The Key to Earning Money on Squidoo

I started earning money as opposed to getting some pocket change as my Nana would call it when I realized what niche actually meant. I used to think okay I’ll write about the eighties that will be my niche…….. a niche is a much narrower idea than that which I refer to as a theme.

My first real niche lens was about one product only – Bonnie (our super Rocket Mom – it was for a Rocket Mom’s assignment) called it a super, super niche lens.

What happened? It started making sales! I had such a super niche as not only was I focused on one product I was marketing it at a particular color of that product so that when people searched for it they were ready to buy.

Writing niche lenses is where the keyword research side of the debate sometimes comes unstuck. This particular lens was written with no keyword research as I hadn’t really understood how to do that side of things at that time and yet it worked. If I had done my keyword research instead of following my instincts and writing about something I wanted that was very specific then I probably wouldn’t have done the lens at all.

Why? There were less than 100 searches made per month for my main long tail keyword, I would get about 10 visits per week, but the majority of them were buying off of the lens whereas another lens of mine was pulling in 1000s of visitors per month, but not buying a thing!

Am I saying not to do keyword research?

Absolutely not! However, sometimes you need to ask yourself whether you need to get a lot of traffic with every keyword or whether you can convert over 50% of the traffic you will get.

My niche a/c has 33 lenses in it at the moment and this week it’s gotten 469 visits in total which averages out to 14 visits per lens – not a lot. However, my amazon a/c has made 5 sales of the product this week and I’ve got 2 sales on my dashboard for the week along with 3 ebay sales that aren’t showing up in the $$ column yet. It’s not enough to live on (yet!), but I have only had this niche a/c for 8 months and with life getting in the way I haven’t been as active with it as I had planned.

This niche has so much competition for the high traffic keywords that I’m deliberately trying to target lower traffic and more niche keywords for the lenses and then using Featured Lenses to try and draw traffic to a couple of high competition lenses. It’s slowly working and if I spent more time I’m sure it would work really well.

A great example of using your keyword research wisely is to make sure you’re targeting the word/phrase that people are actually typing in to Google and not what you would call it, this is especially important when doing a lens on a single product. For example when I was researching a Lego set that I wanted to write about the actual set name only showed double digits traffic for the month when the Lego product number showed a few hundred – at other times this is the reverse.

My advice today is to make sure you write super niche lenses and link them to a niche lens ie if you want to write about Bruce Springsteen’s music make that your niche lens that ties your super niche lenses together……..make super niche lenses on each individual album. By the way this is just an example I haven’t found music lenses to be the most profitable although they are fun to write.

Research your keywords to make sure that you’re using the best possible ones for your lens, but make your own decision over how much traffic you need to target. If it’s the type of keywords that you would type in when you were merely looking for information then you’re best to aim for a lot of traffic, but if you feel they are ‘buying’ keywords then you actually do not necessarily need a lot of traffic.

Sermon over! If you’d like to find out more about earning money on Squidoo then I’ve written some lenses to help you out so pop over to How to Earn Money on Squidoo.

Today's blog guest is lou16 on Squidoo. Thank you for your contribution.