Making Money on Squidoo

It's a perfectly timed request, Whitney, because I just received noticed yesterday that I am now a Giant Squid on Squidoo. Giant Squid was an invitation-only contest that Squidoo ran for some of their webmasters -- with the hopes of encouraging us to create more than 50 lenses for Squidoo, which is why my Hubpages have been coming kind of slow lately. I was in a frenzy to get my lenses done by the deadline.

Happily I made it just in time and had more than enough lenses to qualify me. The perks of GiantSquid-dom include some bumps for lenses of my choice and a pile of free advertising on their Squidoffers which I will be testing out next week by trying to get more referrals for Hubpages :)

I currently have 67 lenses on my main account and maybe a half dozen here and there on other accounts. I actually joined Squidoo last year and then never really did anything with it. I actually only started using it after I discovered Hubpages and started creating Hubs. Those were so much fun that I decided to expand my empire.

I run mostly a combination of affiliate product lenses, celebrity lenses and shopping lenses. I use the shopping lenses as testing grounds for niches that I think might be good money makers and then when one pans out I will usually get a domain and start building my own website.

I received my first payment from Squidoo directly at the beginning of September and it was for a total of $14 or so. Right now I have another $20 or I've made from affiliate sales that need to clear, but the majority of my Squidoo-related income comes from affiliate marketing for products that are located off Squidoo. I push affiliate products much harder on Squidoo than I do on Hubpages, mostly because Squidoo is much more welcoming of affiliate marketing and Hubpages seems to prefer keeping everything internal.

Since many of my lenses are in the top 10,000 lenses on Squidoo and several of them are in the top 1000, I expect a much higher affiliate payout from Squidoo at the beginning of October. I expect it will probably be at least $50, plus the income from the lenses for Ebay and Amazon sales.

The two sites have different philosophies: Seth Godin designed Squidoo to be a site that points to content elsewhere. Hubpages is designed to be content itself. At least that is how I see it.

I still do plenty of just fun, personal interest stuff on Squidoo and my highest lensranked lens at the moment, on Christopher McCandless, is set up to send all money to charity, but for the most part I use Squidoo to make money with affiliate products.

I make okay money with my Hubpages, particularly on Adsense and Ebay (Amazon is terrible), but I bring in about 20 times as much from my Squidoo lenses on a consistent basis and that is because of affiliate programs like Clickbank and Commission Junction and Copeac.

So if I've convinced you that it's worth your time, I strongly encourage you to Sign Up for Squidoo and create a few lenses of your own. Even if it is just to promote your Hubs. ;)

Right now my main goal is to bring the number of Hubs I have up to par with the number of lenses that I have. Since I don't usually push affiliate products on my Hubs, I try and think about what the returns might be for Ebay and Adsense and how popular the Hubs will be ultimately in terms of natural, organic traffic. If i start with a topic and it doesn't perform, then usually I toss out the idea of continuing with that topic. Right now -- I want to update all my TV network hubs and then write some more Hubs about all the different jobs I've had because the ones I've done so far have been really popular and get great traffic.

In the long term, I want at least 100 Lenses and 100 Hubs and then I might take a break for a bit and turn off my computer for a couple of days :)

I hope this helps answer your questions, Whitney, and if you have any follow-ups, feel free to ask!