I got a great comment on my Gift Knitting for the Holidays lens from enslavedbyfaeries about her daughter getting up at five in the morning to secretly loom knit before school. I laughed, because I can totally relate. Though with me it’s the other way around. I have to stop myself from knitting late into the night, or else I wake up to a project that looks like I tried to knit it after about two glasses of wine. 0_o

Her daughter’s love of loom knitting reminded that I had failed to add this technique to my Gift Knitting lens…so, I did! I found a directory of 41 patterns for the Knifty Knitter (a popular loom) as well as a few photos from flickr and some loom knitting supplies.

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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!