This is a copy of a post on my blog about my newly started effots to generate online income: The Bluebird Sings. I’m thinking about making a lens around it (the post, not the blog.) Please feel free to leave me any feedback.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve been hanging around squidoo, making lenses and posting in the squidu forums for about six months. Up until now, I’ve just been having fun, and not really that worried about how to track the success of my lenses. But, since I’m now working towards generating part of my an income though my lenses, I’ve been looking into the ways that squidoo has to track them. Here’s what I’ve found:

The Dashboard

....

The dashboard is a great tool for getting a quick idea of how all of your lenses are doing within squidoo. It lists all of them, and gives you information on lens rank, the average viewer rating, how many visits within the past week, how much money the lens has generated since the last payout, and the last time you edited the lens.

If you hover your mouse over a lens title (like I did for the first one in the above screen shot) you’ll see a few more options. The Stats option is the one we’ll look at here.

Stats

.

When you click on Stats under a lens name, you get a three page report: Summary, Traffic and Royalties. The Summary gives you some stats like current and highest lensrank ever, number of clickouts over the past 30 days, and how many times the lens has been marked as favorite. You even get a couple of graphs showing visits and lensrank, life to date.

The Traffic page gives you a detailed breakdown of how people are finding your lens (see above picture). You can choose to see stats for differing lengths of time from the current day up to 30 days. At the top of the page there is a pie chart showing the number of direct links (people coming directly to your lens) in proportion to links from various referrers (links that people clicked on to find your lens) and search engine traffic. Next to that is a list of search terms that led people to your lens. Below those two displays is a list of referrers and a clickout list. The list of referrers lets you know what links people are following to find your lens. Got an ad out there? This will help you determine if that ad is working. The clickout list lets you keep track of the most popular links on the lens, including any affiliate links such as Amazon or ebay.

The Royalties page gives you a rundown of all the money that your lens has generated, showing how much was paid to you and how much you chose to donate to charity. (Donating to charity is a big part of the squidoo community experience. there are many charities to choose from and you can set how much, if any, you want to donate on each lens.) You also get a lists of Amazon and ebay orders placed through the squidoo-provided affiliate links.

Not enough info for ya? Try out Squidaholic!

Squidaholic

.

I just noticed this little link on one of my lenses the other day. It opened up a whole new world for me. I’m still exploring what all is offered at Squidaholic. It’s a bunch of information including all of the links on the web pointing to your lens, how popular your lens topic is with bloggers, and notices as to whether or not your lens has been listed on popular social sites such as digg or stumbleupon. There are a couple of good Google sections showing how popular your lens topic is over time, and the top ten hottest searches right now.

There’s a debate about Squidaholic, though. It’s public! That’s right, anyone can view the Squidaholic info on any lens. Got an opinion on that? Visit JaguarJulie’s debate on the issue.

Want to make your own lens?

Want to use these tracking services? Click here to make your own lens!

Just a blurb to let everyone know that I’ve updated two of my lenses today.

1. Amigurumi: Cute, Cuddly, Crochet:  I added a new link to My Humble Scribblings. It’s a recent article I’ve written on how to use intarsia and Fair Isle to create color patterns in knitting. I also added a new module: Amigurumi & Crochet Accessories. It features fun ami and crochet items from zazzle.

2. Nerd Gear: Shirts, Buttons and More: Twelve new designs all celebrating the computer nerd!

In my last blog, i announced my first squidlit lens, a review of Farewell, My Subaru, the story of a guy leaving the city to live carbon neutral as an organic goat rancher. Well, when I checked my e-mail this evening there was a thank you from the author! How kind of him to take time out of his day to not only read the review, but to send an e-mail letting me know he had. I really appreciated it.

I’ve been wanting to explore lenses other than the regular one. So, I went hunting for a lens to explain them all and found Thrivingmom’s.  After reading up on the variety of lenses out there, i decided to go with squidlit. I’ve just read “Farewell, My Subaru” and really enjoyed it. So, that’s the subject of my first squidlit lens. It was alot of fun to make. I hope it’s fun to read, too!

In my last post, I was all excited about the benifits of posting your squidoo lenses on stumbleupon. Well, I should have read Katinka’s lens on how to stumble first, because I’ve tripped the spam filters and am no longer receiving hits from it. I swear I had no intention of being one of those annoying spammers that takes advantage of cool services to only promote thier sites. I think stumble is tons o’ fun. I mean, instant web surfing tailored to your likes? How cool is that?

But, I was like a kid during his first visit to the candy store. I got all carried away and stumbled five of my lenses in the course of two days, and have received a (deserved) slap on the wrist. So, don’t be like me. Have fun on stumble, submit a few of your lenses if you want, but don’t get carried away. Don’t be an unintentional spammer.

Ever since I started out here on squidoo, I’ve heard from the giants that you should post your lenses on places like digg or stumbleupon. So, I finally took a deep breath and gave it a try. I published a lens this afternoon about nerd gear and submitted it to stumbleupon.com. The lens isn’t even live yet, but stumble has already generated 14 views! Yea!

Lesson learned: listen to giant squids when they hand out advice!

Well, it’s been five days since I took the discovery tool off of my knitting video lens and I saw no improvement in traffic. In fact, traffic went down. So, it’s going back on there pronto.

I was perusing the squidu forum tonight when I ran across a thread that posted the question as to whether or not the discovery tool at the top of the lens kills your search engine cred: Discovery Tool = Google Killer?

So, I decided to try a little experiment and disable the tool on a lens that has gotten a grand total of seven visits, and all of those from within “squidoo world.” I’ll check back in a few days to see if the traffic has picked up, and if I have any hits from google or yahoo.

oh, the lens is Knitting Help Videos: Cast On, Knit, Purl, Increasing, Decreasing, Bind Off