WAHM or WAHD? Create Multiple Streams of Income From Home With Squidoo

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters (UK version)

Bill Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media.

Squidoo is a website made up of lenses which are individual web pages written by different lensmasters or authors. Each page is about a focused topic that the lensmaster chooses to write about.

Creating a lens is free on Squidoo, and in return Squidoo asks that you stay within their Terms of Service or guidelines. This is a very supportive site with an active forum, and lots of experienced lensmasters who are happy to help out new people.

Most people agree that the lenses that are the most successful are ones where the lensmaster is passionately knowledgeable about the topic.

Hope Angel is by artist Cheryl Lee.

Income streams can be created in five different ways from writing Squidoo lenses. The five ways are:

• Income generated from Squidoo lensrank


• Income earned when reader purchases from a Squidoo sales module


• Selling affiliate products on Squidoo lenses


• Selling products on related sites that you market on Squidoo


• Earning offline income from creating Squidoo lenses

These are all incomes created online without creating a product and/or shipping a product yourself. You can also create another income stream by selling your own products in any of the ways listed above.

Squidoo on its own is a great site. The staff is constantly working to improve, refresh, and update the site for unique features, user friendliness, and keeping it fresh. The Squidoo community and forum is by and large supportive and positive, and a great place for newbies to learn.

Squidoo ranks well in Google on its own, so anything you publish on the site will get a higher priority than if you started from scratch. And there are lots of tools to help you build lenses quickly and efficiently.

Squidoo is like a good investment, and there is lots of room for the site to grow and increase in revenue. It is something that can be worked on in small parcels of time which is what most parents have. You can leave it and let it go if you need to and it will grow on its own to some extent. With consistent effort, you will definitely succeed.

Every lens on Squidoo has an overall lensrank. If you look on your dashboard, that is the number listed next to the lens name. Squidoo is a revenue sharing site, and each lens earns a revenue sharing payout monthly due to the average lensrank during that particular month.

Lensrank payouts range from about $.08 to about $12.00 per lens for lenses between 1 to 85,000 lensrank. Lenses below 85,000 do not earn any money from lensrank. Lensrank changes daily; the number that is important is the monthly average.

Lensrank is earned through a number of factors including ratings, traffic, sales, angel blessings, and clickouts.

Buy at AllPosters.com

Squidoo offers several types of direct revenue earning modules that you can place on your lenses. You do not need to be an affiliate of these companies to sell products from the modules.

Ebay:

Ebay modules give you a lot of leeway as to what you can sell. You can have Ebay chose from your keywords, you can highlight a store or seller, or you can chose specific items to sell on your lenses. If a reader buys anything at all from Ebay by starting at your link, you will get a commission on those sales that is split with Squidoo. You can also earn extra money if a new Ebay customer registers with the site and buys something.

Amazon:

Squidoo currently offers five different Amazon modules that you can sell Amazon products on. They are the Amazon Module, Amazon Plexo, Amazon Spotlight, Amazon Search, and Amazon Recommendations, and Amazon MP3. Each module is a different way to display products from Amazon that are related to your lens topic. I personally like the Amazon Spotlight the best, because it really highlights one single product. If your reader buys anything from Amazon through your link then you get a commission that is split with Squidoo.

CafePress:

The CafePress module allows you to choose specific items, a CafePress shop, or the module can choose products based on keywords. This module works the same way. If a reader buys any product from CafePress from your link, you will get a commission that is split with Squidoo.

There are many companies that allow you to sign up as an affiliate seller. Affiliate sellers are salespeople for the products that they recommend, and if they sell products, then they earn a commission which is different depending on the company they represent.

Squidoo allows lensmasters to add their own affiliate ads, or links to lenses. Your lens can be a recommendation of the product or you can sell affiliate products that resonate with your topic.

Most affiliate sellers will give you credit for a sale for at least 15 days after the initial click through from your ad. Many are for up to 30 or 45 days afterward. There are affiliate programs for just about every store you have heard of, and most types of products. And best of all, you do not have to pack and ship anything.

Squidoo is a terrific marketing tool for your own products. You can make products on several other sites and market them through either Squidoo modules or links you create in a Text Module.

Cafe Press:

CafePress has an affiliate program through Commission Junction. You can sell your own or other people's CafePress products through either a CafePress module or direct links to the items.

Zazzle:

Zazzle is another print-on-demand publishing site that can be marketed from Squidoo successfully. You can sign up to be an affiliate through Zazzle to sell other people's products and create direct links to those products. Or you can create your own Zazzle store and sell your products through direct links, or the Squidoo Zazzle module.

Ebay:

If you are a seller on Ebay, you can create links to your items or store through Squidoo's Ebay module or directly. You can also join Ebay Partner Network (EPN) to sell products as an affiliate.

Etsy:

Are you an artist on Etsy? Squidoo has an Etsy module that you can sell your products from or you can create direct links to your Etsy items from Squidoo.

Lulu:

Squidoo now has a new Lulu module that allows you to sell products that you publish on Lulu or market other people's related products.

Your Own Website:

There is unlimited potential for marketing your own website. You can create a marketing tool to drive people to your website. You can also link directly to products in your lens or you can sell them outright on Squidoo.

Squidoo can also translate into income from outside brick and mortar businesses in your area. Experienced lensmasters can take the internet and search engine optimization knowledge that they have learned to create Squidoo lenses for their local businesses. This is something that you can market when you are out visiting friends, on playdates with other WAHMs or WHADs, or grocery shopping.

By just telling people what you are doing, and are capable of doing for their business, you can gain clients that will pay you directly for your Squidoo marketing expertise. Create business cards for your Squidoo marketing business, and start creating lenses for them.

What makes Squidoo so great is that you are building long term residual income that will grow slowly but will continue to pay you each and every month over a long period of time, and will continue to grow even when you do not have time to actively market it. This is similar to the income an author gets for publishing a popular book. Every time a book sells, they get a small commission. As time goes on, the small commissions add up to larger commissions.

Each time you promote an article, you create a path for traffic to follow. As you become more educated, and create more and more of a following through your promotional efforts, your followers will help you create even more paths. As Squidoo grows, revenue per lensrank will continue to grow, as well as the overall traffic to the entire site. This can only help your lenses rank higher in Google. There are some simple, daily tasks that you can do to promote and support your lenses, and continually increase your passive income and active income.

This is not a magic wand that will create huge amounts of money overnight, but I don't really think that exists anyway. Of course, the harder and more efficiently you work Squidoo, the more benefits you will get, but even a WAHM or WAHD with only one hour a day can succeed at their own pace on this platform.

What can I do in one hour per day to earn an income from Squidoo?

This is based on a five day work week and two days off.

Week One

Day 1

Spend one hour deciding on the topic of your lens and create an outline of what you want to write about on paper or on the computer. Use Word or a similar program.

Day 2

Research your topic online for one hour and see what keywords are a good match for your topic. Find keywords that do not have too much competition.

Day 3

Take your topic outline and create a new lens workshop for it. Fill in the module titles with your outline subheadings. The article title becomes the lens title. Use one of your keyword phrases in the lens title. Write a first draft of the introduction.

Day 4

Spend your hour today writing your lens. This is a first draft. It does not have to perfect. Get your point across, and you can correct the grammar, spelling, and add keywords later.

Day 5

Review your draft, improve and correct it. Add your keywords.

Week 2

Day 1

Add pictures to your lens. Make sure you have filled in at least ten tags in the tags section. Add a Guestbook. Publish the lens.

Day 2

Look at the published lens and decide what you should add, change, or correct to make it better. Go back to the workshop, make your corrections. Then you can start adding Amazon, Ebay or other selling modules.

Day 3

Visit the SquidU forum, and ask for a critique of your lens or put it in your forum signature to start getting traffic. Go back to your workshop and see if you want to add or change anything. Adding a duel or poll module gets a conversation going on your lens.

Day 4

Promote your lens. Add it to Delicious, Digg, Tagfoot, forums, and tweet it out to your friends. Spend your hour creating backlinks for your lens.
Start a new blog for your Squidoo lens topics. Write a post about your lens today.

Day 5

Look at your comments. Visit other people's lenses. Find other lenses on your topic, and if you like them, lensroll them to yours. Let the lensmaster know that you did.

Repeat this process to create a body of work.

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