So far i have seen very little benefit for squidoo sites. i have yet to see one that provides substantial traffic. i would love to be proven otherwise. Arrington sure didn't like the idea http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/09/squidoo-seth-godins-purple-albatross/
The article you link to is an interesting read, but things have changed since it was written last May. There is a benefit to Squidoo, depending how you use it. Squidoo lenses often appear quite high in the SERPs, so there is the potential for a decent amount of traffic. Lens are always a valuable source of backlinks, regardless of how much traffic they get. Making money on Squidoo isn't easy, especially with only 1 or 2 obscure lens. You really need to create lots and lots of lenses. (There's one guy on Hubpages who has created over a hundred pages!). Of course the main reason to use Squidoo is be creative, to join a community, and to have fun! Cryo.
Here's a whole bunch of tips that will bring you up to speed and help you understand the module system... http://www.squidoo.com/why/ http://www.squidoo.com/what/ http://www.squidoo.com/module/ http://www.squidoo.com/lensrank/ http://www.squidoo.com/payrank/ http://www.squidoo.com/iframe/ http://www.squidoo.com/basichtml/ http://www.squidoo.com/unimproved/
Thanks Cryo and Repro for some good information. One of the things I like is that the lenses are a good way to send human and other traffic it deep links. It is not the volume of traffic that is important to me, it is the ability to pinpoint traffic to a specific area of a site that is valuable to me. I am still amazed at the SERP of some of the lenses, which motivates me to constantly re-work existing lenses and add new ones.
Here's a whole bunch of tips... Tips for Squidoo Lensmasters - Issue 2: Squidoo Basics And they're cheap as free!
I asked some of the best Lensmasters what 7 things they ALWAYS do before publishing any lens and here are the results: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Lensmasters
I remember there was an article awhile back about Squidoo and how it was being punished by google. I've seen many more mentions of Squidoo recently so I'm assuming its okay again? Sarah
That happens awhile ago, Squidoo is then back to business and continue to dominate the first page of SERP.
Im using squidoo lenses for traffic driving. I make lenses, bookmark it, and thats it. I just wait for the SEs crawl it.
You guys squidoo had it's time! about a year and half a go, practically any lens i created ranked on the first page of google within a few day for the particular keyword i wanted. in fact, i stopped working on my site for a few months and only created squidoo lenses. I'm not kidding you guys when i say that I was making around $400 per day from affiliate income from squidoo lenses. The biggest day i ever had $800. However, those days are long gone, some of you may recall call that several months a go squidoo was slapped by google because there were too many lenses on similar topics and there was too much duplicate content. Squidoo "watcher", i guess, started deleting user accounts and lenses they felt were contributing to google's love loss for squidoo. Squidoo has not been the same since and nor does it carry the same waiting. Of course i continue to maintain my lenses for back links, but not much money is made. Not like the old day's. I miss those days.
It is just like the days when you can make 3-10 sales with the lens/keyphrase "how to run car on water". It is now all gone...
I am now digging deep into squidoo and there's a core thing that I understood. Don't build lenses to directly promote your product, like I did with this one - Web Builder by Site2You. How to create a website in minutes! Lenses like this one will never be successfull as noone cares about it and noone will help you to promote it. Try to build lenses that bring value to people, like I did with this one after - How to Make a Website From Scratch for Dummies Those lenses are much more likely to be favourited by people and shared to each other, and as a result they have a solid chance to perform well in search! Soon I will make a post about using Squidoo, I'm sure you'll know when it's out
Most of us that have a long term presence on Squidoo feel this way. Squidoo is not the place for spam and trying to use it as a link farm will only result in failure. For those that are willing to invest time and create useful content, the rewards are there in many cases.