Squidoo
With Squidoo, you create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster.” A lens is your own take on a particular topic, sort of like your own mini-webpage, with links to blogs and other websites. The point is that lenses help Squidoo users search; they find your lens on a particular subject and your lens tells them where to look for info.
You can make as many lenses as you’d like, one for each interest, if you want to. There are also ways built into Squidoo that you can make money, “royalties,” from your lenses.
One of the advantages of creating lenses is that you can become an armchair expert. If you have a lens about, for example, golfing, you can build up your credibility with the popularity of your lens. Popular lensmasters become Squidoo celebrities. A good lens ranks on Google, and you can make money. It’s not much at first, but if you have lots of lenses going, you can really make some cash.
But let’s talk about what’s important: how to make money with your lens. You can use lenses on Squidoo to direct traffic to your sites or blogs, where you sell your product. This raises your ranking on Google and also directs traffic to your site. You can network with other Squidoo users and build up quite an advertising base.
You can also get clickthrough and affiliate cash using Squidoo. One lens won’t make you much money, but several lenses can generate quite an income for you. Squidoo pays you at the beginning of every month through Paypal.
You can have as many lenses as you want, but they don’t want you “squatting.” This means having a lens that you never add anything to. It just sits and takes up space. But, Squidoo has RSS Feeds so that you can update your lens automatically from your website or blog.
Squidoo ranks the lenses according to how much traffic they get, how many incoming and outgoing links there are, how many clicks you get and lots of other factors. There is an overall ranking and also a ranking in each category. This gives us a new game to play: trying to get your lens into the top of your category!
There is no limit to what you can have your lens be about, but Squidoo won’t allow anything illegal or spammy, and pornographic material (stuff that’s not “office safe”) has to be marked as “adult.”
