Using Squidoo To Make Money Online

Note that Squidoo is no longer alive. HubPages purchased them.

Always looking to make a little extra play cash online, I decided to give Squidoo a shot about a year ago. I wanted to post a little of what I have found using the site, how much money I have made and if it is still working.

I started off using Squidoo to build a couple good back links for a couple other blogs I had. I will admit, I didn't read up on Squidoo much and just posted a couple articles I had just sitting around. Not long after posting them, two went to "work in progress" and one had a decent ranking within their system.

Being kind ticked that two articles (which were decent written and 100% unique) were not being shown to search engines, I kind of just turned my back to it and forgot about them. A couple months later, I decided to check up on my one article that was still published and found it was getting a little traffic. This article was very general on my niche and had a couple links to posts on one of my blogs.

Around this time, the latest Google hit came out and killed my main blog which was doing pretty well. My main post was getting 300-400 visits a day but was not converting well before the Google update. I decided to move that post over to Squidoo to see if I could save it and 301 redirected my blog page to the new Squidoo Lens. Of course within 24 hours, my Lens was locked for using duplicate content. I emailed Squidoo HQ and told them that I moved over my post and 301 redirected it to the new Squidoo Lens. Within 24 hours of sending my email, I received a reply telling me they they have unlocked my Lens and it was live.

I left the Lens alone for a couple of weeks with not much action. I decided I would give it a couple months before pulling it to try and use it in another way. After a couple months, a small social media bump and a couple bookmarks, I saw that I started to get more traffic and started to make sales through the Amazon modules. As time went on I made more and more sales. At one point I was selling multiple targeted products per day that was selling for $150 each on Amazon. I was also getting the random sales from people just using the link. At this point I was bringing in between $70-$150 per month from this one lens. I of course got very excited and started creating a couple more lens. So far, none have done as good as my first one but still make sales.

In the past month, Squidoo has come up with some crazy guidelines and seem to be locking lenses quite a bit. I guess Squidoo has also gotten hit by the last Google update as well and they took a hard hit. They are trying to guess at what Google is looking for to regain their authority. In my opinion, they are doing some good, trying to get rid of junk lens made just as sales pages. In this process, I guess they are hitting a lot of good lenses. They are also starting to require you to write lenses in a certain way that they think Google is looking for. I do not agree with all of it.

Squidoo is wants you to only create lenses on products you own and to tell a personal story on every lense. Though Google likes getting personal views and how/why you feel the way you do, "how to" and comparison articles do not need this information. Google "how to whatever" and you will find straight forward articles. When people are looking how to do something or a recipe, they do not want a long story line, they just want the info.

So, can you make money with Squidoo today? Is it worth creating lenses? I say yes but make sure to read the guidelines first. Don't overbuild back links, spam, etc. I believe Squidoo will make a comeback one day and having aged Lenses will be good. Though the past month has been a bust for me only making about $50-$60 total (modules and my own links), I'm still making money. I think it is worth at least putting up one new lens per month. You can always pull them in the future and move them somewhere else.