How Long Until My Lens Makes Money?

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Why The H#LL Isn’t My Squidoo Lens Making Sales?!?!?

Sorry, had to add that sub-title to this post. C’mon, be honest… You know you’ve thought it, too! You make this beautiful lens. You put so much effort into and you are promoting the bestest product EVER on your lens. You social bookmark it, Digg it, Stumble it and all that good stuff until your fingers hurt. You even see traffic to your lens! So, why the HELL isn’t your lens making you any money? Is this Squidoo thing a joke?

One Lens = How Much Money?

Seems many people want to know, “How much is a lens worth to me on average?” That is such a tough question to answer because there isn’t a flat across-the-board answer. How much IS your Squidoo lens worth to YOU on average? What if I said that each lens will be worth about $1 a week to you? Feeling good about that ONE Squidoo lens now? Or, perhaps you now feel the need to go create as many lenses as you can…. or just give up.

For me, I felt the need to get out there and make as many lenses as I could. If ONE lens would bring about $5 a month, then TWENTY lenses would bring $100 a month, right? And ONE HUNDRED lenses would bring $500 a month. Ok, now we’re talking…lol!

So, How LONG Until A Lens Makes Any Money?

Ok… now don’t shoot the messenger, but here is the flat out truth.

Your ONE lens may NEVER make money.

Sure, it may bring a few cents each month in Squidoo earnings, but as for the big commissions…. maybe nothing. Ever.

note to unhappy readers: The “back” button is up there to the left =)

Ok, now that we have THAT harsh piece of reality out of the way, let’s talk about what we can do about it.

Affiliate Marketing On A Budget

When people come to the point that they seriously look at their computer as a way to supplement, or replace, income, they usually fall into one of two financial categories:

  • 1. Does Have Money To Invest

  • 2. Does NOT Have Money To Invest

When you DO have money to invest into your new online business, you have the ability to outsource things you don’t know how to do and the ability to pay for traffic via PPC and other forms of paid advertising. You also have the means to pay for tools that make your life easier.

I can’t speak from that point of view because that is so not my story. I didn’t have money to invest. I had to learn how to do things myself. I had learn how to generate organic traffic because PPC was totally out of the question. And the only “tool” I could afford to pay for was my little pea brain. haha!

Like many of you reading, the only resource I had was time….and it never felt like I had enough of that. There was SO much to learn. So many hurdles to tackle…and so many times I felt like I ran slap into a brick wall.

However there is one thing I learned very quickly.

One Web Page Is NOT Enough

For a free marketer, the only potential income streams you have are the free web pages you create and get online. I realized that if it’s just a great idea in my head, but not a page on the internet, it was worthless to me. I needed to figure out a systematic approach to getting all my ideas and plans out onto the web. I am a one-woman show…and each of those web pages became a member of my sales force.

You see, that is how I looked at it. I am a business owner. I have no resources other than my time and my slowly accumulating knowledge. Once I learned how to quickly and effectively get a web page “trained” I could then send it out into it’s territory to work FOR ME. It’s job was to gather targeted traffic and send them to a place where the visitor could buy something that would solve their problem.

If that member of my sales force made sales, I would spend more time “training” it AND send additional “trained” pages to work with it.

My job was to “train” (ie, optimize) web pages and get them out there…then let it go and work on another “territory” (ie, niche market). I kept repeating that until a) I had a whole LOT of “territories” covered, and b) I found successful territories that I could expand my sales force in.

Ok, folks.. scared now? Welcome to MY mind! hahahaha!

However, maybe now you can see how my One Week Marketing Action Plan came to be. It was developed slowly by me based on a pure need to use my time as wisely as I could…and to never feel that “NOW what do I do?” feeling that plagued me so often when I was starting out. I spent MUCH less time “reading in circles” because I always knew what to do next…and when that task was done for the day, I could read forums and other blogs and expand my knowledge even further.

You know what? Some of my first Squidoo lenses….aw heck… MANY of my first lenses are really, really awful. Seriously, they are B-A-D. Guess what? They are still out there. I like going back and looking at how much I’ve learned…and I also like having that little sales force still out there in case I ever decide to expand in that territory.

My little “sales force” plan started off rough, that’s for sure…but it also helped me get over one very important road block.

I Stopped Obsessing Over Any ONE Web Page

That’s right… I just sent the web page out there to work for ME instead of ME trying so hard to work IT. I stopped trying to be ‘perfect’ and trying to do it ‘right’ and just DID it. Sure, I’d check in on that lens or blog post or article from time to time, but I no longer STOPPED moving forward in order to fret over my stats from yesterday.

I just kept working and learning.

Know what happened? One day I realized that I had made $50 a day every day that week… then I made $50 every day that month. Then some time later I realized I had my first $100 day… my first $500 week… my first $1,000 week… my first $1,000 DAY… (pinkie promise that is true…more than once , too =) )

ANYTHING is possible once you start and gather momentum creating your own sales force. Once you commit to following your own action plan and stop holding yourself back by obsessing over stats or whatever the traffic secret of the day is…. wow, there’s no telling what can happen for YOU!

But Learning All This Is Hard!

Ah, the next thing I feel some of you may be thinking, “But Jennifer, this is so EASY for YOU!!!”

Yes, some of it may be “easy” for me NOW, but I can promise you that whenever YOU get stuck on something – whether its trying to make a link, or insert and image, or get a lens indexed, or FIND your lens in the index – I HAVE been stuck there, too.

I learned how to make Google my best friend…and the VERY best member on my “staff”. Any question I had, any road block that had me stumped, I simply typed it into Google and figured it out. Learning all this is exhausting!

But-

I can promise you this…

Once you learn it, you OWN it.

No one can take knowledge away from you.

The knowledge you will accumulate by doing in the coming months will be priceless. It could very well be the roots of a new financial future for you.

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