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My sweetie, Dave, has finally learned how to make his Amazon and eBay purchases after/through visiting my lenses. This is good as he is basically an Italian-art book hound who must buy any new title released and is always haunting eBay for specialty Italian items. Just this week he bought 3 high-end perfumes from Florence via eBay - so now he'll smell good AND he helped some of my lenses get a lens rank boost.
On to other things - and lessons learned.
This morning I was working on my Police fan survey lens, which has been sinking pretty bad in rank. I realized two big problems, both rather late in the game:
1. I'm heavily involved in Police fandom, so I knew I could get a lot of my friends to vote in it. And boy, did they! But here's the thing - I was still early in my Squidooing days and didn't realize I wouldn't get a Tier payout on it until the month AFTER it was published! I should have waited a few weeks and THEN promoted it on the mailing lists and forums I belong to. It's a shame because I actually got the lens up to about 1,000 in the rank, and it finished Tier 2 for that first month, but I got nothing for it. By the time it entered it's first "official" month? All the hardcore Police fans had answered it and weren't checking back.
I might try to do an analysis write-up to post to some of those forums to encourage people to come back and see how they compared in their opinions to others. Because that's the only way I know I'll ever get really good traffic on that lens.
2. Lesson 2 I've been learning about ALL of my music lenses. I was dumb to put in Amazon modules with all of the basic Police albums and videos. Because the kind of fans who are going to visit my lens and want to take the survey? Are fans who already HAVE all of that stuff! What I need to be trying to sell are unique, rare and collectible items. High-end eBay auctions for autographs, gold records, tie-in musical instruments, etc. Because believe me, THAT'S the kind of stuff my Police fan friends buy. I have friends who will fight in to the thousands of $$$'s for photo negatives, reel-to-reel tapes, gold records and other really unique Police items. Again I'm *headdesking* for not realizing this earlier, and I want to rework a lot of the sales modules on my music lenses to really push the high-end collectibles instead of the basics.
But I guess, these are just the things we learn from experience. I used to feel weird pushing expensive merchandise on Squidoo...then I had someone come to my Pink Floyd survey page last week and buy about 30 items in one shot, all Floyd related, on Amazon including collectible figurines at about $150 a shot. If I'm targeting hardcore fans, I've got to try to sell them hardcore merchandise. That's the path to better sales royalties that I'm seeing ahead of me. Now, to implement it for success.
On to other things - and lessons learned.
This morning I was working on my Police fan survey lens, which has been sinking pretty bad in rank. I realized two big problems, both rather late in the game:
1. I'm heavily involved in Police fandom, so I knew I could get a lot of my friends to vote in it. And boy, did they! But here's the thing - I was still early in my Squidooing days and didn't realize I wouldn't get a Tier payout on it until the month AFTER it was published! I should have waited a few weeks and THEN promoted it on the mailing lists and forums I belong to. It's a shame because I actually got the lens up to about 1,000 in the rank, and it finished Tier 2 for that first month, but I got nothing for it. By the time it entered it's first "official" month? All the hardcore Police fans had answered it and weren't checking back.
I might try to do an analysis write-up to post to some of those forums to encourage people to come back and see how they compared in their opinions to others. Because that's the only way I know I'll ever get really good traffic on that lens.
2. Lesson 2 I've been learning about ALL of my music lenses. I was dumb to put in Amazon modules with all of the basic Police albums and videos. Because the kind of fans who are going to visit my lens and want to take the survey? Are fans who already HAVE all of that stuff! What I need to be trying to sell are unique, rare and collectible items. High-end eBay auctions for autographs, gold records, tie-in musical instruments, etc. Because believe me, THAT'S the kind of stuff my Police fan friends buy. I have friends who will fight in to the thousands of $$$'s for photo negatives, reel-to-reel tapes, gold records and other really unique Police items. Again I'm *headdesking* for not realizing this earlier, and I want to rework a lot of the sales modules on my music lenses to really push the high-end collectibles instead of the basics.
But I guess, these are just the things we learn from experience. I used to feel weird pushing expensive merchandise on Squidoo...then I had someone come to my Pink Floyd survey page last week and buy about 30 items in one shot, all Floyd related, on Amazon including collectible figurines at about $150 a shot. If I'm targeting hardcore fans, I've got to try to sell them hardcore merchandise. That's the path to better sales royalties that I'm seeing ahead of me. Now, to implement it for success.
