Last week, I bought Erica Stone’s Squid Pro Quo, and I’ve made Squidoo lenses, following her guidelines ever since.
One of the “complaints” I had about the product was that Erica didn’t tell how much she made from those lenses. I didn’t mean from Squidoo lenses in general, but that specific kind of lenses.
After all, they are sort of … slightly … lazy. There’s not much writing to be done. Although I love to write – there are some topics it’s just hard to come up with more than 200-300 characters of meaningful content about.
What I learnt yesterday about Erica’s earnings on the SPQ types of lenses made me realise that I had to make more of them. These numbers were highly inspiring. You’ll see 😉
Nine Days to First Sale
I bet that I’m not the only one who wonders: How long must I wait before I see some action?
Although there’s no standard formula, of course, it’s good to learn that it only took Erica Stone nine days to reach the first sale. She had two the same day, actually.
But – and there’s a but here – she did NOT create one lens a day, like I strive to do at the moment. She created 30 lenses in five days! That’s six lenses per day on average.
If you only come out with one lens per day, like most individuals with two arms will do, I guess, this could take six times longer.
Statistically.
I have to ask my friend Mike to verify this. He’s very much into analysis and stuff.
Let’s take a look at the next thing, she writes about: The number of sales and the amount she made from it.
50 Sales in a Month
Erica writes that she made 50 sales during the first month, but that 8 of thoses weren’t shipped – right away at least. That leaves 42 shipped orders for an amount of $1,087.03. Out of that, she must have earned around $60. That’s $2 per lens for the first month.
And the numbers continued to grow, according to Erica’s comment on Tiffany’s blog. Here is what she wrote:
Thought I’d give you and your followers here a sort of “timeline of events” and some characteristics on my initial test set of Squid Pro Quo lenses from creation to sales so they could maybe have something to benchmark against:
First lens published 8/24/2012
Total of 30 lenses published by 8/29/2012
First sale from these lenses was on 9/2/2012 (2 sales, actually) – nine days to get to the first sale.
From 9/2/2012 to 9/23/2012, I’ve seen sales from these lenses 17 days out of the 22. That means only five days in that time period had zero sales from this set of lenses.
For the past 8 days, I’ve had sales every day so those no-sale days were earlier in the timeline.
From 9/2/2012 to 9/23/2012, I’ve had a total of 50 sales with 8 items not yet shipped. Value of total shipped items is $1087.03.
Only two of the lenses are Halloween related and those two lenses account for 9 of the 50 sales.
Average weekly traffic per lens is 25 visitors – about 25% referral from inside Squidoo and 75% SEO.
Of those 30 lenses, 10 rank on the first page for their main keyword, 11 rank on the 2nd page for their main keyword, and 9 rank on page 3 or higher. Lenses that don’t rank on the first page have made sales so page 1 is not a prerequisite for success.
Average exact Global Monthly search volume for the main keywords for those 30 lenses is 520. Average PR0s for the 30 lenses is 6. Average pages with 0 backlinks for those 30 lenses is 7.
My Squidoo Lens Frustrations
You know how it’s awesome to see your finished work? And how you cannot wait to have it indexed and visible in the search engines?
Well, I feel like that, too. So everytime I have finished a lens, I take a look at it, and I see that it looks good 😉 And then I spread the word about it on Facebook on Twitter, and typically it’s evening, by then.
When it’s morning again, I login to my dashboard and what I see there is depressing.
My latest lens? It’s back in “work in progress” mode.
GAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!
That just happened to my latest lens, Rhassoul clay for hair, and I see that it’s also my top lens. Why? No idea, but a SquidAngel (whatever that is) blessed it, so that might have been it.
As for my other lenses, there’s especially one I was proud of. My Best way to learn Hebrew took forever to show up in Google.
Finally, it’s here. I checked with a proxy server to see what my real placement is, and without quotationmarks, it holds a nice number 35 position (no, you’re not allowed to laugh here 😉 ).
With quotationmarks it’s number 10. I like that.
Conclusion
Counting on Erica’s results, I should soon begin to see $2 per lens per month.
This means that it’s out of the question to spend several hours per lens after a while. Of course, in the beginning, things take time to learn, and I don’t mind investing in it.
And Squidoo is fun. You get all kinds of points, and quests, and trophees, so it’s almost a game. You get addicted.
If you have Squid Pro Quo, you also have some great templates to use. Somebody told Tiffany that it was faster to save them all in one file instead of having them in three files. I don’t know about that. I have the three text files open, and I think it’s just as fast.
Oh, now I just see a way to make it faster. I use an application called Typinator, and I’ll add those textfiles to that instead. There’s a similar product that works under Windows, but I don’t remember the name. Something with key…
This is probably a number’s game. And with each lens, your work will be easier and faster.
What are your experiences with Squidoo so far?
Well, statistically you’re right. Do one 6th of the work you should expect one 6th of the results. However, where not only dealing with statistics. We’re also dealing with a bit of probability here. Say it takes 100 visitors to get one sale. With 6 lenses in one day you might get those visitors in 10 days, with only 1 lens a day that might take 100 days, but what if the buying visitor arrives on your 1-lens-a-day on day 1 and on your 6-lenses-a-day lens on day 5? In that case you would make a sale faster with less work.
That, however, is not the most probably event, but it could happen.
If 1 lens a day means you can stick to it and 6 lenses a day means you can’t; then you should certainly go with the 1 lens a day approach.
Good luck with the system, as you know I’m doing other things these days 🙂
Thanks for your reply, Mike. I knew I could count on you 🙂
Good advice, too. One lens a day is definitely more me – at least for now.
And good luck with your fiction writing.