Squidoo Income Challenge
My Squidoo Income Challenge Day One
Many of you have been wondering why I have been absent from HubPages. I have been busy on another site called Squidoo. Some of you may be familiar with this web 2.0 site. For those of you that are new to Squidoo, let me introduce you. It is a site similar to HubPages, that lets you write content and earn money from affiliate sales and revenue ad share. I believe they have been around longer than HubPages. They also get more traffic and love from Google. Why? Many SEO gurus say it's because of their linking structure. Don't know if it's true. That doesn't really matter. What does matter is that there are Squidoo lensmasters earning thousands of dollars a month. That's not the amazing part. What I find unbelievable is that many of these lensmasters don't backlink! That got my attention.
At the end of August, I came across a handful of Squidoo lensmasters that were earning a full time income. One lensmaster's online earnings were $6,000 for the month. What's remarkable about her? She's only been making money online for a year. Here earnings skyrocketed by thousands in 6 months! Of course, that got me thinking. If she could make tons lenses, with a full time job and a farm, anyone can!
Guess what I did! Just take a wild guess. I added 50 more lenses to my Squidoo accounts in the month of September alone. That's almost 2 lenses a day. Actually more because I don't work on the weekends. My children keep me very busy, but I digress. Since I love to keep track of my stats to see what works and what doesn't I decided to keep a journal on HubPages.
Why am I doing a Squidoo Income Challenge?
From my experience, I know that I can earn money from Squidoo. I earn an average of $100.00 a month from Amazon, through my Squidoo lenses. I use my Amazon affiliate links in the content. I also use their Amazon modules because it's just quicker and I don't mind paying them half. They do have to pay for the servers, which are probably very costly. When I read what these lensmasters were doing, I knew I could duplicate their technique. I bought an ebook from one lensmaster and took notes from another's blog entries. (Don't worry, I'm going to share all of this in future posts.) I put it into practice. Here's the part that annoyed me. I am an SEO master. I backlink my backlinks. They encourage you not to, so that the search engines could find your lenses naturally. For the first couple of weeks, I tried to keep my hands tied to not backlink. I feel like it took forever to rank on Google's first page. This month I said, "What the heck? I'm leaving money on the table. I'm doing it my way!" I created a lens, backlinked it and in a few days made a sale. That's what I'm talking about!
Here are a few of the reasons why I am taking the Squidoo Income Challenge.:
- My daughter is in college. Her expenses are about to explode when she finishes the two year college she is in and enters George Mason University for an environmental engineering degree. Her father is absent financially ... and emotionally too. So, that leaves me. She already works and is the most frugal young adult you will ever meet. She needs help and I'm the only one that she has.
- My youngest daughter needs braces. Her dad doesn't provide medical insurance. I don't have any either. Braces will cost thousands.
- I need major repairs in my home.
- My 17 yr old is a senior. Senior year is expensive. Looks like he will not be attending the senior trip. Can't afford it. His car needs repairs, etc.
- I'm trying to create passive income quickly. HubPages is great, but it's taking too long. So, I'm trying to jump start Squidoo and then come back to HubPages to rinse and repeat.
Take the Squidoo Poll!
Do you make money on Squidoo?
Day One: October 1, 2012
This post was actually written on pen and paper. Imagine that? I figured that when I had time I would type it up to share with all of you. Basically, what I'm going to do is keep track of the amount of lenses I have, the new ones I add and the backlinks I build. This should give us a clear picture of what action needs to be taken to build profitable lenses.
One thing that one of the lensmasters talks about is outsourcing. I didn't like to outsource because I am a control freak with my online work. However, after doing the numbers and looking at her profit I realized that it wasn't a bad idea. So, I scouted all over the internet and found several lensmasters that sell Squidoo lenses. I purchased some, added my content, a few modules, changed the theme and published them. Then I built a few backlinks and planted them in the internet. That's how I see this whole project. I am sowing seed that will bring me fruit over and over again.
Day One I purchased:
- Monster High Sleepwear for Kids
- Neck Back Massagers
Had to take the links out of the lenses above, due to HubPages TOS. You can look them up by their names if you want to take a look. Lensmaster accts: dollstoysvideogames and Squidoo_income_challenge
The following lenses were created by me!
- Zombie Costumes Kids
- Monster High Costumes for Kids
At the end of Sept 2012 I had 134 lenses. On Oct. 1 I added 4 more lenses for a total of 138 lenses.
Backlinks:
- I tweeted them out.
- Posted them on facebook.
- Submitted them to submitstart.com
Want to see my first week's Squidoo Income Challenge results?
Read all about My Squidoo Experiment after week one. Check out my Squidoo Income Challenge Earnings Report to see how much I money I made online!
Want to join me on my Squidoo Income Challenge? Join Squidoo here. If you join using my referral link, leave a comment and let me know. I would like to help you out with some tips, likes, tweets, etc.
:)
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