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• Going Places on Squidoo

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• Great Food on Squidoo

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• Some of My Popular Hubs

  • Bed Rest Pillow
  • Door Security Devices
  • Heavy Duty Beach Chairs
  • Small Window Fans
  • Buy a Window Sill Planter

It appears that my sales appear to be inching up. I believe sales on my Squidoo lenses in the past 30 days are about 40% higher than in the previous months. This seems to be a pattern each year and one that I welcome.  Amazon sales via hubpages are also increased but that is, I believe, primarily due to my increasing number of hubs and not quite as dramatic.

My new lenses this week were on lap desks; computer lap desks, kids lap desk, lap desks with a light, and pillow lap desks.  On Hubpages, I created another repository for some unused photos with a Hub on Garden Flowers in My Town. I have more photos to add to that page, but I’ll need to find some time to search through my archives!  My only other Hub was on Step Trash Cans.

As Lens Harbor suggested, we are well past mid-year and it’s always good to check up on your progress.  So following that prompt, I decided to take a look at where I am at this point in time. This is a pretty simple task for me actually as I decided this year to merely set some volume goals. No income goals or anything else.  Just volume; kind of a kick in the pants to get busier.  I assumed, and according to my results, rightly so, income would follow.

I had 24 Hubs at the start of 2010 and my goal was to reach 150. As of this last week, I have 152 Hubs.  Goal met.
I had 242 lenses at the start of 2010 and my goal was to hit 350 by year end. As of today I have 324 published lenses.  I consider this goal to be “on target”.

My other volume goals related to article writing to support my lenses and hubs. At the beginning of the year I was going to target Qondio and Bukisa. I’ve since expanded my writing efforts so I’ve not hit those specific goals.

My 2010 goal for Qondio was 245 articles, I’m currently at 117.  Don’t think I’ll hit it but I have other progress to show for this.
My 2010 goal for Bukisa was 115 articles and I think I have only 20. Definitely won’t get there but I made a conscious decision to work elsewhere.

My newer article sites have been InfoBarrel and Snipsly. I now have 27 articles on InfoBarrel, 50 on Snipsly and 30+ new articles at GoArticles and EzineArticles.  In addition, I increased my blogging frequency, so I’ve done quite a bit of writing this year.

Guess I can’t slow down yet.  My new hubs this week were on heated footrests and heavy duty foot stools. My new lenses were about Chain O’ Lakes State Park and voice activated GPS devices.

I’ve had a busy few days. I’m trying to condense my work this week so that I can have a few days off. Parental care duties call for one day and Hubby and I want to get out and enjoy our unseasonably cool weather for a day before the heat and humidity swoop back in for one last hurrah. I’m also doing more consult work right now. Time is tight!

I’ve actually lost track of what I’ve done, I’ve been writing articles, lenses, and hubs so fast it’s all a blur. I find that when I go back and look at my hub and lens lists there are some there that I really don’t even remember doing. I’m not sure if it’s the volume and speed or the declining state of my cognitive abilities.

Anyway, here is what I recall. New Hubs included one on Yellowstone Travel. It was a complement to my Squidoo lens on Yellowstone.  It focused on the sights I would consider critical if you were just going to do a quick drive through of the area on a larger trip.  Another was on 3D camcorders…everything seems to be going 3D.  I have lenses on 3D television and 3D cameras already. Only time will tell if it’s a fad or something that will stick.  I also had some Hubs on wall mounted electric fireplaces and electric corner fireplaces…these are a complement to a lens I did two years ago on Squidoo about electric fireplaces in general. 

My final Hub was on the topic of heated insoles. This relates to my blog title. I’ve begun putting together a list of seasonal specific topics, something I often fail to do!  I never think to do this until too late.  So, in the coming 3 months I will try to include some more winter related topics.  This may help pick up the slack as some of my warmer weather related topics fade.  My how time flies!

I had a 10 day vacation and just returned earlier this week. It was a road trip, whew! I hadn’t been on a road trip through the western US since I was in grade school.  We had a great time. 

Of course now I have new lenses about Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Medicine Bow National Forest, Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands of South Dakota.

When I got back I found the solution to my problem with lenses that wouldn’t open. (Thanks AJ for pointing me in the right direction!)  It turns out that I had too many video’s on the page.  Once support was able to give me access to the lenses I was able to delete a few videos and now the pages will work again.  I don’t know how many videos are too many, but I think I need to look into page breaks in the future.

I would be the first to say that many free publishing sites are wonderful when it comes to getting the word out or making money. Squidoo and Hubpages for instance, are super easy to use, cost nothing, offer great page rank, a fantastic environment to learn and network, and on and on.  On the other hand, they are free sites and have certain perils.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been living with one of those somewhat painful realities. I discovered that I have two lenses on Squidoo that will not open. Not in any browser, not on any computer, and not at any time.  This is bad news of course as far as those lenses earning me a single penny or having them provide information to people who are searching for it.  However, my biggest concern is that I have no idea why they won’t open and therefore, whether this could happen to other lenses as well.

The Squidoo admin/support staff is small as we all know. This, I suppose, has resulted in none of my requests for help being answered. Very, very frustrating.

My only new lens this week was on 3D digital cameras. It’s amazing how in a 6 – 8 month time period 3D has exploded on the market. First 3D TVs, then 3D cameras and camcorders as well.  My new Hub was on how to get mobile TV. I had already written about portable TVs, but I wanted to include information about some of the paid and free TV service available through an internet connection as well.

They aren’t always big, but it’s important for morale to recognize milestones. I think I’ve passed a few this month in fact.

I’ve never sold Amazon products directly until earlier this year. Most of my experience prior to that had been through Squidoo and so that’s where my payments came from. Now that I’ve been making Hubs, I have acutal Amazon revenue. This month I finally exceeded the $300 mark. It had been a barrier for a while!

I think I can also now claim a milestone related to AdSense (thanks in great part to Hubpages again).  I’ve finally managed to hit my payout 3 months in a row.  I had exceeded $100 several times but always failed to make the payout in successive months. The past three months my results have consistently been well over the $100 mark. Again, using Squidoo I’ve been getting AdSense revenue but it was paid out through them and therefore it didn’t count toward my payout.

My end of the year goal for Hubpages is 150 hubs. I stand at 142 today so I’m feeling pretty confident now. I’ve finally hit a milestone related to traffic, and that is…I’ve surpassed the 100,000 visitor mark. I don’t have big traffic goals there, but this one was good to finally break through.

I have no new Squidoo lenses in the past few days but I’ve created several new hubs, with one of them focusing on discussions with my mentee.  First, there is one on blog promotion and then another on vacuum cleaners for pet hair and another on jobsite radios.  I had made a hub on Wisteria Tiffany Lamps and today it had a huge spike in traffic but I haven’t figured out why, I’m hoping there will be a sale or two come out of it.

Here’s to seeing some more milestones next month!

It’s hard when you know exactly what you need to do but are having a hard time finding the time to get it all done. Frustrating. I’m hoping that by the end of summer things will slow down for me.

During the past several days I have created a few new pages. On Hubpages, I made Travel Gadgets for International Travelers. I decided to do this one based on the success of some lenses that focus on topics such as international cell phones, international text messaging, and so forth. I also created a Hub called Write Online.  I seem to be mentoring someone now who is brand new to the whole online business thing, and I decided to do some very basic Hubs/Lenses based on our conversations.  I have to make better use of my time so I’m putting pages together that deal with information I’ve basically already put together, if not on paper.

On Squidoo, I built a lens on Keyword Help, another conversation with my mentee which is very basic. My other new lens was on wireles photo printers. 

Of course the other issue putting a crunch on my time is the slowness I seem to frequently encounter on Squidoo. For some reason even once the general slowness resolved, I’ve been unable to open a couple of my lenses. They get hung up. I’ve tried different computers, different browsers, different times of day, cleared my cache, rebooted, etc. But still they won’t open. Of course they are lenses I need to edit! I finally submitted a bug report this a.m.

I of course earn my share of AdSense on Squidoo as well as income from some of the other ads there. On Hubpages it’s a bit easier for me to see exactly what I’m earning related to AdSense specifically. In the past 30 day period, I made $70 from AdSense on Hupages. That’s with 130 hubs.  I would consider my traffic to still be pretty low there, but the income isn’t bad. Amazon is still my biggest revenue source on Hubpages.

My article writing expanded to more revenue sharing sites several weeks ago. Here is what I’m seeing so far. With 115 articles on Qondio (only 5 of them created in the most recent 30 day period) I earned $5.80. I started writing on Snipsly in the past several weeks and with 45 articles there (and no friends I might add), I earned $2.50 in the past 30 days.  InfoBarrel, has been my lowest earning effort but indeed I’ve only added 23 articles there in the past several weeks. I’ve earned no AdSense income there in the past 30 days.

My primary reason for using the sites is really more for the backlinks to my Hubs and Squidoo lenses, but extra money helps too. I have to imagine that if I was more social and more consistent on Snipsly, Qondio, and InfoBarrel my earning would improve but for now that’s not in the cards. 

Anyway, this evaluation certainly doesn’t look at other things like the ability of my articles to drive traffic or anything but it’s just a look at what I’ve found so far.  For revenue sharing, Qondio is still my pick, followed by Snipsly (much to my surprise).

I’ve never been good at capitalizing on current topics when it comes to content creation and affiliate marketing efforts. I rarely blog about special offers, I don’t often write about current news topics, and so forth. Of course, I do send out a tweet or do a blog about new products, but that’s about my limit as far as being on the cutting edge. I know I miss out because of this, but in reality, it just doesn’t fit my overall plan.

However, that’s not to mean I don’t at least understand that being seasonally appropriate is important. I have been working my way through a list of topics this year and realized today, a couple of my summer themed ideas were about to be addressed too late. So I pushed them up the list a bit. I created Hubs on Floating Lounge Chairs and Floating Coolers once I realized this. I don’t think people will be too interested once summer wanes and probably can’t expect to much even now.

My other new hubs were MP3 Players with Voice Recorder and Water Filtration Pitchers.

My Squidoo payday turned out ok, up a few hundred dollars from last month. I had forgotten to factor in the fact that the drooping lensrank problem that I experienced won’t show up for another month. Next month is when I expect mediocre results. But…with my increased efforts at Hubpages what can I expect?  I am anticipating some growth there that will make up the difference.  Amazon sales are looking quite a bit better.

I was checking my Hubpages earnings. I just finished Hub number 131 I think.  Anyway, I didn’t make any more there in June than I had the previous month. GRRR.  Just have to work through it I guess. We don’t know Squidoo earnings yet, but I don’t expect a particularly good month. Should be ok, but nothing special as my lens traffic was down. Affiliate sales were up a bit, but probably not enough to push me over last month’s earnings.

I guess the good news is that I am beginning to get a trickle of revenue from my other writing sites. (Previously it was just an intermittent drip!)

My new Hubs in this most recent period were about USB computer keyboards, a Laptop Lap Pad, and a Cooling Pad for Laptops.

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