December Payday

This payday came in at a round total of $17.00. Not a lot, but it doesn't surprise me as this reflects October's performance when I was delivering zero effort into Squidoo. Not bad for totally passive income, especially with the improved dollar/sterling exchange rate.

The last week hasn't seen the creation of any new lenses, rather increased effort on some existing pages and what a difference I've seen! Some of the traffic has doubled and I'm hoping that this work results in affiliate sales.

A couple of my new lenses have risen and fallen in spectacular fashion - going from 50 to 2 hits over a couple of weeks. I suspect that they've been picked up in glee by Google, given a chance and then dropped again. C'est la vie!

I'm aiming to create at least one new lens this weekend. I have several registered, but not sure which to pick first.

Textexperimentation

I'm sure that many lensmasters have made this discovery in the past, but I have found that it's original text that seems to do it for the search engines. If I look at all my traffic top-performers, they all have one thing in common - text modules.

As I approach my 60th lens, I am keen to do a short experiment, by adding a couple of text boxes to my most sluggish lenses to see if this makes a difference. I have three in mind and will be monitoring these over the next few weeks to see if they pick-up in hits.

I still don't get the whole tagging thing. Sometimes, they work, and sometimes they don't. I could ideally do with someone looking at where I'm going wrong.

In the meantime, I am going to leave with a shameless post for my new lens on a mysterious place in the Peak District - Lud's Church.

Tribute Lens

The best lenses to build are the ones that you have a genuine interest in, like my new Zach Condon lens. Coming back to Squidoo, I find it very difficult to create pages that focus on affiliates only, and to be honest they are never as successful as the ones that reflect my personal passions. Maybe this is because they are short on text, short on inspiration and new ideas.

On the financial upside, I now have $31.42 in my affiliate pot, which gives me great pleasure considering the fact that I have been away from Squidoo for so long. One of my lenses accounts for two thirds of this.

10000 Hours of Squidoo?

Well so far my health updates haven't taken a huge amount of effect. However, my new Christmas Books lens has suddenly picked up and is getting a decent amount of traffic.

I've been pondering on the messages coming out of Malcolm Gladwell's new book - Outliers - recently and have been really interested to see how the 10000 Hour Rule works. It's not surprising to me that so many successful lensmasters either work from home or have literally put 1000s of hours into the application. So far, I would imagine that I'm at around 600 hours, so I still have a long way to go.

Squidoo Health Check

I'm loving the new health check tools that are now available for Squidoo users. There is the Squidoo Healthcheck Tool, that can be found on the dashboard and gives a quick snapshot of the strengths and weaknesses of a lens. Similarly, there is also the Beta version of Squidutils Health Check, which highlights potential problems. Luckily for rusty lensmasters such as myself, these both direct you to Squidaholic for solutions. Squidaholic contains lots of nifty links to essential tools such as Wordtracker, and Google keywords.

Having examined some of my failing lenses, I've been able to apply some extra love and attention to weaker areas, but time will tell whether I have managed to revive them. I'm keeping a note of the progress of two in particular and will be reporting back on the success of the revamps shortly.

In the meantime, I have created a new lens to showcase Orla Kiely Handbags on eBay. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Like a Virgin!

I've spent the last day or so creating a new lens. It's been great fun, but has also taken me a long time to get back in the swing of things, especially as there are so many new and exciting features to play with!

My latest lens was requested by my husband and lists the Best Christmas Books. It has been surprisingly difficult to find a wide range of classics so some of them are a little unusual, but I am ultimately happy with the final selection. I intend to keep on adding to this over the next few weeks and will hopefully rediscover my Squidoo creativity again!

10 Months On

It's a cliche, but how time flies! What was meant to be a 3 month break has tripled due to work pressures/big move and I've come back to some surprises.

First of all, is my new-found status as a Giant Squid! I was absolutely thrilled to be awarded with this honour, especially as I haven't been active in the community for a long time. To me, this is pretty special.

Second pleasant discovery is that although some of my lenses have crashed and burned, others have been ticking along nicely, despite a drop in lensrank. My passive monthly income from Squidoo has ranged from around $12-25 per month. Not a lot, but a welcome bonus, which has helped me to buy the odd treat online.

Now I am in the process of updating all my lenses pre-Xmas. With an imminent change of career and a driving test on the horizon, it remains to be seen how much energy I can devote to Squidoo, but I would like to at least try to make my 100 as originally planned.