11.08.08
Squidoo me the money!
Well, my cold has gotten worse, so I’ve accomplished little, but I am excited about what I have managed to do.
I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago, of writing articles (lenses) on Squidoo. I thought the only real benefit of them was that I would get some link connections, and therefore get my website ranked a bit higher in search engines (Search Engine Optimization).
But I found out, reading someone else’s lens, that you can actually make MONEY from your lenses. I can promote my products in my Etsy store, and make sales that way, and I can recommend books and music on Amazon—of which I get a commission fee if someone buys through the link—but, the part that I didn’t know about until just a couple of days ago, is that Squidoo divvies up 50% of its advertising revenue among the people who write lenses. Your share of the revenue is based on how well your lenses are ranked, and how many hits they have gotten over the past month. And those monies are disbursed once a month.
Coinciding with this discovery—that I can make money without having to hope that someone will buy something I’ve recommended—is a huge increase in traffic to my earliest lenses. I mean, I went from having 8 hits over the course of two weeks to suddenly having 45 hits just this week. Apparently it takes 2-4 weeks for Google and other search engines’ spiders to crawl and find your lens. Once they do, it starts appearing in searches—thus the sudden explosion of views for a few of my lenses.
Now that I know that people will eventually be able to find my lenses, and now that I know I will make a tiny bit of money for everyone that looks at my lenses, I am highly motivated to write some more! I love to write anyways, and used to wile away boring days at work writing about anything that interested me at the time. Now, for the first time really since college, I have a list of ideas of things to write about.
Squidoo is not just a marketing tool for my website, but a source of cash of its own. And with these increasingly desperate economic times, I’ll take cash from whatever source I can find it (it’s not coming from my store at the moment).
