Squidoo Tips And Tricks #2: Monitor Your ClickOuts

How often do you check your clickouts? Honestly, I do not do it often enough and I bet there are some people who never check there clickouts at all. In case it is not clear what a clickout is, that is when someone clicks on a link in your lens and it takes them somewhere OUTSIDE of Squidoo. Why are clickouts important?

* First, many times clickouts are from commercial modules such as Amazon or Ebay. Checking your clickouts will tell you what people are buying from your lens, or more importantly, what they are not buying. If a certain product has no clickouts, maybe it is time delete and replace it with something else.

* Second, one of the factors which determine your lensrank is the number of clickouts that you have. If your lens has alot of clickouts it will rank higher. Higher ranking lenses earn more money from Squidoo.

So, for two reasons, if a certain product or link has no clickouts, it is wasting valuable real estate on your lens and should be replaced with something else.

As an example, I have a lens about Christmas 2011. Recently, that lens had 3 Amazon modules on it, one with Christmas songs, another with postpartum girdles and the third with Christmas Cards. When I reviewed my clickouts, I noticed that the Christmas cards and postpartum girdles were getting all of the clickouts. Christmas Songs? Nada. Zip. Nothing. Even though they were at the top of the lens, Christmas Songs were getting NO clickouts at all. I guess people are not so excited about buying DVDS of Christmas songs. Needless to say, I deleted the Christmas songs and am currently testing other products.

How do you check clickouts for a lens? On your Squidoo dashboard, point your mouse at the lens you are interested in. Below the lens you will see "Edit, Label, Stats, Delete. Click on Stats. On the top of the Stats page you will see "Summary, Traffic, Earnings, Royalties", click on Traffic. Scroll to the bottom of the Traffic page to find the clickouts for that lens. It should look something like this:



This is my second in the series of Squidoo Tips And Tricks. I wonder if these are helpful to anyone? Is there anything else you would like me to cover? If I get a good response, there will be more. If not, this idea will probably die out.