With the New Year approaching I thought I needed something different to test, and I've decided on Squidoo. I dabbled with this a while back but got sidetracked onto something else without giving it a decent trial. This time, hopefully, I'll give it a proper money making test.Why Pick Squidoo?
Firstly because it's similar, in many ways, to blogging. Secondly I've come across a few reports of people who have done quite well with the progamme. One in particular reckons to be making over $1000 a month - and that would be a worthwhile addition to my blog income.
What Is Squidoo?
If you haven't heard of it before it's all about creating single web pages on any subject you want, like a glorified big blog post. Squidoo call these pages lenses and you can have as many of them as you want.
On your page (lens) there are affiliate links, plus you can add aditional modules. All of these can make money. Squidoo distributes the income, from the 700,000+ lenses, in the following way: 5% goes to charity, they keep 45% and the rest goes to the lensmasters who build the pages.
There is also additonal money to be made from special eBay, Amazon, CafePress modules which can be added to pages if you choose.
Money can also be made by introducing new members to Squidoo, but there is more ...
Your lens or page can be used for virtually anything so it could be for promoting your own blog, products, business, affiliate programs etc. etc. If you can get traffic to your lenses they can be a useful promotional tool.
Okay here's three examples of Squidoo lenses I have just set up. They are far from perfect as yet, and need some editing, but it'll give you a general idea.
(1) Celebrities Photos and News: I'm using this mainly to try and get extra traffic to my celebrity blogs. As you will see I have been able to use RSS feeds so that a selection of my latest blog posts are on the lens.
(2) The World of Ponzi Schemes: I used this theme as Ponzi has been in the news recently following the massive fraud in the USA. The article I have published I wrote a year or so ago.
(3) Making Money With Free Blogs: The lens is to promote this blog. I've included an RSS feed but there is still a lot of work to do on the lens. I want to add a lot more information, but I'll do this gradually as and when I have time.
The people who make the decent money direct from Squidoo have hundreds of lenses and you could, of course, link these together so they produce traffic for each other. And don't forget the secondary income which can be made from your own affiliate programs and other stuff.
For example, you could use something like a ClickBank product, write an article about it and then use links to direct traffic to the main product sales page. There's lots of ways for which a lens could be used if you give it some thought
What Are My First Impressions?
It's very early days and I've only had about 145 hits on my lenses so far - hopefully this will grow considerably. What I have noticed is that, after just two days, I had referrals from Google, now that is a good sign.
There are lots of other ways to attract traffic to a lens. They have their own forum and I've also come across several websites especially for Squidoo lenses. I won't give details now as I can't say if they are worthwhile, as I haven't tried them myself. I'll get back to you on this.
On the Squidoo main page they write that you can, "Create your own page in 60 seconds.' This is slightly misleading. It's true that a page is ready for you pretty quickly but it'll take a while to enter the content, to grasp all of the things you can do with a lens and to get it looking as you would wish.
I'll leave Squidoo there for now and will do an update as soon as I can give a few more facts and figures as to how I have got on. I will add that it's not a get rich overnight progam, the lenses will take time to develop and quite a few will be needed to make decent money.
If you want to have a go as well here's the link: Squidoo. Let me know how you get on.
Good luck,
Mike.
Other reading: 40 Ways To get More Blog Traffic.
