November Squidoo Payout

Today I received my first 3-digit payout from Squidoo, which was just a bit over $128. This was mostly thanks to a single lens that made me about $60 comissions for Amazon sales (and it was a one-time thing), but I'm still pretty excited about it. Here's the customary screenshot:

The Squidoo payout tiers for November were as follows:

High LR: $11.75
Medium LR: $1.96
Low LR: $0.08

As you can see, the highest lensrank tier still pays over $10/mo per lens; that's a pleasant trend that has been continuing for 3 months now. Tier 2 has also reached an all-time high: perhaps we'll even see $2/mo per lens soon?

Squidoo MagicBuilder and QuickBuilder

You might have already noticed that there are two brand new ways to create a lens. Instead of the old lens building wizard that takes whole 4 steps to finish and isn't very flexible at all, now we have the MagicBuilder and the QuickBuilder.

What's so good about the new QuickBuilder?

•  Everything is on a single page, including the button to create your lens.
• Add as much as 40 tags in one go, instead of being limited to 3 like in the old lens building wizard.
• Add the modules you choose from a list of most popular ones, instead of being limited to 4 default templates.
  

As for the MagicBuilder, I don't think I'll be using it much myself, but newbies should no doubt find it useful. It seems the Squidoo team has really put in a lot of work into it.

MagicBuilder is an easy 3-step lens creation guide that will leave you with a page filled with content Squidoo will automatically gather from popular sites like Wikipedia and YouTube. This is not all though. After you select a category for your lens, you will be prompted to choose from several popular templates. If you select Music, for example, you will be offered options like "Make a tribute page" (for your favorite band), "A Top Ten List" (of your favorite albums), etc. while selecting the Tech & Geek category will give you a choice between "Review a gadget", "Best geek blogs", and of course "Your own thing". I can only guess that Squidoo HQ will add more of those lens templates in the future, giving you even more options for starting a lens.

New Squidoo modules

SquidBlog has just posted information on four brand new Squidoo modules. These are:

• Text with BIG Picture module: the uploaded picture will now be 590 pixels in width (a big improvement over Polaroid module), besides, you can add text and even HTML below it, just like with a normal Text/Write module.
• Twitter Search module: now you can automatically search for twitters containing keyword(s) that you specify, and display them on your lens. 
• Amazon MP3 module: promote Amazon MP3 downloads service with this. You can put CD covers and song previews on your lenses, which is really cool IMO.
• Amazon Search module: like in your usual Amazon module, you can specify a keyword to search for. However, a search box will also be available to the visitors of your lens. Naturally, you will get royalties when any product is bought, even if it isn't featured on your lens from the start.

I think these are great additions - while I don't think I'll be using Twitter anytime soon, I really like the Big Picture module. The two new Amazon modules, however, are probably the best for making more Squidoo money. I can see entire lenses being built around the MP3 module, for example.

October Squidoo Payout

Squidoo has just sent October's payment to my PayPal account, and like SquidBlog promised, it was a bit higher than usual: $82.01. In fact, this is the highest payout I've received up to date since the first one back in February this year (yay!). Here's the screenshot like usual:

The October's ad pool payout was determined by the average lensrank of your lenses during August. This new rule (payment tiers used to be calculated by the lensrank on the last day of the month) seems to have increased my payout a little - even putting the factors SquidBlog wrote about aside. Here are Squidoo payout tiers for the month:

High LR: $10.97
Medium LR: $1.85
Low LR: $0.08

I also earned a single $5 refer-a-friend bonus for the first time ever last month (so it was added to this payment). All in all, things are going pretty well with Squidoo, but I feel that I have to set some goals and/or think up some good ideas for lenses if I want to start making some serious money here. I also should definitely start making more lenses since I only have 42 right now, and not all of them are that great. I believe "create more quality lenses" would be an excellent advice for anyone who wants to improve his Squidoo profits.

Publish the RSS feed of your lenses

Today I'm going to write about a great tool provided by SquidUtils: namely an RSS feed of all your lenses sorted by lensrank. You can actually see one in use on the sidebar of this blog ("My top 5 lenses"). Here's how you can get and use yours:

1. Visit SquidUtils.com and enter your lensmaster nickname.
2. Click "Lensmaster RSS Feeds" and grab your feed. Personally, I use the topmost one (all lenses and groups sorted by lensrank), but you can chose whichever you want, depending on where and how it will be used.
3. Publish the feed on your: blog, social networking profile (I show mine on Yuwie), website, or wherever you want.
   

The point? Free traffic, free backlinks, and your lens list will always be updated and sorted whenever lenses change in rank or when you add new ones.

Now, if you want to republish any kind of RSS feed on your website you might need an RSS parser. I've personally used lastRSS which is extremely simple and quite fast; as an alternative, you might want to try Magpie RSS or SimplePie which will also parse Atom feeds.