Beginner's Guide to Making Money With Squidoo Lenses

You really can make money just by publishing lenses on Squidoo. If your lens ranks as one of the top 2000 in the lens rank scale for an entire month, it is classified as a "Tier 1" lens. Squidoo calculates the payment amounts during the next month. You will receive the prevailing tier 1 payment amount for that lens by about the 15th of the second month.

Similarly, if you lens is ranked in the top 8000 for a month, it will be classified as a "Tier 2" lens. In the top 70,000 of so, it will be a "Tier 3" lens. You receive the prevailing rate for your lenses in each of these tiers as well. Your Squidoo account will receive an aggragate payment for all of the lenses which qualify for payments according to which tier they are in.

You may also earn money from Squidoo affiliates such as Amazon, Infolinks and Chikita. Your lenses may receive payments from Squidoo based on the actions of the viewers to your lenses. The amount you receive is variable since it includes sales commission, pay for clicks and pay for total number of pages viewed. You can add Squidoo selling tools to your lens, such as Amazon or Cafepress modules, or you can add your own text or image links for other affiliate programs that you may have.

Generally, the more viewers your lenses have, the more you will earn through the Squidoo payment system.

Please note that Squidoo only pays for lenses that are active for a whole month. If you make a lens on the first or second of a month, it will not earn tier payout for that month. It will earn affiliate revenue, though. Why would you publish after the first of the month then? If you do, you get the rest of the month to boost the importance of your lens. Then in the next month it will start at a higher point in the tier ranking. Most quality lenses start out at the bottom and rise up in the ranks. It can take a little time to reach the top. Many lenses rank low in their first month anyway so losing the first partial month of revenue is something of a moot point. That said, it can pay to publish lenses on the 30th or 31st of a month even if they aren't quite ready. You can fix them up during the next month and be ranked for tier payout right away.

The more you use Squidoo, the more important you become in the community. While you can surf to a bunch of lenses and provide comments, this will not earn you any money but it will increase your standing. You earn achievement points for such Squidoo actions. Publishing lenses, receiving comments on your own lenses and many other activities earn Squidoo points which help you move from level to level, or "level up".

You start in Squidoo at level 1. With enough points earned, you level up to 2, 3 and beyond. When you reach level 24, you become a High Level Squid. This opens up additional Squidoo tools and/or perks to you. You may also apply to be a Giant Squid when you have published at least 25 quality lenses in order to gain even more tools and revenue earning opportunities. Your lenses will be reviewed to see if they all are good so make sure that you don't have any dogs in your collection.

A fairly large group of Squidoo lensmasters can be found on the Squidu forum. They offer tips and help on many Squidoo issues. The archive of information on the boards is very helpful. When you post on the forum, you gain importance and traffic as people get to know you. You can ask for advice there but don't ask for clicks. A lens spotlight board is available where you can post your lens for general review.

As you become a High Level Squid or Giant Squid, you gain importance in the Squidoo community. Except for the additional revenue earning tools, however, you will not gain money just by leveling up. You may gain respect, however. This can translate into a boost in vistors to your lenses simply because you are known to be a Squidoo star and so your lenses may be worth a look to some people. These Squidoo levels are subtle, though.

Squidoo allows lensmasters to use lenses to highlight businesses. You may describe a business that you operate or one that you know about. You may include links to business web sites within the body of your lenses. There is a limit of 9 links to any one web domain. This limit does not apply to links that you may have to Amazon, however.

Many Internet viewers come to Squidoo for information. These viewers may be interested in the merits of your business ventures. By writing a lens about your business, you can give viewers reasons for them to visit your business web site. Don't abuse this Squidoo feature, please. Your lens should give interesting information about the other site and gently coax the viewer to surf there by themself. Don't load up your lenses with spammy directives such as "Buy Now", "Click Here" or similar abnoxious terms.

As mentioned, you should write quality lenses first and foremost. These will be easier for you to complete but will they make any money? They might but it will depend on the amount of traffic. Traffic comes either from people interested in your topic, people stumbling through all Squidoo lenses and people interested in all of your work. Unfortunately, the main amount of money is earned from the first group, the interested viewers.

Very generally, the following lens topics earn money according to the following table of amounts, for the reasons given:

Health, nutrition, lifestyle topics
Good earning potential.
Many people are looking for help for a wide variety of ailments and improvements. Use Amazon and affiliate links.

Pets and animal topics
Low earning potential.
There are many web sites covering the field so it is hard to be distinctive. If you write about pet Egyptian lizards, you will be highly ranked but there will be few looking for such information.

Sports and entertainment topics
Low earning.
There is a lot of free information and viewers are usually just casually searching. Bulk up your Amazon modules.

Product reviews
Medium earning.
These lenses are variable. Give good informative reviews and bulk up your Amazon modules with related accessories. Try to include unusual product accessories such as solar chargers for iPads.

Travel
Variable earnings.
Very few people want to know about ice fishing trips to Elbow, Saskatchewan. Way more want to read about trips to Las Vegas, London or Hawaii.

Once you publish a lens, you can leave it alone to generate passive income or you can promote it. This involves getting the word out there so that people can learn about your lens and come to visit it. You can go to SquidU.com to let your fellow Squids know about you lens. You can also post a link to your lens on FaceBook, Twitter and Amplify.

Consider joining other web sites and backlinking to your lenses. You can join Amplify, Yousaytoo, Infobarrel and Hubpages. Each of these sites allow you to write articles related to your lenses. Include a link or two on these other article sites back to your lenses. Traffic will begin to flow from those sites into your Squidoo lenses, providing them with a lensrank boost. Check out an informative list of article sites that you can use.

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is the term applied to the crafting of Internet content to make it more appealing to automated web searching tools used by Google, Bing and other search engines. While there are many facets to SEO, beginners should be concerned with the principles backlinking as described here and of writing quality content and using relevant keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that are particularly fitting for the lens topic. For example, a lens reviewing Canon EOS Rebel cameras will contain the following keywords:

• Digital camera


• Canon EOS Rebel


• Digital image


• Photography


• Why Canon EOS Rebel digital cameras are the best choice

The keywords are chosen to indicate to search engines, (and viewers), that the lens is worthy of being included in a search for the given term. Notice that some keywords are short and some are long. You can include both but longer keywords tend to rank better. The reason is competition. There are currently 1.8 billion web hits for "camera", 267 million for "digital camera" and only 750,000 for "Canon Rebel eos T1i digital camera review". Don't go overboard as in this classic SEO joke:
A man walks into a bar, tavern, pub, lounge and orders a drink, cocktail, appertif.