These are not tips on how to get your lens to be lens of the day, but rather tips on how to make the most of the lens of the day traffic if one of your lenses is chosen.
Monetize Every Lens
Every lens you write should have some way to make you money, beyond the normal Adsense profit sharing that Squidoo provides. Squidoo makes this easy to do.
Adding an Amazon module to your lens and find books on your topic to recommend is very easy in Squidoo. There are also other modules where you can find nearly any product imaginable to recommend.
Your conversion rate on those modules won’t be very high, though, because the lens of the day traffic is not targeted. They’re viewing your lens because it’s the lens of the day, not because they’re looking for information on your topic. Few of them, if any, will actually buy anything while they’re there.
Consider instead signing up for a pay-per-lead program. These programs pay you when someone signs up for a free report. A free report is an easier sell than paid products, especially for casual visitors.
If I had it to do over again, I’d have put the Squidoo Secrets ebook on the lens. I’ll review Squidoo Secrets in a later post, but you can get paid a bit for giving out the free ebook. That’s the closest you’ll come to targeted traffic in a lens of the day. The visitors are mostly lensmasters coming to see what your lens is like, and giving them a link to a resource that can help them to improve their own lenses might convert well.
The monetization on a lens should be a small portion of the lens. The majority of the lens should provide quality content and links.
Create Lens Topic Groups
Any topic, even a niche topic, is broad enough to write several lenses on it, each covering a different aspect of the topic. This lets you keep each lens focused on its subtopic.
Lens of the day visitors like to see other lenses you’ve made on similar topics, so creating topic groups from the very start will ensure you’ll get some spillover traffic onto the related lenses.
A great way to make it easy for them to find these other lenses is to use the lensroll feature in Squidoo to add each lens in the topic group to every other lens’ lensroll. When a user views one of the lenses, the others will appear in a “More Great Lenses” section.
I’d had only one other related lens, and hadn’t thought to link to it from my lens of the day lens. Despite this, about a third of the visitors found their way to it. Given a couple more related lenses linked together with a lensroll, I’d expect the spillover traffic to be higher.
Link Internally Between Lenses
If you only have a few related lenses, you can link directly between them in a text module. I had too many and too varied of lenses for this, so I created a Who Is Jay Shaffstall? lens that links to most all of my lenses, and then linked to it from every lens.
That way, every lens is close (click-wise) to every other lens.
This works better for the general public than for other lensmasters, though. During my lens of the day traffic, I saw only a handful of clicks through to my Who Is Jay Shaffstall? page, while the one related lens I had received a much higher amount of spillover traffic (see the lens of the day analysis post for traffic charts).
And that’s about it. I have a list of opportunities waiting for reviews in future posts, so for a while we’ll get back to the main topic of the blog, making money online.
Have a great weekend!