Hello everyone, Lately I have been thinking about squidoo and how to make money with it. I decided to give it a try and I think I will focus on making lenses there for the next few months. I am sure there are a lot of squidoo lens masters in DP forum and I thought it would be useful to have an official thread. I have some experience with building lenses, so if you are a total noob for squidoo I would happily help you with advice. If you are an experienced squidoo user, please share your knowledge with us. We can discuss everything - themes, titles, modules. We can like each other's lenses there or comment on them to boost their ranking. We can show off our best lenses. I think it might be useful for everyone, so give me some feedback on what you think and I will be very active here. Sorry if it is not in the right section, I believe it is the best. I searched for a similar topic but didn't find one.
It's hard to believe there is noone else here who is using squidoo. Perhaps I should start and hopefuly others will follow. I think in squidoo you should focus on selling stuff. Earnings from adsens are ridiculously little, don't rely on that. I don't work with any affiliate yet, so I use Amazon. Here is my last lens The Witcher 3: The Whild Hunt. I find the Amazon personal spotlight module to be the most effective. Instead of giving the reader several options to chose from, you give him one and tell him it is the best for him. I alternate profitable modules with social modules to keep the readers' interest. And I particularly like the black box module - it brakes the wall ot text and certainly gets the attention. Well, what do you think?
I tried myself soon on Squidoo and I created some lenses, which are still not getting PR. Do you have to tricks for making the articles more popular? How you increase the lenses PR? Are you using social networks for getting backlinks to the squidoo lenses or just creating them is enough?
I did not understood your opinion? Can you explain? Is squidoo loss of time? If yes, please explain as I really prefer not to waste mine.
IMO, yes. It would be just as hard to get a lense ranking and making money as it would a website of your own. I would rather build a site I own than waste any time with Squidoo.
your welcome. I will say though that the noindex tag might get removed if the lenses get a certain amount of likes or reach 100% completion, IDK, not sure exactly. I have lenses that are over 5 years old and never made a penny. They have unique content, are 100% complete and are noindex but who knows. might try reading up on it on their site but I haven't heard many people talking about or working with squidoo in years. There just got to be too many people back n the day. It's free so you can imagine the abuse.
I just checked this for you. Didn't find any certain rule (i don't think there are any certain rules about anything on Squidoo) but it seems that noindex and nofollow tags are given only to WIP lenses. (Work in progres). A lens is WIP when it is not finished yet or if it has been inactive for a long time and low quality. Basically, it becomes WIP and gets the noindex and nofollow when its rank goes bellow 400 000. And it is pretty hard to get a lens go THAT low. =) Squidoo likes people who make money. Create a lens with good content and they are willing to let you do anything you want with it. You can sell links, you can use affiliates, you can sell the lens itself and transfer it to another owner. You can put as many links on your bio page as you want and they are all dofollow. Check out my last lens, from the link above. It doesn't have the noindex and nofollow tags. And it has been published today. It has a rank of 300 000. It is the same with all my 19 lenses. So you are wrong about that. On that I completly agree with you. The eventual upsides are that squidoo is easier. You don't need to know how to build a website, how to buy a domain, how to set up a hosting. You don't have to bother with all that. And it is free. Still, it is far better to make your own site instead of bother with Squidoo. If you know how to make a website, that is.
I created my account in squidoo 2 years ago with the only goal to build links to my other websites. I published 50 lenses within a month. The results were close to zero, so I just ignored it. More than an year later I went back and checked what had happened. About 30 of my lenses were removed for low quality. For that time I have earend about $5 in total. But I noticed, that all the lenses left were PR1, PR2 or PR3. I thought it was strange, because I never bothered to build any links at all. Never. All they had was just a few facebook likes. And the "featured lenses" module. And the "related lenses". And a link on the squidoo forum. And a hundred more links on squidoo, because whenever you publish a lens it shows on a lot of places. That is the reason I decided to go back to lens building. I think they get high PR easy. With no effort I got PR3 on this crappy lens. With a little real link building it should get higher, I guess. These are all just asumptions, perhaps next pr update will prove me wrong. I am currently testing. That's exactly the reason I made this topic. To exchange experience. edit: I just noticed the links to my lenses are not shown. Anyways, my point remains. = )
I've heard that you can make good money with Squidoo lenses..I've made a few but never really tried to monetize them or anything.
Well, as of today Squidoo disabled the option to transfer lenses between accounts. This is an attempt to discourage the creation of low quality, spun articles. The whole squidoo community is quite upset right now, including all Guant Ssquids and Squid Angels, who are in fact the ones who benefit the most from selling and buying lenses. We will see what will happen.
Squidoo locked one of my newest lenses for "duplicate content". The irony is there were no copy/pasted text there and I believed it to be a really good article. This is the worst thing about squidoo - they use bots to scan lenses and automatically lock those which don't pass the test. There are no rules and there is no way to complain afterwards. :/ I am kind of mad right now.
ok, here is a tip if you write something like "nude photoshoot" or "playboy" in your lens, it is going to get locked. No matter what the context is, the automated bots will just lock it and all your profits will be donated to charity. I am speaking from personal experience.
In all honesty, I have only created one lense. I only did that to try out the process and learn from it. There are plenty of other people who make decent money from it. If you don't think it is worth it, you can always check out other options like infobarrel, or hubpages.
I have tried hubpages. It seems way to hard. I mean in terms of moderation. As far as I know they don't just let you place links and affiliates. And they require much higher quality for their articles. I don't know about infobarrel. What are its advantages?
Inforbarrel provides a larger share in the money you earn. Tim Ferris did a write up about it. It is a bit old, but it is still relevant. Here is the link: http://www.my4hrworkweek.com/infobarrel-earnings-how-to-make-2000-per-month/
Let me know what you think when you finish it. It is definitely an interesting post. I know it is possible to make money from it, just not sure of effort versus money.