Making Money With Squidoo

Last month a colleague asked me to give Squidoo a try. So after much research, I signed up and placed a few lenses online with the goal to complete one new lens every week over the next few months. To make sure I understood how Squidoo worked and what made the lenses profitable, I researched various lenses and their lens makers. The formula for making money with Squidoo seems pretty cut and dry: create great content and promote the heck out of the pages. There is, however, one caveat: the lenses that receive the highest ratings tend to be lenses that have a good balance between: content, resources, and targeted advertisements (i.e. affiliate links).

Here are the tips I've used with my own online endeavors and which have been confirmed for success with Squidoo.

• Find a niche. Choose a broad topic you want to become an expert in or a topic you really enjoy. Write a single lens on that niche, then branch out into other lenses as they relate to that niche.

• Choose a single topic per lens. Focus on one part of your niche within each lens; instead of writing a broad, generalized lens that briefly discusses many areas within that niche.

• Write something concrete. Share information that isn't readily available on the Internet. Don’t be afraid to include resources you can’t easily find online. Share information based upon your own personal experiences.

• Offer a variety of lenses within your niche. Write how-to articles, quick tips, holiday related material, and personal experience essays. Include a gallery of samples and/or images, recommended websites, and supplies.

• Keep paragraphs short. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read online so keep them between 2 and 5 sentences. Each module should have no more than 2 to 3 paragraphs with a 100 word introduction.

• Break up the article with sales tools. Sales tools, otherwise known as money makers, are affiliate programs and/or products you sell yourself. With traditional magazine articles, the ads usually accompany the article via a side bar, the adjoining page, or sometimes above or below the article itself.

With Squidoo, the ads are a little more intrusive. They tend to be placed within the actual content itself and can look something like this: introduction, sales tool, part 1, resource, sales tool, part 2, resource, sales tool, part 3, sales tool, conclusion, sales tool, guest book. It’s also important to label each sales tool, especially if it doesn’t necessarily match the overall theme of the lens, i.e: Clothing for Pregnant Women or Work at Home attire for busy moms. Finally, if you sell a product or service that doesn’t fit the lens, but you want the reader to be aware of it, place it under your guestbook so that it’s less intrusive.

• Cross promote your lenses. Recommend one of your old lenses in one of your new lenses. Share your lenses with your newsletter readers, with your Twitter friends, on Facebook, in a byline on a forum, as a resource in another article on another site, or in a paid advertisement.

• Include images. Each lens should have at least one relevant image (preferably 3) and the image title should include a keyword relevant to the lens. When using images in your lens, make sure you own the copyrights to those images; don't just snag them off the 'net. Purchase them through a stock agency or create your own.

• Be personable and approachable. Include a guestbook and reply to commenters—either on Squidoo or personally by checking out their lenses.

• Update your old lenses with new information from time-to-time.

• Promote your lenses off site through social networking, forums, chats, article bylines, search engines, and various directories.