The Power of Twitter

A great way to promote your articles and gain backlinks is by using Twitter.  If you have a lot of Twitter followers that is an instant audience for your articles, but you can also get readers through the power of re-tweets.  One example of "the power of Twitter" that I have experienced recently is by promoting my The Real Housewives of Orange County lens by tweeting a poll on that lens regarding readers favorite OC housewives.  A couple of days ago, I tweeted that Tamra Barney & Gretchen Rossi were the most popular OC housewives according to the poll (I had already had a few responses) and was sure to use their Twitter names.  Tamra retweeted my tweet and since then, there has been a constant stream of people voting in the poll and visiting the link.  I have also gained more Twitter followers and other users have retweeted my tweet.  Today, I have had over 200 readers of my The Real Housewives of Orange County lens and hopefully they are sticking around to check out my other lenses as well.  This boost of traffic is great for increasing my lensrank on Squidoo (equaling higher payouts) and hopefully for resulting in more sales through the page.  My The Real Housewives of Orange County lens has already had success in selling products through Amazon.  So keep in mind when writing articles to be sure to tweet your article or a portion of the article (such as a poll or quiz) to your Twitter followers.

Squidoo Earnings

I've been focused a bit on getting my Squidoo lenses up to snuff.  I've been a bit lax in the past and many fell into the "work in progress" category.  (All Squidoo lenses with a lensrank under 4,000 are marked as "works in progress" and not promoted on the Squidoo site.  Also there were a lot of lenses that were falling out of paid tiers (only the lenses with a rank of 85,000 or higher are eligible for a share of the income from ads on Squidoo).  Therefore, I updated my lenses, added content where needed, and published some lenses that needed to be published.  I also transferred some of my poorly performing lenses to a different Squidoo account to be worked on later.  I now have 71 featured lenses and 9 work in progress lenses.  In addition, I decided to write an article about my Squidoo earnings and payouts.  You can follow my journey of making money by writing articles and creating Squidoo lenses by checking out my Squidoo Earnings lens which will now be updated with each payout.  I consistently make payout every month with Squidoo and while I have not put in enough time to consistently get a high income from Squidoo, it is a steady income.

Squidoo Article Breaks Tier 1!

I have previously written about how my Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens is my most popular lens on Squidoo.  It has consistently remained in Tier 2 and occasionally flirted with Tier 1.  This weekend, however, it not only flirted with Tier 1, it full on broke into Tier 1! (I'm sure in a large part helped by the fact that it received a Squidoo Angel Blessing on Friday.)  On Saturday it hovered around 1,800  (Tier 1 lenses rank from 1-2000) but this morning it shot up to 633!  My articles is in the Top 1000!  I've never come anywhere close.  I'm going to keep promoting my Daily Deal Sites lens in hopes I can get it into the Top 500 and eventually the Top 100.  On of the major perks of being a Tier 1 lens is that when payout comes there is a huge jump in payout.  Last month a Tier 2 lens received a payment of approximately $8 whereas a Tier 1 lens was approximately $45!  Here's hoping my Daily Deal Sites lens stays in the Tier 1 for the rest of this month (enough to average as Tier 1) and all of next month!  It will be much tougher when the value of the Angel Blessing (giving any lens a tempoarary lensrank boost wears off) but it also gives me the motivation to backlink and promote my lens (by writing more articles on other sites) in hopes of keeping it a Tier 1 lens.

My Most Successful Squidoo Lens: Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon

Before starting my Infobarrel Challenge, I wanted to give a bit of love to my highest ranked Squidoo lens, Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon. As many of you may know, Groupon is a popular "deal of the day" or "group coupon" site.  Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens gets the most traffic and is my highest ranked lens.  It is consistently a tier 2 lens and is inching its way towards tier 1 (hence why I want to give it some love).  If you don't know, Squidoo lenses are all ranked and lensrank determines how much revenue you received from the Squidoo adpool.  The higher the rank, the more you earn.  I will shortly post a blog entry about Squidoo and how the tiers and lensrank work, but right now my goal is for this blog post to serve as a good backlink for my Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens, so in order to have relevant keywords, etc... it's best if I talk about that lens.

Groupon has spawned many popular "Groupon clones" like LivingSocial or Social Steals.  Most recently, Google got into the daily deal game with Google Offers.  My Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens, offers a comprehensive guide to the many Groupon clone sites that keep popping up and describes each of the daily deal sites so you know what they offer and what cities they offer them for.  If you don't know what Groupon is (have you been living under a rock?!--jk!), well Groupon sends daily e-mails with group coupons that harness the power of social buying and offers discounts of 50 -90% off the best things in your city, such as restaurants, bars, salons, spas, and other retailers.  So if you haven't signed-up, sign-up for Groupon and go check out my Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens so you can learn about and sign-up for all of the other Groupon competitors--and hopefully help push my Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon lens to tier 1!