Hi everybody, I was just surfing along the other day and I found a site called Squidoo where you can make a page or a "lens" about anything you want from your own interests to money making lenses. What do you think of Squidoo?
I personally don't see the point. I've been making websites for over a decade and find it pointless. On the other hand, some people swear by it for getting a new website off the ground. Why not just make your own website and monetize it? All you're doing with Squidoo is generating pageviews for them and additional revenues for them. You can do everything on your own that you can do with their site. Just my $.02
Squidoo is pretty good at getting traffic with it's amount of subscribers and group availability. And on the contrary all of the squidoo adsense and other ads does take away from your ability to add more ads or other things. But it's easier to create a page for newbies and others who like the format plus its ad revenue sharing is a good idea. I guess if you want to take less profit per specific items in exchange for more volume, it can even out in success in the long run.
Im not a squidoo spokeperson but it states in its guidlines that the ads (whatever they may be) are to keep the site running and I read that after initial cost of the site are taken care of that the revenue sharing of its "revenue" will begin (but I could have read it wrong).
So you have to share your own ad revenue, or they put the ads on your "Lense", to "cover costs"? So basically, it's just a "bring us your content, and work your ass off to get page views,so we can make some money on the ads" I'm disappointed.
I think there is difference. The google adsense running is theirs, which is part of revenue sharing. The ads cover their costs first. But you can add your own adds in the posts you make and make 50% on the sales of the "shop" modules you add. For instance I made a lens about my blog. The ready made format of the modules allowed me to promote my blog and its individual article and let me link to the RSS feed. Plus their is a module that allows you to put your direct links up (one to my blog page directly). You can consider the other adsense ads and other stuff about making money like you getting paid for traffic. Plus you can get to know other people and their lenses, like here, find products and check rankings within squidoo to see how things are going.
Yep, that's exactly how it works. Which is why I'm there plugging away and making and promoting lenses. Read www.squidoo.com/why Squidoo won't make you rich, but it'll add another iron in the fire towards that goal.
That's one part of it. They also split affiliate commissions. However with Amazon because they are on a higher tier, I believe that they get double the commission. So they split that with you, so you'd get the same amount if you were in fact doing it on your own. There is also no problem with putting your own affiliate links in your lenses.
Reprobate or anyone, is their a difference between a lensmaster and a regular lens maker? And how do you create links on your content posts?
Lensmaster is the term used in place of webmaster. So anyone who makes a lens is a lensmaster. Hyperlinks? http://www.squidoo.com/basichtml#module1957980
So why do I need to go to Squidoo to split the money on anything? It still seems like I 'm working for them, and just doing extra work in their community, just to cut them in on the revenue. I have heard others say that it is a great program, and some people swear by it, but I still don't understand the benefits. Do I have to post on there separately, like its a whole different blog?
YEAH. By the amount of hype the site gets you'd think it were some amazing thing. I tried it a while back just to see what everyone was talking about and haven't seen one referral or a dime from the site. Time is better spent on your own blog.
Thanks Reprobate. I think what squidoo is just another way to get more targeted traffic. If you main post stuff is good and directs customers to the sites you want them to go, its effective. Its like an extra landing page to get your customers that are there to your sites.
Squidoo is an excellnet web2.0 for marketing your websites or earning revenue or generating backlinks. You want to know more about it? Download the free ebook I'm giving in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=329543 Cheers
The biggest benefit I see to squidoo is that it's an easy way to get some top quality backlinks from an established and highly ranked site, which is really useful for SEO. If you put some work into your lenses then you'll also get a new source of traffic as visitors click-through to your sites. Riatsala
Can't you get the same benefit by using blogger and keep all the adsense money? I also wonder is it hard to promote your squidoo lens because you get a back slash page instead of a sub domain. Most directories and such do not allow those links or am I wrong? For example, it would be easy to promote mylens.squidoo easier than squidoo/mylens . Am I right or wrong?
Blogger is very different, but why not do both? You probably wouldn't get your squidoo lenses accepted in many web directories, but it's not easy to promote a blogger page in that way either. I have several lenses with pagerank 3 simply from the internal links from other squidoo pages. Doing external promotion on top of that would be beneficial, but it's not something you have to do. Riatsala