Firstly I must admit I haven’t been very active blogging about squidoo in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been a little busy. A holiday in Dorset and then working hard to pay for it!
One day I’ll get that the right way around!!!
Well, I started on squidoo to see if it could make some money/drive traffic to my website and have a bit of a creative outlet online. This was back in June 2007 Just after returning from Glastonbury. I created a couple of websites and blogs, in addition to my website selling books – The Book Garden. Realising that there was money to be made from affiliate marketing, I decided to spend some time learning the ropes.
Well, the websites gave me some basics in webdesign but I sort of lost interest as they weren’t returning enough on the time invested, and are now just a bit of a playground and showcase for the day-to-day business. The blogs weren’t getting a lot of traffic and I lost interest in them, only occassionaly going and making a post these days.
Meanwhile the Squidoo stuff I’d created was getting traffic, and there was a really helpful community and forum. I didn’t really do much with squidoo in the first couple of months, apart from created the longest lens I’ll ever create – Perry Mason. Then in September I was quite shocked to receive my first Paypal payment from squidoo! A little over $10 may not be much, but I was quite pleased with it as I was mainly interested in earning some money from my own amazon affiliate links in the lens and the bulk of the money was royalties from cafepress and ebay.
This inspired me to spend a lot more time on Squidoo! The last few months I have seen a steady increase in earnings from affiliate marketing, primarily through squidoo. I may still be some way from making a ‘full-time’ living from this, but I’m earning a nice regular, and steadily increasing, amount from squidoo, and I’m only doing it when time allows. If I could devote 40 hours a week to squidoo and other affiliate publishing projects I’m sure I would be earning a full-time or better income, at the moment though I can’t afford to give up ‘the day job’ until I’m earning enough to replace the income I’d lose by doing so. Affiliate income is usually 30-60days behind it being recorded so there would be too long a lag between earning the money and being paid it.
Wasn’t this post supposed to be about a squidoo lens earning £10 a week?
Or even $20 if you need the US conversion! Well, yes it was I just didn’t want you to think that it’s easy to create a lens that will bring you an instant return! In most cases you’ll only see a few cents from a lens, though if you do write a really good one with links to relevant items you can make a better return, the trick is to write about either something unique or/and something you’re interested in. There are probably hundreds of lenses about ‘how to earn money from affiliate marketing’ but very few good ones, and hundreds of other sites and blogs covering this outside of squidoo, so you wouldn’t get a great deal of traffic even if you did write an excellent article. Go for niches, go for something that interests you, go make it yours and write it well, don;t just copy stuff.
Anyway, I should explain a bit more about why I’m doing a Gratitude Dance. £10 isn’t a lot to earn from a lens, but it’s a great milestone for me to be able to say that 1 of my lenses has earned me at least this in affiliate commission every week for the last month! Now some lenses and links have earned more commission in one or 2 purchases, but these are often occasional rather than regular. This lens is earning on the basis of an average of 70p per action/purchase, not a lot, but the fact I’m getting 15 or more successful transactions a week from this does add up, it’s also interesting that it is getting more traffic and more commission as the weeks pass too! Originally this lens peaked at about 4,000 lensrank and then dropped quickly. Then as search engines started picking up on the keywords it started getting more and more visitors, currently pulling over 100 a week, mainly from search engines, and more often than not the search term was not any of the keywords, though usually close. Now, most of my lenses don’t earn a heck of a lot of money, some tick over quite nicely, the odd one or 2 get good sales, but if I could create a couple of dozen lenses that perform as well as this one each week, I could go be going full-time online much sooner!
If you were here to look for tips and advice on earning money from squidoo, I hope I have provided some and I offer you my encouragement in earning money from squidoo. If you thought that this was going to give you the ’secret to easy riches’ well ….. Stop Being A Sucker! You get out of this what you put into it, there is no ‘get rich quick’ and those offering to sell you a ‘get rich’ program are the only people who are likely to get rich from it!
