November Squidoo Payments

Another month has passed and here we are again with Squidoo payments. The “blue box” has just dropped on my Dashboard so I went over to check my earnings.

The stats are a tad bit disappointing for the actual Squidoo earnings, I managed to have about $120 less than the previous month. I was trying to figure out why, and then it hit me. These are the earnings for September, and that’s the very month I was away on a 2 week holiday with hubby to a Greek island, with scarce internet connection and no real updates to my lenses.

On the other hand, I’m thrilled to say that my Amazon check is bigger than ever, it’s actually $300 more than what I got last month, so overall my earnings are on the rise.

While I did have Amazon earnings both on my own affiliate links and through the Squidoo affiliate links, the reason for the actual lower earnings on Squidoo is because of the lost lensrank. There are hundreds of thousands of lensmasters at Squidoo and pretty much everyone is fighting for top lensrank. And considering that there are only around 2000 places for a tier 1, which pays out anything between $50 and $60+ for a lens caught in that rank, the fight is indeed fierce.

A tier 2 lens is getting a much lower amount, but still there are around 10,000 places for this, with payment of more or less $10 per lens. If you have lots of tier 2 lenses, tha’t s not a shabby earning either.

However keeping lenses in tiers 1 and 2 (especially in tier 1) is really hard, and it’s becoming harder and harder with the more lensmasters that are regularly joining Squidoo. So what makes a lens keep its high tier position?

There are many variable in play, and only Squidoo knows really the secret formula, however there are some things that can be safely said that help higher rankings. One of them is constant updating of the lens. That has always proven to help. Also click-outs from the lens to other sites, as well as high traffic and sales.

Of course likes, comments and blessings from other lensmasters also help. They might not do much in the long run, for when you’re really at the edge between two tiers, every bit helps.

For me in September the major ingredient was prominently missing: lens updates. I was away, and while I had the laptop with me, I didn’t really work during my holidays. Hence the lensrank of some top tier lenses suffered. Which just shows to see that Squidoo is great, but it’s not entirely passive income either. You do have to work at it, just as with anything else that has the potential to help you make a good living.

On the other hand, I’m glad that the sales still prevailed - and increased actually, because September has been a great Amazon month for me.