Over this last week I've been reading a lot about how online marketers can use the free lenses at Squidoo to make money. And although I haven't tried it yet, I am considering it because it's basically a free way to get a web page with a good page rank and, of course, includes the opportunity to earn income.
With that said, today I'd like to share some of the information and videos I discovered this week.
If you go to squidoo.com you'll see that the home page has a page rank of 6 out of 10. You'll also see that there are currently 21 main groups that contain anywhere from 47 to 365 subgroups within them. I checked out some of the lenses and never found a lens that had a Google page rank less than 3 out of 10. There may be some, I just didn't find them.
On the squdoo.com download page you can get a free TypePad Blogging Widget, Buttons and Badges for your Squidoo lens, a Squidoo-Firefox Extension and free ebooks like Everyone Is An Expert.
Squidoo.com lets you build your own lens through the use of modules and some of these modules can earn money because they are linked to affiliate programs like Amazon, Cafepress, GoogleAds and eBay. You earn 50% of the affiliate commissions for these purchases and squidoo.com donates 5% to charities and keeps 45% to maintain the site. You can also donate your commissions to a host of charities automatically if you want.
While there are millions of lenses on squidoo.com, some of them do really well in the search engines. I found http://www.squidoo.com/meatsnacks/ listed on the first page of Google and AOL and http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ listed on the second page of Yahoo. Both of these lens were set up to make money and recruit a downline for Jerky Direct.
Since http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ offered to share their lens stats, I discovered that the lens had 196 unique visitors this last week. And while that doesn't seem like very many, that same lens had almost 5,000 unique visitors in February. (Bet they were on the first page of Yahoo that month.) And although I don't know if they made any sales, since they had almost 5,000 highly targeted visitors, the odds are they got a few sales and signups.The person who owns http://www.squidoo.com/jerky/ has a free membership site, SquidooSecrets, where he shares a lot of information on how to use squidoo to earn money.
I've reviewed the information shared both at SquidooSecrets and in Squidoo Blueprint and found that they both state pretty much the same thing on how to set up a lens to make money. The primary difference between what they offer is that Squidoo Blueprint gives a lot more information on how to put content on your lens, how to get a good page rank, how to avoid being deleted from squidoo for having a spam lens and how to get more traffic to your lens. So if you want to use squidoo.com as a marketing tool, I'd suggest you first get a free membership at SquidooSecrets and play with building a lens. Then if you're lens isn't getting traffic or making any money, invest in Squidoo Blueprint to get some ideas to fix those problems.
If you're interested in squidoo but not ready to join a free membership site, I found 3 very good videos by Tiffany Dow of SocialMarketing101 on YouTube. You can click the links below to watch the videos.
How To Set Up A Squidoo Lens
Make Money On Squidoo
Adding An Opt-In Box To A Squidoo Lens
Will a squidoo lens make money for you? As with all other forms of web marketing, there are no guarantees. However, squidoo is becoming a popular place for people to gather in groups, it is possible to get good search engine placement and creating a lens is free. To Squidoo or Not To Squidoo, the choice is yours.
To Your Success,
Susan
P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment on the blog.
Tags: squidoo, sqidoo secrets, squidoo blueprint, social marketing, make money, squidoo lens
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