Squidoo is such a popular mode of making money online that people are now starting to exploit and profit from new and inexperienced lensmasters. Personally I’m a big fan of paying for nothing that can be obtained freely, though I can understand those who may wish to part with a few bucks for a short-cut or to obtain some ’secrets’. Unfortunately the ’secrets’ that are often advertised aren’t actually secrets and surfing a few popular squidoo blogs, the squidu forum and squidoo itself will reveal these so called ’secrets’.
The situation is obviously becoming more of an issue as more ‘products’ are created and this appears to have inspired Squidoo’s Editor In Chief, Megan Casey, to write about it in the squidu forum.
But there’s another category of people there: The vampires. Vampires are people out to cheat and trick and scam and make money off of YOU, off of people who want to use Squidoo. Vampires happen. But that doesn’t mean you need to be suckered by them.
Don’t buy ebooks promising secrets and results and instant traffic, without checking with some real, honest people first. Don’t use an automator tool (and certainly don’t buy one). Anonymous, computer-generated content isn’t content. And someone will catch you, 10 times out of 10, and will shut you down. Don’t sell or swap or engage with people who hound you or disrespect you.
Here I’ll mention a few of the more respectable resources and ones I use myself.
Squidutils – free resources, blog & revenue sharing tools. This is run by Fluffanutta, a prolific and respected lensmaster and tool developer. Fluff does a great job keeping on top of squidoo developments in his blog, and the free resources he provides, such as the squidutils dashboard, are great. The tools to give you alternate ways of linking to amazon and ebay are also pretty cool, especially if you are not in the US and wish to provide links to other amazon and ebay sites. This linking service does have one snag though – your affiliate links will include some of Fluff’s affiliate id’s. This, I believe, is calculated to give Fluff a share of the revenue you would earn. You may ask why is this any different to sharing with squidoo? Well, with squidoo you get a share of the revenue on any purchase made via your links, using Fluff’s tool is different that it is more hit and miss and more like roulette whether you will get the revenue or Fluff. Having said this I do feel it fair that he does earn some revenue for the work he has done creating the tools and to cover the costs of hosting squidutils, I just am not particularly thrilled about the ‘roulette’ method of revenue sharing. If he could create a similair structure to the squidoo system, where he creates the links, tracks them, allows you access to the reports and then pays you a share I would be giving him a standing ovation and placing his links on all my lenses rather than just some.
Captain Squid – blog with lots of tips. Loyalis is the man behind Captain Squid, Isle of Squid and a number of other squidoo projects. The Captain is a top earner on squidoo and does seem to make it look remarkably easy to earn money from it. I think it’s a great blog, though like many other squidoo blogs (including this one at times!) it can make it seem too easy to earn money via squidoo. There are a large number of tools in the Captains’s toolchest which can be used by lensmasters, though again much of the info can be gained by searching the net and the prices of the tools may be a little off-putting, though some pretty big claims are made about the performance of these tools!
WidgetSquid – A creation by the captain to take advantage of the new Clearspring module which is going to revolutionize squidoo in the near future. I particularly like the ebay tool he’s made, the captain has quite cleverly introduced some ads to this widget which will give an opportunity for him to earn some money from the time he invested in setting up this widget. Which in my opinion is a much better way of doing this than his previous ebay rss affiliate tool which the results were limited to 5 results and 2 of those results have the captain’s PID inserted instead of your own, for those not keen on giving away 40% of their affilaite links there was a version you could buy as well. Currently the new ebay tool looks as though it gives you all the ebay affiliate links and the captain will do ok from the ads served with it. (I’d love to work out how to do more with the clearspring tools to enable me to add my own ads to the widget, but my code experience just isn’t up to it!
BuildMyLens – premier lensbuilding service from Tiffany & Lewis. If money is no object and you have a great idea or product to get out there Tiffany and Lewis can create you an all singing, all dancing lens on the subject of your choice. Perhaps a little out of the reaches of most newcomers to squidoo for a business looking for some web promotion it can seem to be a very good way of gaining visitors, customers and sales with little required from them apart from paying the lens building fee.
Did I miss any resources out that are worthy of mentioning? I may be making subsequent posts on this subject so will include suitable suggestions.
Did I give a fair review of these tools?
Feel Free To Comment ………
