Making Money With Squidoo

What Are The Stats?

For a site that started small, it has become hugely popular online. According to Squidoo.com, around 900,000 lenses have already been built. Since these all have to be done manually by someone, usually referred to as a lensmaster, it's an amazing achievement. These lenses attract around 420,000 people to visit Squidoo.com every day. It's the popularity of the site, the immense traffic, and the ability to link to moneymaking opportunities that bring new people to the site every day. Squidoo.com reveals that many people make around $1,000 per year with their lenses. In some unusual cases, people have made $10,000 per year; however, it's possible you may only make $40 per year, depending on the quality of your lenses and how many people they attract to them.

What Determines The Quality Of The Lens?

Squidoo assigns a hidden LensRank to each lens. It is based on an algorithm that can include the lensmaster's reputation, how many ratings and how high they are, the number of inbound and outbound links, and the actual traffic coming to the lens. The higher the LensRank, the more quality the lens is determined to have. Unlike other sites that pay more to people based on a rating system that grants more privileges to older users, this one re-rates the lens every two weeks to keep the rankings fresh.

Traffic to the lens is a major component of the quality, as it includes click-through rates. The more traffic you get to your lens, the more opportunity you have to make income from the lens. In that respect, they're just like any other Internet marketing venture. You have to attract eyeballs to the lens to get visitors to create actions that bring in income. Some of that income will be from the traffic itself. Other income might come from affiliate offers you have linked to your lens. You might be using the lens to generate leads and make money that way too. Finally, there is a way to create a Squidoo co-op page that essentially partners you with others who will take a share of the royalties for that type of exposure.

Earning Money With AdSense

It may come as no surprise to seasoned marketers that you can earn money with AdSense from Squidoo. For those that don't know what this is, it's the money generated from visitors who click the Google Ads located at the top of every Squidoo lens. Monies are collected from Google and then distributed via a formula that rewards top lensmasters and popular lenses more. Generally, the more traffic you get to your lens, the more likelihood someone is going to click on an ad, potentially generating revenue for you. However, just because you have a lens doesn't necessarily mean you'll make any money from Google AdSense. It's just a potential possibility until a sufficient number of people click on ads that have a good payout.

For Squidoo, it follows a revenue sharing model that provides 50% of the revenues generated by the lensmaster to go directly to them. The rest of it goes for operating expenses, charity, investors, and employees. There are several tiers to the system, where higher ranked lensmasters can make more from their lenses than others. You don't have to have a Google AdSense account to make this money, unlike other sites where you embed the code into the pages. This is all taken care of by Squidoo. You do, however, have to have a PayPal account where the monies from your lenses can be deposited every month. If you earn more than $600 from Squidoo, they will want some form of tax identification, but otherwise, you will have to report it to the IRS, however your accountant sees fit.

What Generates More AdSense Money?

Traffic is a big component of AdSense income. However, so is content. Seasoned Internet marketers will be able to use their keyword skills and niche ideas to highlight lenses that can rank well with Google, as well as Squidoo. If you don't know much about keywords, you can find a useful keyword tool online to help you generate content around keywords that attract more visitors.

You should not stuff the content of your lens with too many keywords. Typically, a 1% to 2% ratio of keyword to total word count is recommended for any one keyword that you use in your content. Using keywords in headings and subheadings is a particularly powerful way to get noticed by the Google search engine.

Many of the same strategies that marketers use to generate income from AdSense on their own blogs and websites can be used with Squidoo pages. However, this is not the sole way to earn income through Squidoo. In fact, you can avoid Google Ads altogether and instead focus on different ways to earn money.