Is Squidoo a Scam? An Honest Answer

1. AD REVENUE: Each month, Squidoo keeps 45%, donates 5% to charity, and distributes the rest of its ad revenue among lenses according to their average monthly "lensrank." See Squidoo Payday Questions and Answers for a breakdown of "lensrank tiers" and monthly payouts over the last few years.
   
   
2. MERCHANT MODULES: Earn commissions through your visitors' purchases on merchant modules (widgets) for online stores like Amazon, eBay, and CafePress. It's easy to plug in a product name, shop name, or username, and promote a product or book that ties in with your topic.
   
   
3. PROMOTE AND SELL YOUR STUFF: If you have a store on one of the e-commerce sites that Squidoo's built modules for, you can showcase your products and let Squidoo pull in the product picture, price, and item information for you. If you have your own online store which Squidoo doesn't know about, use text, link and image modules to build a virtual storefront or product catalog pointing back to your site (Tip: I've written a tutorial on how to sell Zazzle products on Squidoo). You can even add a Paypal button to a Squidoo lens.
   
   
4. AFFILIATE MARKETING: This is the big bucks method that many of Squidoo's top earners use. Affiliate marketing services like Share a Sale and Comission Junction have a pool of business clients with items they want to promote. You, as an affiliate marketer, sign up to promote whichever products you like. If a reader purchases something through an affiliate link on your lens, you earn a commission!
   
   Note however that Squidoo has had to impose a limit of 9 outbound links to the same domain per lens, with some exceptions for "trusted" domains. See "About the limit on "overly promotional lenses" for more info.

I'm not a Squidoo expert.
I'm not a Squidoo employee.
I'm just a Squidoo member who noticed that "is Squidoo a scam?" turns up sometimes in Squidoo-related searches. I decided to answer the question partly because I'm a fan of Squidoo, and partly -- yep! -- to earn a little money by building a Squidoo page tailored to a particular search phrase.

The fact that you're here suggests that Squidoo works!

(Addendum: For the record, this lens has earned $61.73 between Mar '09 and Mar '11 via nothing more than the ads in the header and sidebar. It's not my best earner; see below for more on what you can expect to make).

"Can you make money on Squidoo?" is an important question.

However, earning money is by no means Squidoo's only function! Squidoo members create lenses for many different purposes.

Here are just a few of the most popular ways that people use Squidoo.

That's all well and good, but you want hard numbers, right?

While most Squidoo members are wary of sharing their stats with the world, a few post month-to-month results. First up, check out young Squidoogirl's Is Squidoo a scam? blog post sharing her own results for her first six months on Squidoo. I warn you her quick start is NOT typical; she did a stellar job of studying SEO and affiliate marketing, and mastered them sooner than most.

More typical results: see how much Janet21 earns on Squidoo and Rwoman's Squidoo stats. Here's my own Squidoo stats, typical of someone who treats Squidoo as a hobby. Here's Pastiche's Squidoo Stats, not about money but traffic, showing how members can use Squidoo's tools to attract and track a particular audience for their content. And here's Christene's haul, she of the ever-helpful Squidoo Payday unofficial FAQ.

You might want to read Captain Squid's blog post on his first lens to earn $1000 a month, although this is of course exceptional.

Two years ago I invited visitors to my most popular lens to share their Traffic Stats and Squidoo Earnings via anonymous polls.

The poll numbers are skewed towards people who haven't been on Squidoo long. Even so, it looks like a minority of lensmasters -- about 5% -- are making upwards of $5000 a month with 200-500 visitors a week for their typical lenses. These people are earning the bulk of their money through 3rd party affiliate sales.

What can you expect to make on Squidoo through tier payouts and commissions alone? Squidoo Staff member Kimberly has an illuminating breakdown of the March 2011 Pay Day.

“To me, getting to $50 a day was a turning point. The learning curve had lessened and I knew that once I could make $50 a day, there was NO telling how much I could make after that crucial landmark was achieved."

~ Excerpt from a How to Make 50 Dollars a Day Online on PotPieGirl's excellent blog on Squidoo, SEO and affiliate marketing

Gordon Hamilton is a former member of Squidoo who used to make thoughtful posts in the members' forum. He recently returned to say:

“I really do love Squidoo. It is so friendly, has so many wonderful people and I have made so many wonderful friends and acquaintances but unfortunately I have a living to earn and it has quite simply got to the stage where I have given up with Squidoo as a potential income generator. It is the best social site on the Web - bar none - but its revenue generating capabilities I have found = zero. Eighteen months of back breaking effort and zero success."

~Excerpt from post by Gordon Hamilton, "Looks Like Squid-Bye," Mar '09