Lawrence of Arabia Will Hopefully Make Me A Few Dollars

One of the good things about going away for a few days is that it gives you something to write about on Squidoo!

As I was in Dorset for three days I have written about this on a new Squidoo lens called Dorset, Thomas Hardy and T.E. Lawrence.

I don't expect this to make me a heap of money but with Squidoo the more lenses you write the more, at least in theory, you should be able to make.

I say in theory because, as with normal blogging, the lens still has to be reasonably well written and will need promoting.

It takes longer to make a Squidoo lens (that's a page, if you haven't heard much about them before) than a straight forward blog post but, as I see it, even if each one only makes a few dollars a month this can add up if you have lots of lenses. So Squidoo isn't instant big money, it's something that develops over time.

With Squidoo you can write about virtually anything (legal) that you wish and each lens can be about something completely different. This can be, in some ways, easier than blogging about a particular niche as the world is your oyster.

I'm quite happy with the way things are going so far with Squidoo.

Good luck,
Mike.

Ten People Can Lead To Money Making Millions

I was reading something on Seth Godin's blog that I thought might be food for thought. Seth is the guy who launched Squidoo back in 2006 and turned it into one of the top 500 most visited websites. Whoops, it was actually 523rd today!

Anyway this is what he wrote:

First, ten
This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you...

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they'll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don't love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They're not anonymous and they're not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

This immediately got me thinking back to my network marketing days and multi-level marketing in general. But, if you think about what he has written, it's really a legitimate marketing idea for any blog, product or whatever.

Instead of massive budgets and outlays it could be the small Internet blogger's answer to promoting whatever it is, that he or she wants to promote.

Build a reputation and then cash in on it. If your friendly contacts like whatever it is, as sure as eggs is eggs, they will tell others who will do the same ad nauseam.

It may sound like a pyramid, and in a way it is, but it's how word of mouth and virals work. It's how, say, a good restaurant gets known.

As I say food for thought.

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. As I've mentioned Squidoo these are a few of my latest Squidoo lenses: A year In My Cornish Garden / Monumental Hotel Funchal And Madeira Reviews / Awful Jokes and my top rated lens is Making Money With Free Blogs. As you can see you can write about virtually anything on Squidoo and can make money doing so - can't be bad!

Test Out Your Link Bait Or Niche Before Publishing

If you have a written a special article or post, something that you think will attract some link bait, is it actually best to use this as a blog post or should you perhaps create another website for your masterpiece?

A bit of a long first sentence but I've been thinking about this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly I published some World War 2 Photos of London bomb damage as a Squidoo lens. As you may remember I'm doing a money making test on Squidoo.

The thing is, I had published these very same photos, for which I have the copyright, as a blog post on one of my now defunct blogs. On the blog they didn't get many hits and got lost amongst the other posts.

The same photos, however, on the Squidoo lens have had 55 different keyword combinations used for referrals from the Google search engine over the last seven days.

So the photos, with virtually the same text, worked much better on Squidoo than on a post on a run of the mill blog.

I was also reading another blog post Link Bait Launch Cycle where the writer suggested:

"Don't Publish Your Article/Idea As A Blog Post - blog posts are perceived as low value.

Create a dedicated branded site, or dedicated branded page for your product, service or idea. By all means create a blog post to link to your branded site or page, but try to make the presentation of your idea different to what you normally do."

So those two things got me thinking that it might be a good idea to test out an article or particular niche on a Squidoo lens. If it proves reasonably successful the idea could then be transferred to a proper website with it's own .com address. (You can get a .com for about $10).

As you know I like to experiment and test things, it's really the only way to learn for yourself, so I may well now test out ideas on Squidoo lenses.

I would add though, that some of my other Squidoo lenses aren't getting any referrals from search engines - again this illustrates the benefit of testing things out.

We shall see but, as I often say, food for thought.

Good luck,
Mike.

Back Scratching Doesn't Always Make Money

As I mentioned on December 20th I am giving Squidoo a trial to see if it will:

(a) Make money in it's own right
(b) To see if it can generate traffic to my blogs
(c) To see if it can generate traffic to affiliate programs and thus make money

It's very early days to make any assumptions as yet. From what I have found out so far I think it will take at least three months to establish if Squidoo is a worthwhile project, as far as money making is concerned.

I've been attracting some traffic to my Squidoo lenses and this has come from:

(1) 47.2% - Referrals from my own blogs
(2) 22.8% - From Google search engine
(3) 18.6% - From within Squidoo
(4) 10.0% - Arrived direct, not sure how
(5) 01.4% - From Ask search engine

What is encouraging from the above is the percentage from Google. I have now created 5 Squidoo lenses but the search engine referrals are to only two of these. This shows that you have to follow the normal SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rules and think about keywords and the like when setting up lenses.

A decent percentage has arrived from within the Squidoo community itself. In other words if you participate in commenting and ranking other lenses, and joining in on their forum, this will produce traffic in relation to the effort you put in but ...

... from a money making viewpoint is this traffic actually of real value? It's a little like everyone scratching each others backs. You scratch mine and I'll scratch yours.

Absolutely nothing wrong with this as it will boost your Squidoo rankings and standing within the community but ...

... if you are in Squidoo to make money then you won't make much from this particular direction - at least not as far as I can see.

I wrote a post back in April 2008 titled Regular New Blood Is Needed To Make Money. In this I wrote that, as valued as subscribers are, they don't really make you money. I feel it's the same when attracting Squidoo members to your lenses.

Of course it all depends why you are setting up Squidoo lenses or blogging. If it's just for fun then it's fantastic to get lots of stuff going on with other members and lots of back scratching.

If your mission is money making, however, I still stick to the principle that this comes from fresh blood via search engines and good links.

As with Dracula continuous new blood is required to keep your money making alive and well.

Anyway, just a few initial thoughts on Squidoo. The four most visited of my Squidoo lenses are:

The World Of Ponzi Schemes
Celebrities Photos and News
Everything Perry
Making Money With Free Blogs

Good luck and wishing ...

A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR
TO ALL
SUBSCRIBERS, READERS AND ADVERTISERS
Best wishes,
Mike

Money Making Test: Squidoo Lenses

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.

Don't Scatter The Money Making Seeds Too Wide

I've been looking at some of the money making programs and things that I've joined this year and then never really done anything more about them. Things like Zlio and Squidoo and quite a few more besides.

With blogging it's so easy to keep joining various websites but unless you - or in my case I - do something positive about promoting them it's all a wasted effort. It must be much better to hone in on just a few favourites and really go to town with them - and forget the rest. It's no good doing things by half measures.

The last one I looked at, of the stagnating things I have joined, was Squidoo. I'd actually made some money from it - 25cents!

Squidoo is all about creating various lenses. A lens is really just a page about anything you want and you can have hundreds of these if you wish. When I joined I quickly set up one lens to see how it all worked.

The pages are a little basic but I guess, time permitting, it would be possible to make them look okay.

Squidoo pay royalties to it's members, thus my 25 cents, and this is why some people run dozens and dozens of lenses/pages on different subjects. This is how the website describes their commission payments:

'You recommend great stuff (on your lens). Sometimes you'll recommend a product from Amazon or eBay or CafePress or one of our hundreds of other commerce partners.

Since Squidoo is free to use, we have to run a few ads on your lens in order to keep our doors open. So you'll see a few Google ads and SquidOffers on your lens.

Now, since you're the brain behind the lens, you should get a cut! And better than a cut: you get HALF. That's right. Any time someone stops by your lens and buys a product you recommended or clicks on a Google ad, you get 50% of the royalties.'

How much could you make? It's the same old story - it depends on how much traffic you can generate and then how many readers click on the ads.

This is what Squidoo reckon:

'If you are an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate two or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sound like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses.'

It's also possible to make cash from introducing others to Squidoo. As soon as your friend earns $15 you and your friend get $5.

To make money it would be necessary to get into involved within the Squidoo community, the various groups and to publicise your lenses. There is potential providing you have a supply of that special, magic ingredient - time!

While I was checking out the 'things' I had joined I thought I'd have a laugh so I also looked at Wealth Toolbox. My initial $50 (which was given free!) is now 'worth' $317.08 ( payable in 2009). Oh and any new members are now given $100 just for joining. Ha ha ha!

My final thoughts are that money making is all about doing something properly. Concentrate on a few things and forget the rest. This doesn't mean we should miss out on any new, genuine opportunities, it just means being selective.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Celebrity Insider - Photos & News. Yesterday's posts include Hilary Rhoda, fashion model; Charley Uchea, Big Brother housemate; Nicole Merry and her split from Theirry Henry and Jessica Simpson

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