Using Squidoo Lens to Increase Traffic and Earnings

Squidoo.com has become very valuable to webmasters, in terms of building traffic to their blogs. A squidoo page or a lens can be a place to aggregate a webmaster’s many interests all over the web. These lenses are user-generated, and you get to decide what to put there. Think of it as one page that asks you a single question: What are you about?

You can place RSS feeds from your blog, which could be a good way to build traffic. You can also enhance your credibility by showing a side of you other than that they see on your blog. Think of it as your about page away from your blog, or another place over the web where you can self-promote. This can be your personal announcement page, where you tell your fans and squidoo community that you are connected with a particular blog, your accomplishments so far and why you do they things you do. This could also be your poll place, if you don’t have much space for a poll on your blog. Other stuffs you can place here include youtube videos and photos. A squidoo lens is particularly useful if you have an offline business and you just want a page on the net to inform your customers about your travels, favorite food, and recent activities.

How does one monetize a Squidoo lens? Here are several ways:

Keep your topic relevant and get extra adsense earnings from the traffic your lens attracts. Remember that lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Squidoo splits the adsense earnings with their lensmasters, and donates a portion of your earnings to charity. The earning scheme is co-op style and 5% goes straight to charity first; 50% goes to the lensmasters (you) and 45% goes to Squidoo.

This isn’t a content place, and people do not expect to see articles. Just an introduction about you or a topic; and other things related to you that you want to announce. In this sense, it is ok to recommend products from ebay auctions, amazon and other companies that you are partnered with The second earning option is relevant to us because we can have an additional free place on the web to place links to sales pages or ebook downloads.

Of course, build your lens with your visitor in mind. Do not build a lens that contains ONLY links to affiliate or sales pages. The best way to do this is to alternate your links and lens parts. Your affiliate links may go in between videos, RSS feeds and photos. This way, you dictate how a reader browses your page. First he sees something interesting like a travel photo, then he sees a recommendation from you to try a new camera, then he sees summaries of your blog posts (as RSS) or links to your other blogs. Use your lens to tell a story about what you do online and offline, by pointing your viewers to relevant sites.