Squidoo money makers

There are four things you may see in your dashboard after you've had click throughs from a lens to ebay:

CRU This means a new member has signed up for eBay, but hasn't actually made a bid/bin yet.
ACRU This means that your CRU (above) actually placed a bid on an item or made a bin purchase.
Bid/Bin With this information you can see how many of your visitors actually came to eBay and placed a bid on a item.
Winning Bid (Count) This just means that someone actually won an auction or did a BIN.

In the new system squidoo pays lensmasters out only for Winning Bid and (giants) for CRU and ACRU. Since ebay no longer supplies the proper stats, squidoo has created a work around to be able to pay us out in this way. The result is that we still get payed per sale. It's unclear to me right now whether ebay has brought down the amount they pay out per sale.

Zazzle modules are not set to make the lensmaster any money. However, with the new skimlink setup, they can make us something anyhow. Like adsense the payout is lensrank dependent - but distributed among those lenses that have links that are skimlink material. That's not just Zazzle, but other links as well.

Here's more about skimlinks. An individual lensmaster explains Skimlinks as well. She claims that there's a separate zazzle pool that gets distributed between lensmasters using the zazzle module.

As squidoo HQ says: these will never make as much as the money making modules like amazon or ebay. They're just a small bonus.

Since i-tunes songs are only 99 cents a piece, it would take a lot of sales to make serious money from this module, but still: you do get commission from the itunes module. Very suitable for a music or fan lens, obviously. Especially in combination with the Amazon MP3 module: catering to two different kinds of customers.

Is google adwords a money maker?
Squidoo has at this moment two kinds of ads they show on all lenses: glam ads and adsense ads. These make lensmasters money only indirectly: we get payed out based on lensrank. In other words: whether you have a hundred visitors a day, or a thousand: you get the same top tier payout (which is about 10 dollars a month these days).

If you are getting serious traffic on a lens, or series of lenses - start your own website or blog on the subject and put adsense on there: that leaves out the squidoo middle man. And you can use your squidoo articles to give your new site it's first links, so the search engines know it exists.

Other ways to make money online
There are all kinds of ways to make money online. Squidoo is only one - but one of the easiest. I would recommend that anybody who has found a niche that sells on squidoo build a blog or website around that topic as well. If you want to keep it cheap you might also build a hubpage (or hubpages) on that topic. Some article directories pay out their writers based on how many visitors they get. Examples include Triond, about.com and Associated Content, Manuscript Services, Constant Content, Helium, google knol, articleincome, dailyarticle, webcontent, webarticles, allcontent, sportsarticle etc.

This program has made me some money too. The trick is (like it is with CJ) to find the specific online shop that sells what people in your niche want to buy.

Linkshare is a new program for me. I signed up because a shop I wanted to feature had a program through LinkShare. However, it never panned out. I still get their emails, but I can no longer login - account expired or something.

Perhaps I should do a whole lens about this topic. But for now I'll just limit myself to the following observation: it is an extra challenge to find affiliate programs that don't just sell your product, but will pay out in a way that works outside the US as well.

For me, from the Netherlands, what works best are programs that pay out through either direct deposit to a Dutch bank, or paypal.
Programs that fit that bill include: allposters.com, shareasale and squidoo.

Amazon pays out through cheque (which is expensive to turn into money)

Linkshare pays out through direct deposit, but I haven't figured out how to fill in their forms without a US address.

Unfortunately changes in my personal life, and in the way squidu is managed, have made me decide to stop answering questions on that forum. I'm also too busy to answer questions elsewhere.

I am available for consulting though, but that doesn't come cheap. For $99 you get a month of asking whatever questions you want and advice on your SEO strategy, link building, optimizing your blog etc. SEO consult online publishing.

If you aren't willing to pay up, you'll have to be content to stay updated on my Marketing Spiritual Blog where I am also willing to answer any questions related to the posts. It also contains a free ebook.

I'm active on twitter and facebook.