Why do people think squidoo is spammy? Why do people think it’s so easy to earn money from squidoo? Why is it so widely promoted as a Get Rich Quick scheme by so many? I came across a Work-At-Home advice blog today promoting squidoo, and wasn’t very impressed by it.
There are a bazillion ways to make money on the Internet. But one of the easiest is creating Squidoo Lenses and profiting from the revenue generated from them. First of all, Squidoo is super easy; you can build a basic lens in about 15 minutes. And they rank high in Google’s search engine results, so they’re traffic magnets. – Work At Home Mom Revolution
**
The article does cover a few basics, but gives no insight into how realistic earning more than the price of a cup of coffee a month was. (I did leave a comment to suggest that it wasn’t a particularly accurate of how easy it was to earn income from squidoo)
There are so many articles on blogs offering advice on Work at Home Income, many of these that mention squidoo do seem to oversimplify it, resulting in poor returns and dissatisfaction among those that follow the methods given. Usually these articles state you <b>can</b> create a lens in 15minutes. Well, this is true to an extent if you use RSS modules and grab info from wikipedia, stick in a couple of youtube videos andthen fill the rest of the lens with product links, whether theybe to amazon, ebay, cafepress, netflix, to name just a few of the companies squidoo can help you promote and will share revenue generated from them. It would be a very poor effort as the key to getting your lens ranked and receiving good traffic is actually having well written, well presented, interesting information and this is just not possible in 15minutes.
You can just write a quick blurb on the intro to a lens, then use the multitude of modules available to pre-fill the rest of the lens with content, what you will get is a spam lens, and search engines pretty much ignore these as there is no original content. If you look on squidoo, the number of these sorts of lenses is increasing rapidly, alomng with the dissastisfaction that squidoo isn’t what people have been lead to believe, it’s not easy money, it’s not guaranteed traffic, it’s what you put into it.
Squidoo works well for me, though it has been a long learning curve to get to the stage where the revenue share from squidoo is enough to pay enough for even my internet connection.
Having said this, I do have some success with promoting products etc through affiliate links and the income from this now dwarfs the revenue sharing from squidoo. It must be said though that my earlier attempts following a similair model to what was suggested by the blog post quoted, creating a longtail lens with affiliate links in a short space of time, were an unmitigated failure and rarely earn more than a few cents a month, some not even that! So in essence a very poor use of my time, I would even go as far as saying a comlete waste of time if it was not for the fact that I had learned what not to do!
What has worked well for me is spending time writing about subjects that inspires me*, doing some research for it and in total spending several hours creating a worthwhile lens. Now I may spend 2-10hours on a new lens, but I then can sit back and watch that lens earn me double figures a month. That may not be seen as a great return but what you have then got to take into account that over the course of a year the several hours you spent were a great investment as you recalculate your hourly rate for these each month you see your return on investment increase.
For people new to squidoo, or those fresh squids trying to find the ‘magic formula’ to get rich quick, I can only repeat – “You get out of it what you put into it!”. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, then good luck and be aware that many that are advertised as such are only getting one person rich – the person pushing the scheme!
The more of these type of blog posts that exist, and the number is rapidly increasing as bloggers turn to ‘wealth creation’ and visitors look for that magic formula that will earn them a fortune with little or no effort, the more squidoo will see of spam-like lenses and these new lensmasters will ‘damage’ squidoo’s credibility with search engines and visitors. The worst of these are those that spend 15minutes creating a spammy lens, and then spend an hour promoting on other social networks, directories and blogs by just posting a link and not contributing to the community or blogger they hope will help promote their lens. Squidoo is already a banned url on some social networks such as Propellor for this reason. Hopefully though, most newcomers to squidoo will learn and improve the qualityof lenses they produce, those after fast results will drift away quickly and their lenses will drop like a rock to the regions of being out side the squidoo payout tiers and even below the threshold of quality for getting featured in search results.
I would like to add though that for those who do want a Quick Solution to creating a great lens to promote their products, businesses, websites, blogs, etc., You may want to have a look for professionals to create you a lens. There are a few services out there that will do this for you. Two full-time lensmasters offer their services to make a lens for you on any subject. BuildMyLens provides astoundingly professional lenses that work well in getting traffic to them and ranking highly on squidoo. Though the price at $249 a lens, or $799 for a group of 4, may seem a bit steep, if you have picked the right niche to market they will quickly return your initial investment.
*some subjects only provide me with fleeting inspiration, sometimes this is long enough to create a good lens, sometimes this means one stays as work-in-progress awaiting my inspiration returning. I often publish these incomplete as work in progress to see if they will fly, often they won’t, but if they do start getting visited and climbing the rankings this is often enough to reinspire me to go back and polish it up a little
** Lisa, the creator of Work At Home Moms Revolution has visited to respond to my criticism of her blog post and has apologised for suggesting it was simple to earn lots of money from squidoo. Her blog is actually very well written with lots of good and interesting articles about Work At Home opportunities and worth a visit.
