This is a week of WA little milestones for me.  Receiving my first WA Gold (thanks, everyone!), and watching my member rank drop below 100.

I took my children to the lake earlier today and while soaking up the sun and the water and keeping a hawk eye on my children, I contemplated just how much fun it is to make Squidoo lenses.  And I thought of a goal I can set for myself.  Inspired by Maureen's goal of starting 100 miniblogs in one year I'm thinking of setting a similar goal of two Squidoo lenses a week for the rest of the year.  If I actually pull this off I should have around 40 by the time 2011 rolls around.

The goal would be to get the lenses created and published, not even worry about optimizing them for keywords or all that.  Just write from the heart and publish, then later come back and make them better.  Some of the lenses will no doubt support my campaigns.  Some will just be for fun.  The beautiful thing about Squidoo is that it has the built in affiliate programs with Amazon and Ebay so I can always recommend some good products that way, and of course there's the Adsense revenue too.

So I have a question for all you big time squids out there.  What's an average monthly revenue a good quality squidoo lens should get assuming the author does nothing but publish it?   Are there good squidoo lenses out there that are just buried, or is Squidoo pretty good about finding them and featuring them?  So far, the three lenses I've published are featured but ranked in the 40,000s.  The next question is going from that basis, what are a few simple steps an author can do to improve that average monthly revenue?  What would you say is the most important--keyword optimize it, get the word out, get on Squidoo forums, something else?

I guess my point is that I'm having lots of fun with Squidoo, and I'm finding more and more aspects of my own life that I could "monetize" by creating a Squidoo lens on the topic.  The fun part is making the lenses.  The other IM stuff is let's just say not so fun.  I'm trying to figure out how much I could reasonably expect to make in Squidoo income by just focusing on the fun part.  Once I know that, then I can figure out how much of the not so fun part I need to make myself do to meet my income goals.  Another way to put it is there's a part of me that wonders if I could just keep steadily publishing lenses, will I be laying a good foundation for making some good income?  Is there a point at which I can expect that I have enough lenses that by sheer chance some of them will turn out to be great moneymakers, or overall they'll do well?

Now, I can imagine one answer for me will be to involve myself in the Squidoo community, and I recognize that as a good thing.  However at this point I consider that in the not so fun category.  I'm sure it's enjoyable and all that, but it strikes me as just one more thing to spend time on.  I'm actually a pretty busy lady and have to optimize my time as best I can. 

Bottom line is:  Can I just produce Squidoo lenses and reasonably expect to make decent money?  Or, are there other activities I must engage in that are critical to my success with Squidoo?

Once I get some answers I'll make a decision about whether to actually set two Squidoo lenses a week as a goal.