 2 for both "MK802 review" and "Android Mini PC review" search terms. I must be doing something right :)

After a month, my Squidoo lens page now appears on page 4 for a Google search on the keyword "MK802 Review".

However, the Rikomagic forum topic I started for my review link is on page 2.

And even better, I made a short review on gdgt.com with a link to my lens and that is on the first page.

Furthermore, my link also appears on AndroidCentral forum (one of the top 3 returned results earlier on) but unfortunately, the URL only can be seen by registered members. As for the other 2 top 3 returned results, my link has seen been pushed off the linked page as the comments are quite active. While my actual page link is only on page 5, I am getting a lot of traffic from the links appearing on the first 2 pages.

I submitted this Making Money on Squidoo lens to Lensroll a few weeks back and I had mostly forgotten about it. For the past couple of days, I noticed that the traffic to this lens had a slight bump and when I checked, I found out that this lens has been "Published" by Lensroll and it is currently at the top of its Published list. I think I will be paying a little more attention to Lensroll and start submitting some of my other lenses as well.

First month update - Aug 2012

For the first month, I made an active effort to maintain the referrals that I have been getting from my backlinks. I checked my lens stats report almost on a daily basis to see which backlinks were giving me the most traffic by looking at the referrals report. I played a more active roll in the forums.

I made sure that my signature had links to my lenses and I helped other users whenever I could. I noticed that I was getting referrals both from the topics where I posted my review as well as from signature links.

When my Google search rank started improving, I could gradually rely less on the referrals. I still post occasionally but not as often as previously. After awhile I started noticing that I was getting backlinks from sites that I did not post to. Others are now adding links to my site on their own.

My plan now is to take a more hands off approach to generating backlinks for my MK802 Review lens. I will now concentrate more on adding content to the lens and also work on adding backlinks for my other lenses.

It has been about 10 days now since I have taken a hands off approach with this lens and so far so good. I have not observed any drop in traffic. I am getting significant traffic from Google searches especially the long tailed ones.

Second month update - Sep 2012

I am happy to report that my hands off approach has worked well. The number of visits has actually doubled in September compared to August. More than half the traffic is organic and mostly from Google. Google ranking for the keyword "mk802" is very good and my page either appears on the first or second page of the search results.

Third month update - Oct 2012

In Oct, I concentrated mainly on creating backlinks to my new MK808 and Uhost Android Mini PC lenses. The response for my MK808 has been great as it is now ranked 5th on Google for "mk808" and the lens has shot up to Tier 1. It has remained in Tier 1 for the month Oct and it is one of four lenses that is in Tier 1 for Oct.

Response for my Uhost lenses is not as good despite having one of the lenses appearing on page 1 on Google for the keyword "uhost". This is mainly because the number of searches for "uhost" is much lower than "mk808" so it is not seeing the same benefits despite the good Google ranking. However, it is not all bad as I wrote a preview lens on the Uhost2, the upcoming update to the Uhost and that lens is doing fairly well.

I have taken a completely hands off approach to the MK802 lens by not creating any new backlinks. I am still getting unsolicited backlinks which are bringing good traffic to the lens. Average weekly visits has increased from 1700 in Sep to 2300 in Oct. However, I am still updating the lens itself on roughly a weekly basis.

Fourth month update - Nov 2012

In Nov, I continued writing new Android Mini PC related lenses. My existing lenses have been getting such great response that I have been getting offers from both Android Mini PC manufacturers and retailers to review or promote their products on my lenses. I have been kept busy mainly with writing the reviews and then promoting them on a few forums that I have built a good reputation on.

This method is working well for me as I can easily get all my new lenses into Tier2 within a week or so of publication. Some of them get into Tier1 as well but it is not easy to remain there. I noticed that for the first 2 to 3 weeks, the lens will move up and down the lensrank a bit but after that it sort of settles down at a spot.

Weekly visits took a drastic drop in mid Nov but from the discussions in the Squidoo forums, it seems that this is site wide as many lensmaters saw drops in their traffic. I lost 30-40% of the traffic on my top lenses and I am down to about 10,000 visits per week in total which is the level of visitors back in late Sep/early Oct.

Fortunately, sales doesn't see to have suffered or this could be because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday making up for the lower number of visitors. Although the month isn't over yet, I am seeing better sales in Nov compared to Oct.

Seventh month update - Feb 2013

I finally joined Pinterest in January 2013 and I have been actively pinning some of my lenses on both my boards and also on a few other Squidoo centric boards that i have been invited to join. I still do not have many followers yet so the impact to my Squidoo traffic is still negligible for now.

As part of my 2013 new year resolution, I have started my own blog at Androydz.com, a Wordpress blog dedicated to Android and other tech related news and articles. I have written a couple of full length articles for my blog which I am linking from my Squidoo lenses. This has helped in getting significant traffic to the blog by leveraging on my Squidoo traffic. This is all part of my plan to diversify my online income and not put all my eggs into the Squidoo basket.

March 2013 update

Traffic from Google has dropped significantly for the past couple of months. I suspect that this has something to do with the current revamp that we are seeing from Squidoo HQ to cut out the lenses with spun and low quality content.

Fortunately, I am still having significant traffic from backlinks, both those created by me and by others. I am also seeing some traffic from Pinterest although it is not very sustainable at the moment plus I am seeing some returns in terms of traffic from my own blog.

Overall though, my traffic has dropped 30-40% from its highs in Oct. Considering that I have almost twice as many lenses, the actual drop is probably much higher. I am not too worried however as sales from both Squidoo sales modules and my own affiliate links have not seen any significant drops. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the traffic that I lost is just the non-buying ones.

May 2013 update

This section on backlinking is one of the more popular sections on this lens as I get a lot of feedback and comments on it. Recently, Squidoo HQ made a post on low quality inbound links to lenses. According to the post, low quality links are defined as "no-follow" links from forums and link directories. As you know, I do make use of backlinks from forums as they do drive traffic to my lenses and most forums do make their links "no-follow" to discourage spammers.

"No follow" links have never been an issue with me as I am looking for actual traffic and not just for improving my ranking on Google. I have always considered my backlinks as "high quality" even if they bring no SEO benefit because they are relevant and bring benefit to those who click on them.

However, this latest development from Squidoo might change things quite a bit depending on how it plays out. So far, none of my lenses have been locked due to this problem but it may be too soon to tell. I will be monitoring this for now.

Image credit - Squid Art Too

Is building backlinks still an important part of getting more traffic and ranking better on Google?

There have been some conflicting views on whether building backlinks to your lenses is important to gaining more traffic and improving Google ranking. Which side of the fence are you on?

Attracting returning visitors

This is much harder than the first part because I have written a review type article and under normal circumstances, you will not read a review more than once.

This strategy might work better for informative type of articles where you can constantly update with new content and information..

The other problem that I have is that it is currently not possible to know how many repeat visitors that I have so I will never know for sure how effective my efforts are.

I found out awhile ago that it is possible to track new and returning visitors using Google Analytics. I have been tracking this for about 10 days now and for all my lenses combined, I have 65.21% new visits or 34.79% return visitors. I am still not very sure how return visitors are defined by Google but I am very happy with about 35% of returning visitors.

I have added a "Follow me" link to a specially created Twitter account I created just for Squidoo on some of my lenses so that I can update interested readers on updates that I make on my Squidoo lens.

First month update - Aug 2012

At first, I thought it would be difficult to get return visitors for a review article but I think I have managed to get a substantial number of return visitors by constantly adding new content to the review. For example I have been adding more usage suggestions for the MK802 device. I am also keeping an updated list of USB devices that are supported by the MK802.

I have added a Bookmark module at the bottom of the page to encourage visitors to return. I have also started a new Twitter account specifically for my Squidoo activities. I am twitting updates to my lenses as part of my effort to attracting return visitors. I only have 6 followers to date but it has only been up for about 2 weeks so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Second month update - Sep 2012

According to Google Analytics, I have a new visitor rate of about 65%. That means that 35% of my visitors are return visitors. I still see a lot of direct linking to my MK802 review lens which I think means that it is being bookmarked.

I have also created a few new lenses that contain information that can be updated frequently. Hopefully these lenses will attract more return visitors but these lenses do require a little more effort from me.

Third month update - Oct 2012

For Oct, Google Analytics reports that I have a New Visits rate of 61% and a Bounce Rate of 61%. This means that the interlinking of my lenses has brought more traffic to all the lenses in my cluster. The Bounce Rate shows how many visitors are leaving my pages by clicking on the back button. A lower rate is preferable. My Bounce Rate used to be about 70% when I first started using Google Analytics in late Aug. I am happy with the roughly 10% improvement.

Image credit - Squid Art Too

Lens Clustering

(or how to recycle your visitors)

If you are successful with the 1st and 2nd methods and you are now passively driving traffic to your site via search engines, why not channel them to your other lenses?

Obviously this is more likely to succeed if your other lenses are of interest to your visitors on your original page. You generally know the interest of your visitors but you can have a better idea of what interests them further by looking at the Keywords data from the Lens Traffic stats page. Look at the keywords with high occurrences and variations of it. Does your current page fulfill their needs?

For example, on my stats page I see a number of searches for "firmware update". If I want to, I can start another lens related to firmware update where future traffic can be channeled to. Now the same visitor going through my original lens can give me two or more visits. It is like compound interest!

I have not done this yet but it is something that I will definitely explore. As I have mentioned earlier, writing is my primary drive so if I am motivated enough to write on "firmware update", I will (although it does seem rather unlikely at this moment).

New Lens - Turn Your TV into a Smart TV with the MK802 Android Mini PC

Screenshot of Lensrank for Smart TV lens
Image Credit - Roy Yap

Well, actually it is not a new lens. I published the Turn Your TV into a Smart TV with the MK802 Android Mini PC about 2 weeks ago to test my theory above. Though not as successful as my original MK802 Review lens, it has managed to climb into the top 2000 in Lensrank today at #1701.

From the stats page, I can see that it gets about 12% of traffic from the MK802 Review lens and overall, it gets about 19% of its traffic from all my other lens combined (I have a total of 7 lenses at this moment). I think that this is a healthy figure.

In return, the MK802 Review is getting about 6% of its traffic from the Smart TV lens. In terms of number of visitors, this translate to a total of about 110 extra visitors per week to both sites.

First month update - Aug 2012

I think the lens clustering idea is working well. My Turn Your TV into a Smart TV with the MK802 Android Mini PC lens has been performing well. Although it just missed out on having a full month in August (just short of 3 days, drat!), on average it managed a Tier2 ranking and it is my second best performing lens.

Encouraged by the success of my first cluster lens, I published a 2nd cluster lens, How to use Skype on an MK802 Android Mini PC. I noticed a lot of keyword searches on USB webcams and microphones on my MK802 Review lens so this should be a good lens to go along with it.

I am currently working on a third cluster lens which should be published in a few days' time.

My 2nd cluster lens is performing much better than I expected. It got an unexpected but very welcomed boost by being referenced in an article on Liliputing.com, a popular blog for mini computers. It already hit Tier2 in its daily lensrank. I still haven't published my 3rd cluster lens because I got sidetracked by another lens that got published instead over the weekend.

Second month update - Sep 2012

I now have a total of 5 lenses that are related to the MK802. The lens clustering is a great way to bring traffic to all the lenses within the cluster. The main MK802 review lens is still bringing in the most traffic probably due to its good Google search ranking but 2 of the other cluster lens have been getting very good traffic as well and are currently in Tier 1 territory. The other 2 lenses are currently in Tier 2. If the main review lens keeps bringing in the traffic, it should not be a problem for the rest of the cluster lenses to continue to perform well.

update - 15 Sep 2012

Due to the success I have been having with lens clustering, I now have a total of 9 lenses in the MK802 cluster. Except for the newest 2 lenses that have just been published, all the other 7 lenses are either in Tier 1 or Tier 2. However, I've noticed a side effect of lens clustering. Click thru to the other clustered lenses is not recognized by Squidoo. Squidoo only recognizes click thru to non Squidoo domains. As a result, I noticed that my CTR (Click Thru Rate) has dropped from 20-30% to 10-15%. I am not sure how much this affects my lensrank but I hope the extra traffic and sales is enough to offset it.

Third month update - Oct 2012

I have continued adding more lenses to my MK802 cluster. There is also a sub-cluster of sorts with lenses that are related to the MK808 and Uhost Android Mini PC. These are similar devices to the MK802 so I can still link them up altogether.

I now have a total of 11 lenses in my MK802 cluster and all of them are in either Tier 1 or 2 in Oct. However, a few of them were newly published in Oct so they will not qualify for any tier payment in Oct. I also tried branching off the cluster by publishing a related lens but I have not been successful in getting that particular lens to rank well on Google mainly because the competition is much greater. I will try to get some backlinks to it to see if I can improve it.

Fourth month update - Nov 2012

I now have a total of 15 lenses that are clustered together. 13 of them are in Tier1and 2, 1 has dropped into Tier3 and another has just been published so it is still moving up the lensrank. I still cannot improve the Keyboard review lens to rank better despite some additional backlinks but I have arrested its decline in lensrank.

Out of the 3 strategies, lens clustering seems to be the most successful of all as I have been getting a lot of traffic through this strategy. I am not 100% sure but I think linking my lenses together has also helped in getting my new lenses ranked higher and faster on Google.

Fifth month update - Dec 2012

Lens clustering continues to be a major factor in getting more traffic overall to all my related lenses in my cluster. In Dec, I have tried to branch off slightly from my core Android Mini PC lenses by writing a review on an Android media player or TV box. Basically it is still a similar product but with a different form factor and target audience. So far the lens is doing well in terms of traffic and ranking on Google so I'll be doing another one in Jan to start a sub-cluster.

I now have a total of 16 lenses in Tier 1 and 2 although many of them are actually hovering between Tier 2 and 3 as the holiday lenses take up more of the top spots. Except for 1 lens, my Tier 1 lenses should be be able to keep their Tier 1 ranking for Dec.

Mar 2013 update

I have now extended my clustering over to my own blog over at Androydz.com. Besides sharing the overall traffic, I am also seeing significant increase on click-thru rate for some of my lenses as click outs to Androydz are recognized as click outs while those that go to my other Squidoo lenses are not.

Image credit - Squid Art

Other Little Things I have Learned....

Since coming aboard on Squidoo, I have learned a lot from my fellow lensmasters and I have also made a lot of observations on my own. I have started making small little changes here and there on my lenses to help them get just a little more traffic. Here are some of the things I have discovered and changes I have made.

  • Pay more attention in choosing the intro image for your lens. The intro image will also be used as the thumbnail that accompanies your lens. When looking through a long list of lenses on Squidoo, I can't tell the number of times that I got attracted to click on a particular lens because the intro image thumbnail caught my eye.

    As many have noted on Squidoo, try to use a square image as that would look the best when in thumbnail form.

    Next, I took another look at the intro images and thumbnails recently and see if any of them can be improved. I made a change to my MK802 Review lens intro image as shown below.

    The first image shows the device but it is just a black box and it is uninteresting. The second image shows the same black box but with the hand as a comparison, I can see that it is tiny and since this is supposed to be a mini PC, it is eye catching.

    I also made a change to the intro picture of this lens. The original image was made by lensmaster Greekgeek and it is a great image but it is also used by many other lenses that cover the same topic. To make my lens stand out, I created a custom image using the same theme of a squid with cash.

  • On certain lens listing like the featured lenses or on your bio page, the first couple of sentences or so are included as a summary for the lens. This can be another opportunity to attract a few more visitors. I've looked through my list of lenses and I have made some changes here and there in the opening sentences so that it gives a better summary of the entire lens.
  • Google Analytics keeps track of my visitors' country of origin. The highest percentage of visitors is from the US but it is only about 17% of the total. The next highest countries are Netherlands (7%), Germany (6%), UK (6%) and Canada (4%). These 4 countries alone make up more visitors than the US.

    The current Amazon modules on Squidoo targets mainly US visitors because except for a few categories like DVDs, CDs and books, Amazon does not ship overseas for most other items. This is a huge lost opportunity for sales as I am only targeting 17% of my visitors for sales.

    I signed up for Commission Junction (CJ) as many of the vendors there do support international shipping. The big problem with CJ is that those vendors selling the goods that I am promoting are not well known. I get clicks to CJ but I have yet to make a single sale after more than a month. I suspect that my visitors are more reluctant to buy from an unknown vendor unlike Amazon which is a trusted name.

    This is when I decided to sign up with the international Amazon sites as an affiliate. There are local Amazon stores for the UK, Germany and Canada (but unfortunately none for the Netherlands) and you have to apply to be an affiliate to each store individually. Signing up for the Germany affiliate was a bit more troublesome because of the language but nothing Google Translate cannot take care of.

    I started out with Amazon.co.uk first about 2 weeks back and after about a week, I made my first sale. Today marks the 10th day and in total I have made 10 sales. This is lower than my Amazon US sales and since the UK store does not stock as many items, for some of the products I have listed, there is no option to buy from the UK store. However, I am not complaining as these are 10 extra sales that would not have existed if I had not added the Amazon UK links.

    I have yet to make any sales for the Amazon DE and CA affiliate but the links have only been added for less than a week and it takes me time to slowly add the links to my lenses.

The Milestones

I will provide an update on all significant milestones that my lenses have achieved here.

  1. 08/06/12 - The MK802 review lens has reached a Lensrank of #1,586, breaking the 2000 Tier 1 barrier for the very first time. This is 12 days after publication on 07/25. I hope that I can maintain this for the rest of the month.
  2. 08/07/12 - One of my other lenses has just turned 1 week old today. This lens has a very niche topic and is targeted at a very small demographic. I am glad to report is has reached a Lensrank of #17,650 despite everything going against it. I will be very surprised if it can hit Top 10,000 and make it into Tier 2 territory though.
  3. 08/09/12 - I made my very first sale today! Sold 2 items through eBay via my MK802 review lens although the 2 items have nothing to do with my lens. The 2 items are just a buck each so I am practically making nothing from the sales but I am still very happy because I have finally broken the duck.
  4. 08/11/12 - Another milestone today, yay! I sold my very first item on Amazon via my MK802 reviews lens. This time it is a related item as someone bought an MK802. The commission should be much more substantial and I am hoping that this is the first of many to come. I have been concentrating mainly on improving my Lensrank and getting into Tier 1 for the AdSense pool that I have never really thought much about making sales so this is a very nice surprise.
  5. 08/14/12 - The MK802 lens hit 100% completion today with 20 likes from fellow Lensmasters. Incidentally, this lens also made 100% completion today with 20 likes. Both made the achievements about 2 minutes apart. Thanks to all who liked my lenses.
  6. 08/15/12 - The MK802 Review lens jumped to #665 today, the first time it has breached the top 1000 level. However, I don't think it can stay there for long as the main reason it made the jump was it got almost 600 visits on a single day. The traffic came from a high traffic forum but as the link gets pushed off the first page, the traffic will drop as well.
  7. 08/23/12 - Surprisingly, my Lensrank did not drop back to below 1000 level. It hovered between the 600+ to 700+ level and amazingly it actually breached the top 500 today at #492. I am ecstatic of course but I think I am getting more confused about Lensrank. The only thing that I can think of for the Lensrank improvement is that I made a couple of sales over the week. I am not complaining but I am certainly baffled.
  8. 08/25/12 - It has been exactly one month since I published my MK802 Review lens and I would like to share my Lensrank data. It is doing better than I expected and I hope it continues to do so for the months to come.

  9. 09/03/12 - About a month ago (on Aug 9 to be exact), I made my first sale on my MK802 Review lens. Almost 1 month later, I have sold a total of 14 items on Amazon and another 4 items on eBay. Actual amount earned is not a lot because I sold mostly electronics items on Amazon and those only carry a 4% commission to be shared between Squidoo and me but I am happy to be making sales on a regular basis now.
  10. 09/06/12 - I have two major milestone announcements today. The SquidsUtils bug has been fixed and I can now see my average Lensrank for August which is the first full month for my MK802 Review lens and it is 1,103!. That means the lens have made it into Tier 1. Next, I am also happy to announce that I finally made it on Page1 on Google Search for the keyphrase "MK802 review". As a result I am seeing a lot more traffic from Google which in return has also resulted it being linked by other sites. These are backlinks placed by others. It's a good day.
  11. 09/12/12 - I have bad news and some good news. First the bad news. I learned a little more about SEO this week. Last week I was happy that my MK802 Review lens was on Google's 1st page for the keyphrase "MK802 review". I then found out that this particular keyphrase only has 590 searches a month. Major bummer. The good news is, for the keyword "MK802" which has over 40,000 searches a month, my lens is listed on the 2nd page! My traffic has almost doubled because of this. Now, I can bring out the champagne.

    Sales is also more consistent now. I am seeing sales almost every day now. I have also opened my own Amazon Associates account as I sell mostly electronics and computer items which has a 4% cap on commission. It was the right decision as I sold 11 items in the first week after I opened my account. Since I sold more than 7 items, I also get bumped to 6% for items in other categories.

  12. 09/19/12 - My MK802 review lens has made it on the first page of Google for the keyword "mk802". All the backlinks the lens have been getting must have helped.

  13. 10/10/12 - My MK802 review lens has managed to stay in Tier 1 for another month in Sep. In fact, the rank is even better than Aug.

  14. 10/12/12 - Achieved another milestone this week. Total visits to all my lenses has just breached 1,000 visits per day.
  15. 10/22/12 - Total visits per week has just exceeded 10,000 visits a week today.
  16. 11/16/12 - The blue box has finally dropped today and Sep is a great month as I have managed to more than double my payout in Aug. I also started using my own Amazon affiliate account in Sep and it is a good decision as my income from Amazon (both Squidoo and affiliate) is almost 5 times the Aug income.

    I also have a few other milestones. Total weekly visits has just breached the 14,000 mark which means that the daily visits has now reached 2,000 visits per day. I have doubled my visits in just slightly over one month.

  17. 12/13/12 - The blue box has dropped for Oct and it is a fantastic month that far exceeded my expectations. My original unannounced goal was to hit a $500 a month payout by the Dec 2012 payout but I have already achieved that by the Oct 2012 payout. Dare I dream of a $1000 payout by the Dec 2012 payout?
  18. 12/31/12 - Dec was another brutal month when it came to traffic. My traffic dropped at least 30-40% in mid Nov due to a change in Google and was recovering in Dec when it took another hit just before Christmas. The second hit is most likely due to Christmas itself and people spending less time online.

    The good news is that LR and sales did not seem to have been affected greatly as sales increased month over month in Nov and Dec and the lenses more or less kept their Tier positions although the LR itself did drop (or increase depending on how you look at it).

  19. 2/15/12 - Today is Squidoo payday and I have achieved another milestone. I have managed to exceed $1,000 on my latest payday. This includes both Squidoo and my own affiliate sales. This is mostly thanks to the significantly higher sales in December.

All Squidoo lensmasters look forward to seeing the blue box in their dashboard.

What is the blue box? I have been reading about lensmasters waiting for the blue box to arrive around Sqiodoo's payday which is sometime during the middle of the month. I finally got to join the rank of lensmasters waiting for their blue box in October 2012. This was for the August 2012 earnings (there is a 2 month delay for payout) and I knew I had one lens in Tier 1 (MK802 Review) and one lens in Tier 3 (Maxis Home Fibre Review). I also made my first sales in August 2012 but I was not sure exactly how much I made.

I will be listing my Squidoo earnings here on this section and I start off with my very first payday on October 2012.

  1. AUG 2012 Total Payout - $67.25

    I made a total of $67.25 for August 2012 (paid out in Oct 2012), my very first full month on Squidoo (I registered and published my first lens on 25 July 2012) and it is a wonderful feeling. It is a great start and it is a great motivation to continue writing great lenses on Squidoo. Out of the total, $45.79 is from ads while the balance is from the sale modules.

    I could have made more but I made a very silly and costly mistake. I turned off the text ad for a short while (a day or two I believe) while playing around with the ad settings. I could have made an extra $15 for the Tier 1 text link ads if I had not done that. Live and learn I guess :)


  2. SEP 2012 Total Payout - $142.00

    September 2012 is a much better month than August. Part of the reason is that I have a lot more lenses that qualify for tier payment as I published about 8 lenses in August which qualified for payments in September. Total payout for September is $111.83. $80.94 is from tier payments while the balance of $30.89 is from the Amazon and eBay sales modules.

    For September 2012, I had 1 lens in tier 1, 1 lens in tier 2 and 4 lenses in tier 3. 2 other lenses also earned a little for the text link ads although they are out of tier 3. Some people refer to this as tier 4.

    I also made another $30.17 from my Amazon Affiliate account although I have not been paid yet as I have set my payout threshold quite high for Amazon. International affiliates can opt for payment either by Amazon credit or check. I have chosen check and the bank charges are quite high to cash the check so a higher value check is preferred.

  3. OCT 2012 Total Payout - $625.20

    October 2012 far exceeded my expectations with a total payout that is more than 4 times of the September payout. All the new related lenses that I created in September have all performed well with a total of 4 lenses in Tier 1, 3 lenses in Tier 2 and 6 lenses in Tier 3. Total Squidoo payout is $416.15 out of which $349.32 is from tier payments and the balance is from Amazon and eBay sales modules.

    Earnings from my Amazon Affiliate accounts have also increased almost 7 fold with a total of $209.05.

    I am really surprised to do so well in October as I do not have any Halloween related lenses. I am now really forward to my November and December payouts.

  4. NOV 2012 Total Payout - $838.89

    November 2012 payday has arrived and I am happy to report another record payout although the increase is a little more modest this time but I am not complaining. I had a total of 4 lenses in Tier 1 and 6 lenses in Tier 2. Unfortunately the tier payments dropped a bit compared to October so it sort of balanced out a bit. Total Squidoo payout is $445.62 which includes tier payment as well as Squidoo affiliate sales on Amazon and eBay.

    Earnings from my Amazon and other affiliate accounts for November is $393.27 which brings the grand total to $838.89.

  5. DEC 2012 Total Payout - $1004.60

    December 2012 payday has arrived and I must admit that I was a little disappointed with the lower tier payout. However I have 10 Tier 2 lenses compared to 6 in Nov. I also managed to maintain 4 lenses in Tier 1. So, the lower tier payout was more than compensated by the higher number of Tier 2 lenses.

    Total Squidoo payout is $459.79 out of which $105.91 was from Squidoo Amazon and eBay sales. I also earned a total of $544.81 from my own Amazon and other affiliate accounts. The grand total for December is $1004.60 which just pips it over the $1,000 mark for the very first time.

    For the whole of 2012, my total online earnings from both Squidoo and my own affiliate accounts is $2,677.94.

  6. JAN 2013 Total Payout - $841.27

    January 2013 payday is surprising because I managed to get 6 lenses into Tier 1 while maintaining 10 lenses in Tier 2 although overall traffic and sales have fallen from the highs in Dec. Unfortunately, tier payout continues to fall as well.

    As a result, total Squidoo payout is actually lower than Dec at $432.94. With the holiday season over, my own Amazon and other affiliate accounts only managed to bring in a total of $408.33. The grand total for my first paycheck of 2013 is $841.27. Not as good as Dec of course but I still manage to outdo Nov which was a great month.

  7. FEB 2013 Total Payout - $687.15

    Both tier payout and sales continue to drop in Feb. I had a total of 6 Tier 1 lenses and 12 Tier 2 lenses but the total Squidoo payout is only $389.50. Squidoo sales has dropped as well. While disappointing, this trend is normal for Squidoo at the beginning of each year. However, I also suspect that with the drop in traffic lately, the earnings drop is probably a little higher than usual.

    My own affiliate accounts didn't fare that much better either. Total sales across all affiliate programs is $297.65, which is a 27% drop from Jan. The total earnings for Feb is $687.15.

    With all the new regulations and scanning going on to remove low quality lenses, hopefully traffic will recover soon on Squidoo and with that higher earnings for the months to come.

  8. MAR 2013 Total Payout - $464.16

    Both traffic and tier payments drop even further as search traffic from Google continue to elude Squidoo lenses. I had a total of 4 Tier 1 lenses and 14 Tier 2 lenses in March. Total Squidoo payout including sales is $261.69. Due to the lower traffic, Amazon affiliate sales has also suffered as it only brought in $202.47 which is a huge drop from Feb and the lowest full month sales since I started my own affiliate account in Sep 2012.

  9. APR 2013 Total Payout - $396.26

    Tier payments has dropped even further and it is a little demotivating. The number of lenses in the Tiers have remained roughly the same with 4 Tier 1 and 12 Tier 2 lenses. Total Squidoo payout including sales is $186.37 which is a huge drop considering that I have only 2 less Tier 2 lenses compared to March. Amazon affiliate sales was minimally better at $209.89 so I am grateful for that.

  10. MAY 2013 Total Payout - $352.41

    As you can see, May's earnings has dropped further compared to April's. The good news is that the Squidoo portion of it is $187.19 which is a tad higher than last month. I am crossing my fingers and hope that the earnings decline at Squidoo has hit rock bottom and goes back up again after this. On the other hand, Amazon affiliate sales has dropped after the slight recovery last month.

  11. JUN 2013 Total Payout - $302.23

    Unfortunately I was wrong. Squidoo earnings has not reached rock bottom. Tier payment, traffic and therefore sales is significantly less than last month and as a result, my total Squidoo earnings is only $151.03. Amazon affiliate sales also continues to drop and it is only $151.20. That brings the total to only $302.23.

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The Beginning....Still

(or we have only just begun)

This is just the beginning for me. I contemplated about waiting longer and adding more content and data before publishing this lens but after going through it a few times, I felt that the content is good enough to stand on its own. I will of course update this lens on a frequent basis to report on the success (or failure) of the approach I am taking and also to report on any milestones I achieve especially on getting my very first paycheck from Squidoo (hopefully!). Carpe Diem!

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I update this article on a frequent basis with new information. Follow me on Twitter for update notifications on my Squidoo activities.

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If you are one of the lucky few who have earned enough for a payout on Squidoo, please share your experience here.

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