Earning Money Online Series: Writing for Squidoo

I've been a member of Squidoo since 2006; before I joined here, actually.  But I quickly saw that my writing needed help, and I came here for that, leaving my pages on Squidoo to languish until this year.  I'd get a dollar or three from them every now and then, even though I wasn't checking in.

Squidoo is not a social networking site. Our most social posts would be out of place there.

Squidoo is not strictly writing. Photographers and artists use the site as well.

Squidoo lenses are made up of a lot of little building blocks rather than being a straight text and html editor like we look at here.  Basically, you arrange these blocks how you want them, fill in whatever text you need/want to create the page you envision, spiff it up with photo or video modules and color themes, and, if you want, add any products from affiliates like Amazon and eBay you think are relevant.

Here's one of my recent pages if you'd like to see the difference:  How This SAHM Supplements The Family Income All I added is the content, the rest is the work of the theme and the modules.

If people buy items through the affiliate modules you use, Squidoo splits the commission with you. Even if a person clicks through your Amazon module, then buys some other product from Amazon rather than the one you recommended, you still get a commission.

Squidoo lenses also earn a percentage of the general ad revenue pool from the ads displayed on the pages, based on how the lens performs. This is paid in a tier system, based on traffic and other factors.  The top 2000 lenses on the site earn an average of about $10 each a month.  The next 6000 get around $1.50-$2 per lens.  Most of the rest get a few cents; recently that's been 7-9 cents each.  It's not much, but if you write a lot of lenses it adds up, and in the process you learn how to do better.  The very lowest quality/traffic lenses and those you don't have live on the site yet don't get anything.

You can choose to donate your earnings to charity, or keep them.  Just set it and forget it, they don't ask you every month.  You can even set some pages one way, the rest the other.  They have you set your own payout threshold, and it can be as low as $1.  They pay automatically.

Squidoo pays via paypal, and if you're in any of the countries paypal works with, you can earn there.

Squidoo welcomes, even encourages, quality promotion of your own products, your zazzle store, your online business, or books you've written. Squidoo and Gather work really well together, as cross promotion is accepted on both sites as long as your content while you're doing that is good.

Copyright infringement is NOT okay on Squidoo. Pages get locked for that.  They act fast on spammers, too.

Squidoo does not pay you to read other's work.

The community is pretty good.  Many other members write pages sharing their tips and experience for how to do better on the site; things like how to get more traffic, rank better on search engines, and make gorgeous pages.  The forums, called SquidU, even have a place to submit a link to your page and ask for member advice on how to improve it.

Money I've Earned At Squidoo With 8-9 lenses, two in second tier and a few in third: between $3.50-$4 a month.

Money I've Earned At Squidoo With 30+ lenses, one in first tier and 10+ in second: $30-$50 a month

Unless you write articles related to making lenses on Squidoo, your traffic will be coming from search engines and wherever you promote your pages.  It's not just about Google, Yahoo is also a major source of traffic, and works a little differently, so pages will sometimes not do so hot on one but do really well on the other.

It takes a lot of time and effort to build up to a decent earning rate there, but it does get easier.  Past pages written to draw search engine traffic will generally keep drawing it, as long as you keep the content somewhat up to date.

If you decide to try Squidoo, get a heck of a headstart on what I knew when I started by checking out my Squid Newbie Survival Guide.

Click here to read about my experience writing for Hubpages.