Make Money With Squidoo

People are always looking for ways to make money online and one of the ways I use is Squidoo. Squidoo actually makes up a very large percentage of my online income and is one of my favorite ways of earning money online.

Squidoo is not a get rich quick scheme, but it does offer you all the tools you need to be able to build up a regular income online. In my experience it does take a little bit of time as you need to build up your portfolio of work, but this portfolio is going to continue to earn you money for years and years to come.

Squidoo is a revenue sharing site like many other places online including Hubpages and Wizzley. I explained it to my daughter that I used Squidoo to make lots of different websites on a variety of different things.

Squidoo calls each webpage a lens and people who produce these lenses are called lensmasters. Squidoo makes it’s money by placing advertising on each lens (through Google, Chitika and infolinks), as people click on these ads Squidoo gets paid.

Squidoo puts all of it’s ad revenue into a pot and takes out 50% to pay for running costs, a percentage goes to charity and the rest is profit. The remaining 50% is for the lensmasters and this is divided up according to lensrank.

Lensrank is determined by a number of factors such as traffic, sales and clickouts. There are three different tiers on Squidoo. Tier one gets paid the most and is for lenses ranked 0 – 2,000; tier two gets paid a lower amount than tier one and is for lenses ranked 2,001 – 10,000 and then tier three gets paid even less and is for lenses ranked 10,001 – 85,000. These lensranks are based on the average lensrank per month.

What about lenses that rank below this? Well they don’t receive any ad revenue, but they can still make money. I have a shocking number of lenses that do not receive any ad revenue, but they make me money every month – want to know more?

There are basically two other ways in which I earn money with Squidoo and they are –

• Sales
• Affiliate earnings

Sales

Squidoo offer different types of modules – modules are the things you use to build your lens. Two of these are the Amazon module and the eBay module. The great thing about these modules is that Squidoo is the affiliate so you don’t have to join as an affiliate yourself. This is handy if you live in a state where you cannot be an Amazon affiliate or if you don’t have your own website (which seems to be a prerequisite to becoming an eBay affiliate).

All of the sales you make through these modules gets split 50/50 between you and Squidoo. I am not an ebay affiliate, but some of the things I write about can be found on ebay, especially some of the more collectible items, so adding the module helps me to make sales.

I do use the Amazon module, but I’m also an Amazon affiliate as well so I also use my own links. When I first joined Squidoo I liked using their modules because you can set your payout to $1 payable through paypal and you received your money two months after you made the sale. Through Amazon I had to wait until I achieved $100 and then they would send me a check – making that much when I was first starting out seemed impossible!

Affiliate Earnings

You can use affilates and keep all of the earnings for yourself with Squidoo and this is where you can really make big money! I use my own Amazon links on Squidoo quite a bit with a lot of success, but although Amazon converts quite well they don’t give you a very big percentage so I turned to other affiliates.

After Amazon my biggest money making affiliate is Shareasale and then Zazzle. If you’re not already a member of Zazzle, and if you want to make money from your own photos then you should be, you can promote your own products through Squidoo.

Well when it comes to earning money online it’s never as easy as the scammers tell you – if you want to earn then you have to put in the time and energy and treat it as a job. This is true of any real online opportunity.

The key to success with Squidoo that I have found is to develop a niche. Now I’m sure you’ve all heard about creating niches before and you probably will again – the reason is it’s what works! Once you decided on a niche you need to write your lenses, now not every lens needs to be a masterpiece that you’d be proud to show your mom.

One of my niches on Squidoo is Lady Gaga Costumes. Now my main Lady Gaga Costume lens has a lot of content, text, video, selling modules and links. I have also developed Official Lady Gaga Costumes as a lens, now this lens doesn’t have a lot of content – it is purely a sales lens. This is okay because the traffic comes into the first high content lens and trickles through to this one when people have already decided that they want to buy their official costumes.

I have a total of five lenses that could be classified as Lady Gaga Costume niches and they are all interlinked. Two of them have a lot of content and three of them are basically sales lenses.

Do not try and build a sales lens first or you may become disappointed instead build a high content lens within your niche and watch your stats ie if you’ve built a lens on gothic pewter pendants and under your stats you see that people have landed on your lens looking for gothic vampire pendants then you can build your next lens on gothic vampire pendants and link the two lenses together.

I go into all of my Squidoo ‘tricks of the trade’ in more detail on my blog opposite and also on the links below.