Squidoo: I don't get it

Squidoo, so far, has been a waste of time for me. I put a lot of work into creating a lens with great content.

The result? One visitor. Great payoff there.

Now I have to work to get traffic to it? Why don't I just work to get traffic to my real site?

Google really likes Squidoo pages if they are properly optimized with groups, tags, links, and variety, and good content.

That's a nice tip, Stacy. Thank you.

I'll be watching this thread because I have to agree with the first two posters in my experience to date.

I know, i know, it gets crawled like every 13 seconds by the warm hand of Mummy-G, and all that... but as far as I can tell, it's basically just a fancy article directory that I can put my own affiliate links on.

I'm keen for the Squidoo-folk (squids?) to wade in to the debate (as it were).

TheNightOwl

Hi been playing around for a few month now with squidoo and hub pages as a way of just increasing the numbers of links to one of my sites and it is working..

the site has moved up in the search listing on Google and I am seeing more traffic.

Ok I'm not making much from the lens and hubs...but that was never the idea..I am making from the traffic from Google...

they are free to set up easy to use so why not use them.....in the past i have played for links that got me a lot less then they do

What I like to do is take my ezine articles and flip them alittle bit and paste them to a squidoo lens and put my actual site below every article, as far as getting traffic to the site, social bookmarking can take care of that.

Some folks are making a killing from Squidoo. To think Squidoo is a waste of time and money is WRONG. People often come up with horrible lens and thoroughly deserve what they get. Take a look at the link below and you will understand what I mean.

Are you a Stay at Home Mom (or Dad) Interested in Earning a Monthly Income?

I traied squido in the past but did't work for me, I do think it's a bit of wast of time.

Hi, I've just come around to squidoo, so I can't really weigh in here. I've read other posts where people make a killing. But I've created a few lenses, what's the harm in getting more backlinks. But I've heard hubpages are great, and I really know nothing about them. Anyway this weekend i plan to do some reading and figuring things out. We'll see if it's time well spent.

I do know there is a warrior on here who offers a squidoo course for those wanting to learn more.

I primarily use Squidoo for SEO help but not to make sales from a product. There are those that swear by it and apparently do pretty well however.

@yourreviewer: I received your PM, but I don't have enough posts here to be able to respond. Please contact me through my lens and I will be happy to give you some advice on your lens.

Janet~

Most people don't stick around with Squidoo long enough to figure out how it works. I've had lenses get #1 front page rankings for affiliate product names for searches that returned over 400,000 pages on Google. I've got a Sqidoo lens right now that shows on the front page of Google and it has held it's position for over 4 months now. The search for the name of the affiliate product promoted returns over 300,000 pages.

I don't care what anyone says, if you learn the ropes you can make a killing with Squidoo. Apparently, no one here likes Squidoo, so I'm not going to spoon feed my techniques, but you need to have a keyword density of from 2.8-4.5% to make Google love you. I go for 3.5 and it works well.

Do some homework. Squidoo rules!

I use squidoo mostly for backlinks to my main sites. One of my friends in real life is making about $500 a month of squidoo and she doesn't know a think about making webpages. I guess it has it's appeal there where you can build pages easily without know much about seo, html java etc.

I haven't put much time into squidoo because:
1) You can't have an opt in page in squidoo and I do a lot of email marketing
2) You can't effectively use ppc marketing in my opinion because the user is sent to a content site with too many bounce links (other squiddo lenses, advertisements, etc).
3) You cannot track your affiliate sales.

I see a few people doing using PPC for squidoo lenses, I just don't know how it would work.

I guess it can be good for adsense if you find good keywords and work on seo. Good for people to get started with internet marketing if you've never built a website.

In my experience the people who make the most money from squidoo are making money by teaching other people how to make money on squidoo.

its extremely wrong to think that squidoo is a waste of time.

However, it needs GOOD lenses and time, then the traffic will come. The benefit is also not the lens alone, but the PR coming from the lenses, and interlinking the lenses with your sites, adding your site's feed on the lenses and vice versa.

I have a bunch of lenses which rank VERY high on google for certain search terms and products. So it cannot be that wrong.

As always, this rule applied:

Don't depend on ONE thing - but use EVERYTHING you can get your hands on to your advantage.

What many have said is true for sure, squidoo is a free alternative to making your own site and a great one at that. I have mostly used it as a landing page in the past quite effectively. Google tend to love squidoo pages when they are properly optimized and tagged correctly, so if you don't have a website, its a great place to start!

I use it for the SEO end. It ranks well with google so it helps get traffic to your site. They take about 20-30 minutes to set up, then you just let it go. Update it every so often,just to keep it fresh.

I like them.

I have been using squidoo aswell and haven't had much success with it, but I'm not going to say that its been a waste of time because I've seen the power of lenses showing up in the first 2 or 3 results of google for a very competitive keyword. If you are using squidoo i think stay focused with it, im certainly going to be revisiting my lenses to clean and optimise them

Squidoo lenses help me drive traffic I may miss otherwise to websites...they aren't huge numbers

here's an example from my analytics for one of my websites:

squidoo.com (referral) 67 7.17%

on this lens, it has the opportunity to:

1. go to a website
2. buy my book

so if someone doesn't come across my book website, or my main site this is working for -- this is an extra net to catch visitors

Oh, Squidoo... When I first started Internet Marketing, I was only building Squidoo Lenses and writing articles for EzineArticles. Was it worth it? Heck Yeah! Just look at my DAILY traffic stats for just ONE LENS:



... and I get 25%-35% CTR to my links from all my lenses.

- Lenses are free to build
- Lenses are easy to build
- Lenses are very easy to get indexed
- Lenses are relatively easy to get ranked HIGH in the SE...

I still build occasional lenses and all of them start getting decent amounts of organic visitors within weeks, sometimes within days. Google still seems to love Squidoo as well, so why not?

Alex

I've had reasonably good luck with Squidoo. I like it for topics that I want to spend a day or two on and then periodically update. Probably my most successful lense is one that is gradually growing its number of visitors (okay, it's still only about 80 a WEEK).

I have some affiliate links in there about where to buy this product and periodically I make a sale from them. Just in this last month I sold $200 worth of a product which garnered a $50 affiliate payoff. Okay, I can't pay the mortgage with it, but you can bet the $50 made me think about what I could do to continue to increase visitors.

I think Squidoo is great for topics where you don't want to do even a mini website or a blog, but you have some information that people would find useful and some products to associate with that information.

Others use it as described above, to drive traffic to other websites or blogs.

Marketing with Squidoo is just like any other strategy... it takes some time, effort and it needs to be part of a comprehensive larger plan. You may have to create several lenses to get one that is "worth it", and figure out the system.

If you are looking for immediate results, then you probably are not going to like ANY strategy out there... it can happen, but it can rarely be counted on.

One of the great things about Squidoo is that it is work that is done once with repeated pay-offs over time... getting one hit from a squidoo lens is not so exciting, but getting one hit a week forever is a different story. And - if you take the time to study what works and practice a bit, you could get great results like Alex!

One more note - not only can Squidoo pages get indexed quickly and build up PR for your site, but they are located on a different IP from your host. This means that most Search engines will give them even more importance when evaluating YOUR site...

One way link, different IP, easy to setup, no cost and highly flexible... its a fantastic tool. Your job is only to figure out IF its the right tool for you, and then how best to use it in your strategy.

Ron

Plexpert said,
I haven't put much time into squidoo because:
1) You can't have an opt in page in squidoo and I do a lot of email marketing
2) You can't effectively use ppc marketing in my opinion because the user is sent to a content site with too many bounce links (other squiddo lenses, advertisements, etc).
3) You cannot track your affiliate sales.

Not true at all! You can have an opt-in page through Squidoo. I simply take a screen shot of my opt-in pop up from my main site, insert it into Squidoo with a clickable link to an HTML page I've set up at one of my domains, and bang--the names go into aWeber as slick as you please.

You say that you can't track your affiliate sales. Why not--everyone does that.

By the way, and I'm not criticizing folks here, but Squidoo is much more powerful than you think. I can pick any niche I wish on Squidoo, do some research, put up a lens and have it rank #1 or #2 on Squidoo for the name of the product and get it on the front page of Google 99% of the time. A lot of big name gurus use Squidoo lenses and I slap them silly even for the names of their own products. I do this because I have taken the time to study how it works and test, test, and retest my techniques.

I'm not being critical when I say this, but a lot of you are missing the boat on this.

Like anything else, it takes time to master.

OPT-IN in Squidoo? Possible!
And using an image that when clicked takes you to a blank page with an opt-in form is outdated.

You can have an actual opt-in form on your lens now
Check this out: How to add an opt in form to your Squidoo lens
(not it is not my lens, or my method, but it works!)

Alex

I never did well with Squidoo, either. I'll take the advice from here and modify my lens and see what happens.

I would agree that Squidoo is a great place to start if you don't have a webpage or blog, as its free and it has heaps of easy to use templates. I've been using squidoo as a general information page about my business and it does well as a landing page for me! I wouldn't want to host my entire business on it, but as far as giving people general information and posting some affiliate links for my business, it works great! Some great posts on using it as business tool here though!

I followed some of the links in this thread and it looks like there are some dedicated and focussed people here making some money directly off their squid pages. More power to them.
My particular interest is in how lenses support a hub network beefing-up the backlinks, themes etc etc. Does anyone have some insight or experience into that aspect ?
Tony

Squidoo can be used to provide backlinks for your main site.

Hey it's free to use folks that counts for something.

i am now #1 (yes, ONE) for "micro niche finder" on google...should asnwer your question. I have other lenses which rank well too.


Secondly, you all know how "reviews" can turn many visitors into buyers. And the lenses are excellent to make pre-sell review pages for whatever products.

Hello YseUp

We all need to find ways to get content in front of visitors that are interested...some call it getting in the way of traffic....( thats what Squidoo has lots of)

Think of it as owning more internet real estate, or building our virtual assets....so how do we get our content marketed?

There is a great way to integrate Squidoo, articles, and blogs together into a giant traffic net, by building keyword targeted lens campaigns....that not only builds links, but generates direct traffic to your website, blog, or affiliate landing pages==>>

This is quite an interesting thread.

I am a Squidoo newbie. I published my first lens less than a month ago as a tool to drive traffic to another site. Traffic to that site has already increased and so have sales. I'm still learning about Squidoo and finding out what it can do, and I find this thread particulaly informative because it reveals an interesting range of points of view.

A tool can only be as effective as the skill of the person using it. So before I started working on my lens, I looked at scores of lenses to see how they were presented and to get a general feel for Squidoo. I looked at lenses with high rankings and those that were probably never seen by anyone besides the lensmaster.

I noticed the various ways people use Squidoo. Not everyone has a primary money-making motive. Some simply want to socialize and meet people who share their interests, and that was obvious from their lenses. I recognized those who specialized in making money directly from Squidoo and could see the strategies they use.

As I climb the Squidoo learning curve, I know that I've got to use my lens in conjunction with other tools and tactics to get the most benefit from it. I do have the advantage of a few years of online marketing experience so I'm familiar with many of the pitfalls. I also understand the elements of SEO and so on.

I think every lensmaster owes it to him or herself to first develop a clear understanding of Squidoo benefits and limitations, and then figure out if (and/or how) they can navigate these components to reach their objectives. And that ought to be done without being distracted by what others may be experiencing - positively or negatively.

BTW, my lens is in my signature, if you care to take a look.

Hermas.

i have never tried Squidoo, I was going to give it a go soon, I hope I do not waste my time!. Thanks for the input guys.

I agree. I took a look at the sight a few days ago./ I did know what all the fuss was about. It seems to be a huge waste of my time.

according to my friend, that makes several million a year, you hook squidoo into a network of high pr site pages
wetpaint.com
squidoo.com
hubpages.com
tumblr.com
wordpress.com
about 8 others

each page on each site connecting to another high pr site page and also connected to your page. If you do it right, he says you get to the top of google.

I think Jacquie Lee said it best. You must optimize your Squidoo lens effectively with the whole enchilada otherwise it won't work for you....

I have an idea.

Up to date I'm scared of automated link building software for established domains. But what if I used those types of programs to build links to a squidoo page and then passed the juice to a credible website from there?

It would be "link laundering" kind of like money laundering but for links. Thoughts?

I use Squidoo and it's great for me. But you have to know how to optimize it for Google. I know a lady from Georgia who made over $150,000 in one year with a marketing plan she devised using Squidoo. PM me and I'll tell you about it.

This article is a bit old now... but I'm not sure Google Love's Squidoo as much as people want to believe. Those ranking in Google are likely not ranking because of Squidoo, but because the content is relevant.

Google Acting Against Squidoo Due To Spam

I'm with most of you, not much activity from my Squidoo lenses.

I was a bit of a late starter with squidoo and can understand how you feel. When i first came across it i thought it was some freaky uperclass version of blogger. Another free site that would shut me down after a while even if i did nothing wrong once i had excellent traffic in there direction.

Then last xmas i reviewed this amazing traffic generation ebook from a fellow wf member and the section on squidoo really got me thinking.

Since then ive outsourced and created my own lenses and the traffic and backlinks and sales together have been amazing. Like everything new we are often afraid of it but i thoroughly recommend that you give it a go.

Here is a free squidoo ebook (no email addy required) to show you how to become a squidoo expert:

Samantha Milner's Expert Series - Become a Squidoo Expert in 24Hrs

kind regards


sam
X

I don't understand how anyone uses Squidoo? I have been a chronic internet user since the mid to late 1990's (at least a few hours every day) and not ONCE have I EVER encountered a Squidoo page and I use Google instead of the address bar half the time to find websites LOL.

Is the best advice to use Squidoo as a backlink and not spend too much time on it?

Don't underestimate Squidoo. Even if you don't have another 'money site,' using GOOD keyword research and some good keyword-rich articles published on EZA, you can make very good money.

There are people making unbelievable amounts of money using Squidoo. Some of the Giant Squids especially are making many times more money just from Squidoo than I could ever hope to earn working a regular job.

I don't like squidoo, it's too busy, it implies you need to continuously tend to lenses and it's covered in links.

Talk about link dilution.

As for the Google loves it quotes, I tend to think Google loves highly optimized, long pages with great keyword focus.

Still, at least the links are dofollow, unless they deem it to be a work in progress.

I've written 800 word lenses that are wip's.

- Delete

- Add to Ezinarticles

Hello links, traffic and sanity!

I wrote an article about Squidoo just a few days ago. Here's the link for it!

The lenses seem to rank extremely well in Google and there's no waiting around to get each lens approved. You can throw in nice anchor text for inner pages so it definitely has value. I think Squidoo is good for experimental projects where you target one such product.

Their referral program is quite sneaky though, whereby you get 5$ per referral, but each referral has to earn 15$ before you get the money. It'd take some work getting that 15$ cos they share the revenue out between the very top guys. HubPages offer a flat 10% share, which is more fair.

Create the best lens you possibly can and you'll probably earn some good money. Otherwise, just use it to join up the dots for all of your sites.

Hey YseUp, I've been tackling Squidoo Lens for the past 6 months with no really success as yet. I painfully learnt that there is a right way and a wrong way to use Squidoo Lens... I think I'm finally going to make a break through and if I do... dare I say it... then sure enough... anyone can. Fingers X'd

I have used Squidoo to make all my money that I am now using to create actual websites. O.o