SquidOffers FAQ
Welcome to SquidOffers™--a brand new service from your friends at Squidoo.
If you're curious about how to make a SquidOffer that rocks, check this out. And if your Offer has been declined and you don't know why (gasp!), be sure to read this. But if you're just getting started, read on, Grasshopper.
Understanding SquidOffers
SquidOffers is the new user-generated, community-voted,
turbocharged, gotta-have-it "advertising" system. It's like Reddit or Digg voting, except every single listing is a cool offer from someone who wants to promote something. So, the best offers rise to the top and get the most traffic.
Squidoo is getting millions and millions of new visitors every
month. Traditional advertisers want to sponsor our pages and pay us a lot of money to do so. But we'd rather have you do it with great content. For NOT a lot of money. (Actually, for just $25/week right now).
When people compete to share authentic "offers" with our users and our millions of visitors, everyone wins. Squidoo gets a little more money for operating costs. Lensmasters could get extra royalties from their lenses that carry SquidOffers. Charities get more donations. Real people with remarkable sites and services get the chance to put their work in front of lots of interested folks. That's one better than a trifecta of wins.
You want to promote your stuff, right? You drool over impressions and brand marketing and exposures and actions and traffic. You want genuine user feedback. SquidOffers to the rescue! Here's the deal: You provide great content for our users, we'll provide the eyeballs and let them visit and vote for their favorites. It's up to you to create an offer interesting enough to click on.
Are you an author with a new book coming out? A blogger looking to promote an event? An entrepreneur with a hot new gig to launch? A politician campaigning on an issue? Set up a SquidOffer and see what the people have to say.
BETA: We're just getting started, so we encourage you to sign up to post an offer or two and see what happens. First come, first served. The program will be changing over time as we experiment with the best way to get the right offers in front of the right people.
SquidOffers will run in a clearly marked sidebar on all of the nearly 100,000 lenses on our site, as well as being featured on SquidOffers browse pages, and (soon) being syndicated to any other website that asks for it. Offers are categorized by Squidoo topic. For example, Music SquidOffers will show up on Music lenses on Squidoo, while the Computers and Gadgets offers will be on the Computers & Gadgets related pages.
For a low fee ($25/week right now, with a 4 week minimum), you can submit your ad to be listed in SquidOffers. It will include a thumbnail image, a headline and a short description.
There will be a maximum of 100 offers in a set, by topic. The offers will be in a Plexo, a Squidoo-patented list that gives people an easy way to vote up their favorite offers. If you're voted into the top 5 in your topic, your offer will show on every participating Squidoo lens in that category.
Your offer runs on the site for the amount of time you purchased, and you pay the same fee regardless of how much traffic or votes you get. So, a great offer could generate tens of thousands of clicks for just $100, while a lousy offer might lead to not much at all. This means that advertisers will compete to offer the best possible content to Squidoo users, which is our goal.
If you got one (you lucky duck), that means you're getting a an insanely great deal on an Offer, for you and for 3 of your friends. Just give them the secret coupon code that was emailed to you and they can sign up for a discounted Offer. You'll be asked for your coupon code when you go to create your next Offer. You can only use it once for yourself, and each of your friends can use it once. Yes, your friends can be entirely new to Squidoo. No, they don't have to send you a thank you note in the mail. :)
Getting Started
It's easy to get started. Set up your first SquidOffer in just 4 easy steps.
a. Your offer has to be transparent. You make an offer and your website keeps the promise of that offer.
b. Your offer has to be under your control. When you buy an ad, you warrant that you are authorized to do so.
c. Your offer has to be legal. No warez, no software installs.
d. No spamming irrelevant categories with your offer. No Adult content in non-adult categories.
e. Once you create your offer and send it in to get reviewed and approved, there's no more editing allowed. Think of it like a newspaper ad: what you submit is what runs; no corrections. So be sure to proofread, and doublecheck your URLs! f. Our staff is allowed to make tiny edits to your offer to make sure the style is appealing. They might even be nice and fix a typo for you, but if your offer loosk lkie thiss!, she's probably going to decline it.
See our SquidOffers TOS for more rules.
And read up on 5 Reasons Your Offer Might Get Declined. Don't show up on this list, please!
Right now, $25 for a week. With a minimum of 4 weeks. Buy lots of weeks to lock in this price, because who knows how long it will last!
You set up an offer, pick the category to run it in, see the first available start date, and tell us how many weeks in a row you want it to run. You pay via PayPal. We review your offer in under
73.5 hours and make sure it's up to snuff. If it's not, you'll get your money refunded. If we accept your Offer and then find out
you've done something in violation of the TOS, we reserve the right to cancel your Offer with no refund.
Right now, yes. We're betting images make offers better. We're betting surfers will appreciate the whole packages. We're betting on a strategy that isn't just text-based ads, but isn't huge banner ads either.
Squidstaffers do! We are going to manually and editorially inspect every offer submitted, and we'll reject any offers that violate our policies, or even just offers we don't love. Think about the ads that run in Wired or Cosmopolitan. Cosmo makes sure the ads fit their story, appeal to their readers, and offer them something neat. Wired makes sure the ads are geeky and smart and in the right tone for THEIR readers. Squidoo will do the same: if we're going to run your offer, it's got to be real and authentic and fun and relevant to the category you buy. Our goal is to connect users to sites, not to sell out our users to make a few bucks.
When you created your offer, you selected a category to run it in, and your run dates. We will always show you the very first available start date in your topic. Sometimes it might just be the next week. Sometimes, if invetory sells out, the first available week might be further down the road. When your offer gets approved, that means it has been greenlighted to run on your agreed start date, for as many weeks in a row as you purchased! We'll send you an email when your offer is approved, and will confirm your start date there and on your MyOffers dashboard.
There are 3 things that could happen when an offer gets declined. 1) It's declined and gets refunded, less a small PayPal transaction fee. 2) It's declined and is 100% refunded. 3) It's cancelled, and receives no refund at all.
1) When you signed up as a SquidOffer advertiser, you agreed to in good faith create only the most authentic, relevant, and honest offers under the sun. This means you agreed not to spam categories, mislead users, feature offensive or illegal content, impersonate anyone, and more. Now, since we're all very busy people, we're betting you will do your best to create the best offer you know how, and that you won't waste our time (and worse, yours) with junky offers.
But if, by chance, you do, and we decline your offer, we'll tell you why and give you a refund. Please note that PayPal charges a small fee for every single transaction, including refunds. So, if you submit an offer that isn't quite up to snuff, and we have to decline it, your refund will be less that transaction fee. The minimum SquidOffer purchase is $100, which would be charged a $2-3 refund fee. So when you get $97 back, that's why.
2. If your offer is declined because of our capricious editorial standards, like: we just didn't think your copy was that great, or it had lots of typos, or the tone didn't quite match with Squidoo, then of COURSE you will get a 100% refund! We'll eat the PayPal transaction fee. And invite you to try again!
3. If, after your offer has been approved, you change your destination URL's landing page, or if your offer is found to be breaking some part of our Terms of Service, it could be cancelled without warning and without refund.
But, gloom and doom aside: we really don't want to decline your offers, so make 'em great!
Anyone logged into Squidoo can cast a vote. They can vote for 90 offers, or just one. Each vote = 1 point, and shows live right away. The 5 offers with the most votes in a category show on all the lenses in that category.
We score votes on a rolling basis, earned during 2 week windows. This means if an offer gets a bunch of votes in just a single day and zooms to the top, in 2 weeks that day's votes will be cleared out. Whoa! Why? Well, an offer has to keep earning its way to the top in order to stay there. This 2 week system gives new offers a chance to get in the mix, and makes sure we're putting only the best, most consistently voted content on all our lenses.
We show on your MyOffers dashboard how many lenses your offer could display on in each category. Right now that's about all there is, because we're specifically focused on not being "ads" and not being about cost-per-click and impression structures. Rather, these are "offers", where the quality of your offer and your content gets votes and earns it way onto thousands of lenses in front of thousands of eyeballs. From there we rely upon the advertiser to track the incoming traffic to his site.
Sorry, we can't help. It's up to you when you submit the offer to make sure it's in topnotch shape. You'll always get to see a preview of your offer before submitting it...triplecheck to make sure your destination URL is right, the copy is right, the image is good, etc. If you're really really stuck, drop us a note here but no promises. Sorry.
SquidOffers for Lensmasters and Partners
You bet! Just sign up for an advertiser account and get started. It's totally cool to buy an Offer to promote your own lenses, your lensography, your blog, your site, whatever! And stay tuned in SquidU for some contests and freebies, exclusive to lensmasters.
SquidOffers are going to show up on every lens in Squidoo, and will not interrupt the natural flow of content on your page. They're designed to fit in as much as possible.
Just as with our existing AdSense pool and our PayRank system, we'll pay lensmasters half of our earnings from SquidOffers, after we pay out overhead.
So, chances are if you have a lot of good lenses (which boosts your PayRank), the inclusion of SquidOffers will help your monthly royalties will go up.
SquidOffers are designed not to interrupt the natural flow of content on your lens. They're meant to fit in as much as possible. By placing them in the sidebar on lenses (we'll never move them into your main content column, promise) and clearly labeling them SquidOffers, we're telling your readers right up front that these are different from your usual content. We might play with the UI of the SquidOffers over time, as we see what appeals more successfully to surfers and to lensmasters alike.
Yes yes yes! Please shoot a note to us here or email it to charity at squidoo.com.
