MORE SQUIDOO LENSES?! Why would I make those?

One of the best kept secrets that the other Squids don't tell newbies is that their lenses make money.

Now, sure, you've "probably" already noticed that you can put in Amazon affiliate lenses and make money selling books, but I bet you didn't realize that you can make money completely passively on Squidoo.

How? Well, do you notice all the ads on this page?

Squidoo won't start featuring your lens until you get at least three modules in besides the introduction, but that's your bare minimum. (And think about it -- throw in the poll module and the guestbook, that's two of your three right there)

I tend to find the right length of a lens is somewhere around 10 modules -- that's enough to include lots of pictures, polls, things on Amazon to buy, various gadgets and widgets...

So if your lens has more than that, either they should all be pretty short modules, or else it's in your reader's best interest (and more profitable for you!) to break long lenses up into smaller, shorter ones with more specialized content.

Let's talk about the Perfect Reader. This mystical, rare creature will:

• Find your lens.
• Read the entirety of your lens.
• Respond to all of your interactive modules (like polls, duels, and guestbooks)
• Rate your lens
• Favorite your lens
• Recommend your lens to other people.

By now we're into fantasyland, perhaps, so let's talk about the Interested Reader instead. At the very least, an interested reader will provide the minimum they can to make you feel good about what you've offered to them.

That minimum is traffic.

Interested readers click through to the next page to read more. If you have lots of lenses, you give them lots to read, and they leave you lots of traffic.

Traffic improves your ranks and thus makes you money, so this is good. So everyone benefits when you have lots of lenses!

If there's one thing people on the internet like, it's the ability to get their hands on EXACTLY what they're looking for.

Now, if you're building a giant catch-all lens, you're not going to anticipate everyone's needs. And even if you do, how the heck will they FIND it all in that one dinky page?

You can still string all your information together in a series of lenses the same way you can put it all in one big lens, but if some of that content is useful for multiple lenses, having a premade lens dedicated to that one repeated item is a whole lot easier than including it over and over again on several different lenses, right?

By splitting up content into lenses that each only contain a specific topic, you can combine them into other lenses as you see fit later -- and this all still generates the traffic you're looking for!

What the heck is a Giant Squid? A Giant Squid is someone who's made fifty awesome Squidoo lenses. It's not an easy requirement to meet, sure, but when you're a Giant Squid, you know how to work Squidoo to your advantage -- and it becomes easier than ever to make lenses and have them make money for you!

You want to be a Giant Squid. You just DO.

Being a Giant Squid gets you into the "old boys club" of Squidoo, which means you get all the best advice, the best tips, the sneak previews, the new experimental tools, and best of all . . .

You get a LensRank boost to ALL of your lenses, and any new ones you make, which means it just got easier to rocket your lenses into the stratosphere and keep making that money.

But it takes 50 Lenses.

No matter how good your one lens is, You can't become a Giant Squid with just one lens.