Do you write for squidoo?

1. 58

   sid_candidposted 12 years ago

   I am planning to start writing for squidoo along with Hubpages. Have you worked for squidoo? How has been the experience? Is it worth writing for?

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   1. 57

      toygurusposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I write for squidoo. It is a lot different from hubpages. Instead of hubs they call their pages lenses.
      
      It is really powerful if your understand html. If you have a creative mind and think every house shouldn't look the same you are going to love squidoo. I know that content is king but sometimes presenting stuff in the most useful way to readers is also important.  With hubpages you don't really have control over the layout of your pages. All the pages look the same.  This power also makes squidoo more difficult to use.
      
      Your lens has to include a number of things in order to get dofollow links and even be featured. This means you can't simply write a 5 minute short article and expect it to appear on squidoo or even in the search engine. This cuts down on spam.
      
      The payout structure is completely different as well. You get payed based on how well you rank on squidoo not by click. Some people don't like the squidoo logo because it looks cartoony. However, you have the ability to choose different templates. Also the more you write the more stuff you can unlock.
      
      There are also people on squidoo known as the squidoo angels that can bless lens. This will give you a boost in the squidoo rankings and this cuts down on spam.
      
      At the moment you don't have to worry about all of your traffic disappearing over night since each page ranks on its own and doesn't depend on other pages. It's harder for google to penalize your entire portfolio. If one page is not ranking another page will rank. Also you don't need google to make money on squidoo since you are not paid by adsense. You can make money by just drawing visitors from the community to your lenses and having them like the page. This will increase your squidoo rankings.They don't have to buy anything or click on the ads they just have to like your page.
      
      One thing I really like about squidoo is their statistics reports. they tell you exactly what keyword brought you the traffic and where it came from. They also show you on which links people are clicking on. If you love managing stuff and tweaking stuff this is a dream come true.
      
      They also allow up to 9 links out to affiliate sites and Amazon is whitelisted so you can have as many Amazon links. Squidoo has made their Amazon modules hidden to the search engines so you will not get penalized for having to many Amazon products on page.
      
      At the end of the day you have to use different tools for different needs. Both require substantial work and your income is dependent on how much effort you put in. You have to be on squidoo at least a year before you start seeing real income. Some of the things you can do on squidoo can't be done on hubpages and likewise. Both are great but I must admit if my hubpages wasn't penalized by google I would be using hubpages more. I get 4 views on hubpages and get 1000 views over at squidoo.

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   2. 78

      Greekgeekposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      While I've dabbled with publishing on my own websites sporadically, Squidoo is the one site where I've enjoyed success.  I hit upon that success by sheer accident: I wasn't trying to earn money, just publish on a highly-trafficked website where I would get readers and feedback instead of just writing in a vacuum. To my surprise, I began earning money. Since the start of 2011, I've treated it as a job. Like any job, there are irritations and setbacks. In the past year I've gotten irked with HQ changing or dropping certain features without much notice. I also hate the fact that many of our lenses only earn about 30 cents a month; it's hard to create those top-ranked lenses that pull in $7 to $45 a month. Despite those problems...well...I can't knock this...
      
      Link: My Squidoo earnings to date,
      ...not counting Amazon Associates, Cafepress and Zazzle sales I've made from links on my Squidoo lenses.
      
      I get about 14,000 to 15,000 visitors a week on 360 Squidoo lenses (160 of which I've made this year).
      
      Sqidoo has more features than Hubpages and more bugs (most of which are annoying to us when making lenses, but thankfully our readers don't see them). The visual look/feel of Squidoo is a bit quirky-looking for serious writing, but you can mitigate that by choosing a dignified theme like New York.
      
      If earnings are a goal, you have to learn how to get traffic to Squidoo pages, and you need to offer things for visitors to click on or interact with. It's not enough to get a visitor to a Squidoo page: did they find anything? Did they click anything? Did they buy anything? Squidoo's lensrank system tries to reward articles that engage readers. It also rewards you for editing/updating your articles -- once a month, if you can, even if it's just checking for typos and looking the lens over before you hit Publish again. 
      
      Like any site, it takes time to learn and earn, and some are more successful than others.

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2. 75

   Richieb799posted 12 years ago

   I do occasionally, remember to add all of the checklist items other wise your Lens will stay as 'Lens in progress' and won't be viewable in search engines..I find tweeting them and bookmarking helps them get out of this preliminary phase.

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   1. 78

      Greekgeekposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Checklist?
      
      If you mean that "% complete" bar in the upper right-hand sidebar of the lens workshop, that checklist is only a set of suggestions, not requirements.  They are not what determines whether a lens is "Work In Progress."  That "lens progress" checklist is one of the things that irks me; it confuses newbies.
      
      How Squidoo WIP works:
      
      When you first publish a lens, it's considered a Work in Progress. It becomes "featured" once the lens has been "indexed" by Squidoo (which happens once a day around 8AM EST). During "indexing," Squidoo's algorithm checks to see that the lens...
      
      1) ...has a graphic or logo in the introduction module.
      2) ...has at least 200 characters in the introduction.
      3) ...has at least 4 modules total. (The guestbook doesn't count...you must have an introduction plus 3 modules of content.)
      4) ...passes the duplicate content and spam filters.
      
      When a Squidoo lens is "featured," it is added to the Squidoo topics directory so that search engines can find and crawl it.
      
      Lenses may fall back into "WIP" mode their rank drops below 500,000. If this happens, Tweet it or share the lens to get a few visitors, edit and republish, and it should pop back up above 500,000 in a day or two.

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      1. 95

         artsofthetimesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Thank you for this. i do have an account on squidoo and have never been able to figure out why my lenses fall into the WIP mode.
         
         Now i know why, and know what to do.
         
         Thanks

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3. 82

   mary615posted 12 years ago

   I used Squidoo in the beginning, but HubPages s SO much easier for me.  Maybe I just don't like their cartoony look.  I found it hard to use, but, in all fairness maybe I didn't give it enough time.  I  like everything about HubPages.  They have made it so easy to write and publish.

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4. 77

   Rob Wintersposted 12 years ago

   Very informative overviews on Squidoo toygurus & Greekgeek, thanks for sharing - haven't tried out Squidoo yet but intend to so found your posts very helpful.Cheers Guys :-)

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5. 54

   healthywholefoodsposted 12 years ago

   Yea, I learned a lot about squidoo via the comments. I was wandering about so many questions that were answered here. Thanks for posting on the forums.

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