Squidoo Still in my Good Books

It has been a while since I have talked about my lenses and since the September earnings have just been paid to lensmasters, I thought that now is a good time to update you on how I am doing with Squidoo at the moment.

I am not running to buy a new car yet (although I could really do with one) but yesterday Squidoo credited my Paypal account with a whooping $30.77, my highest payout yet from Squidoo!

Granted, there were $9.58 included in that figure which I had been accumulating from previous months because Squidoo only pays lensmasters who have earned $10 or more, but even considering that fact, November has brought me my record revenue from Squidoo so far of over $20.

My best lens for the month of September (shared advertising revenue is being paid 2 months after the actual month in which it has been earned) was my Squidoo Lensrank Experiment which was a real success for me as it stayed in the top 2000 lenses for most of the month, earning me a handsome $11.52! I also had 4 lenses that didn't rank too bad and earned me $1.92 each and 3 lenses that made $0.08.

In case you are wondering about the total not adding up, my November payment also includes Amazon affiliate revenue (I am not an Amazon affiliate but can still get a small portion of this through Squidoo) earned in October from my Halloween lens; this was a lens that I created at the end of September and ranked pretty well throughout the month of October so I should see more royalties for October that will be paid in December.

Here's for you if you'd like to see what I am up to on Squidoo:
All my lenses so far.

P.S. Christmas is coming soon so why not experiment on creating a Christmas wishlist lens like I did here? Join Squidoo today, it's free! A word of warning though: you could actually enjoy this a lot (I know I do!).

My Squidoo Lensrank Experiment Is Finished!

About a month ago, I created a new Squidoo lens called Squidoo Lensrank Experiment.

Using my knowledge and the knowledge of other lensmasters (I found a great number of Squidoo tips lenses that were very helpful and I also used information from Squidoo's forum) I gathered all the all the Squidoo tips I could come up with and used them in my Lensrank Experiment.

What makes my experiment interesting for other lensmasters or anyone thinking of joining Squidoo is that not only I used all the tips I am talking about, I also disclosed what I was doing as I was applying my tips; I reorganized everything and republished my all-new Squidoo Lensrank Experiment yesterday.

The outcome of my experiment is not bad, as I got my best lensrank on August 26th with my lens getting an overall lensrank of 765 (I started out at 641191). Although lensrank changes everyday, my lens has been in the top 2000 for most of its lifetime so far; I still have to try and update it often to try and keep a good lensrank (at least until the end of this month, as Squidoo royalties are now being calculated based on average lensrank for the month), and I am also also working on a few new lenses at the same time. The good news is that I now have my own Squidoo blueprint to help me with my other lenses.

If you have a Squidoo account, check out my Squidoo Lensrank Experiment; you can even bookmark it if you think you can use my Squidoo advice in the future. If you are wondering what the heck Squidoo can do for you, why not find out by making your first lens for free?

Squidoo Lensrank Experiment

I have written about Squidoo in the past and the reasons why I find it a very exciting way to earn money online.

As far as I know there is no magic formula to get a good lensrank on Squidoo and get a popular Squidoo lens that gets lots of traffic which can in turn make it a good income source, even though many lensmasters have tried to "crack the code", but there are a few things you can do that really help achieving this goal.

All of these tentatives inspired me to create an all-new Squidoo lens which I called Squidoo Lensrank Experiment. As the name indicates, this is an experiment I am conducting to see if I can implement all of the tips I can find to get a good Squidoo lensrank but what makes my new lens original is that I am explaining in detail every single thing I am doing to try and make my lens popular, both in the making side but also the promotion side of things.

So far I have started with a lensrank of 641191 and have come to a lensrank of 8073 in just 3 days (the lower a squidoo lensrank is, the better).

If you want to know how I did it and more importantly if you would like to copy my method and get a good lensrank for your own Squidoo lenses, check it out here and bookmark it (Stumbles, Diggs or anything else you can spare would be greatly appreciated) because I have lots of great tips to add to it every day.

Writing for Associated Content

I haven't updated this blog very frequently lately but this is mainly due to my children being on holidays. I have less time to myself as I haven't had to get up too early (Ok this is my own fault, but I also deserve a holiday!) and I have been spending more time with them; however, I am still working on my Squidoo lenses.

My latest lens is called Writing for Associated Content; I created it to help promote my Associated Content articles but it also includes excellent articles giving tips on increasing pageviews by other Associated Content producers.

The lens is not completely finished yet as there are lots more useful articles I want to include but it is worth taking a look, especially if you are familiar with the Associated Content website. If you like Writing for Associated Content, don't forget to bookmark it as I will be updating it as I find more helpful tips to help you promote your articles.

Setting my Priorities Right

Last month I joined 6 get paid to click (PTCs) sites to see if I could make a little bit of easy money.

I must admit that joining PTC sites wasn't the smartest thing I ever did; I always looked down on blogs containing a bunch of PTC banners and little useful content, but for my defence I can always say that I did it for research purposes. PTCs are usually the first sites joined by people who want to earn money online. Me, I started with an online casino affiliate website, then moved on to this blog and writing articles, Being a Squidoo lensmaster and finally joining PTC sites. As I am pretty busy with all of these sites, I must select the most rewarding websites if I want to actually try and make a living online so I will not waste my time anymore on PTCs.

My favourite site so far is Squidoo; this site is great because it can be used to combine several income streams: for my latest lens for example, I have chosen one clickbank product to promote (a product not related to internet marketing or making money online), wrote a few paragraphs about the topic and included a few links to articles related to the same topic; this lens is now my most popular lens and the last time I checked, I had one clickbank sale (I am now a few cents away from payout!) and I haven't even got to publishing articles to promote this lens on free article directories!

If you want to see what my lens looks like (I still plan on adding a few graphics to make it more attractive), take a look here.

If you are interested in making money with Squidoo, don't forget to check out these articles:
Simple Ways to Make Money Online with Squidoo;
5 Easy Ways to Make Money with Squidoo - Associated Content;
How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 1);
How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 2);
How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 3).

How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster

At last I have completed my series of articles (for now) on how to make money with Squidoo and how to become a successful Squidoo lensmaster.

I haven't quite become a squidaholic yet but I am working on it. These articles were something I had in the works from quite some time; the information was pouring in from everywhere so I decided to strucure it in 4 articles each focusing on one aspect of Squidoo:

5 Easy Ways to Make Money with Squidoo shows you the different monetization methods you can use on a Squidoo lens;

How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 1) focuses on how to make a Squidoo lens more search engine friendly, so that more Internet surfers can find it;

How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 2) explains how participating in the Squidoo community can help you get better rankings and more visitors;

How to Become a Successful Squidoo Lensmaster (Part 3) is more about how to promote your lens online and the use of fresh content to boost traffic on your Squidoo lens.

If you are interested in making money with Squidoo, also check out the One Month, One Lens, $1000 Profit lens; the title is self-explanatory and no, it's not one of my Squidoo lenses (although I wish it were!).

Shameless Promotion: My New Squidoo Lens

I have created and published my fourth Squidoo lens, which is also my first lens that has nothing to do with making money online.

My new Squidoo lens is about something I should have thought about a long time ago: as you may know if you are a regular reader of this blog, I am a French mum living in Ireland; I was finding it difficult to teach French to my children as I have been speaking English to them since the moment they were born and the fact that they could not communicate with their grand-parents easily was starting to bother me a lot!

This is why I have decided to create Learn French Online. Of course the fact that this Squidoo lens is not dedicated to making money money online does not mean that I am not trying to earn some from it, this is why I have added a few affiliate links, an Ebay module and also an Amazon module (so far).

I haven't started to promote Learn French Online yet, apart from blogging about it on Smart Ways to Earn Money Online with Internet Junkie so I will try to write down everything I do in order to try and get traffic to it. Now I must get to work so that I can write another great article about making money with Squidoo very soon!

My New Money-Making Projects

I haven't been very active on this blog this week but this doesn't mean I haven't been working hard and coming up with new smart ways to earn money online!

I signed up with Numenmail 4 days ago: this is not really my usual style but yes, I have been taken in by their seemingly very attractive program! Numenmail is one of those Paid to Read Emails websites but this one looks like it really pays well. Payout level is at $8888: yes, I know this is huge but I got a free $800 bonus on sign up and most of their emails pay $80 plus I get on average 20 links to click per day (so far) which pay $5 each. So far I have a balance of $1670 and I am still expecting something to pop out of their site telling me that for some reason they cannot pay me when I get to $8888!

I don't want to turn this blog into one of these sites listing all sorts of Get Paid to websites and full of banners trying to get referrals, with (in my opinion) very little good content. I am not saying these are bad, I just think there are enough already out there and I don't want to join the masses. If you are interested in finding out whether Numenmail is a scam or the real thing, you can follow my progress on Can I Really Make Money Reading Emails?, which I update every day with my new earnings and anything else related to this that I might find of interest. I will also write a post here when I reach payout level (I should be rich by then!), and if (as I suspect) I find out this is a scam, I will make sure to update you on that too!

I also created a new Squidoo lens, How to Increase your Clickbank Commissions, containing affiliate marketing tips so that I can promote my affiliate marketing articles and links and (especially) my Clickbank portal.

Talking about affiliate marketing, I wrote 3 articles about affiliate marketing during the week. I will publish them all on Associated Content and also on my favourite article directories (this is so I can try and get more links to this blog and and promote my Clickbank portal), but not all at the same time. I think I should wait at least for a week between each batch of submission so that I do not get slapped by Google for submitting duplicate content to different websites.

Boosting Traffic: How to Make and Save Money Squidoo Lens

Here is the update on how my Squidoo lens, How to Make and Save Money, is doing: today its lensrank is 2599 (when I first published it about 2 weeks ago, it was something like 183000), it is number 74 for the "SEO and Affiliate Marketing" category, so I am pretty pleased so far, even though I have only had 21 visits.

As you may already know if you are familiar with Squidoo, your lens gets a better chance of ranking high (and making you more money) if you update it often. The ideal updating frequency would be once a day but it is not always very easy to come up with new content every day, especially if you are busy doing other things like blogging.

Unfortunately I have noticed that the mere inclusion of RSS feeds (even if they get updated every day) doesn't count as an update, so I have decided to create a Favourite lens of the day module: every day I will write a short review about a different Squidoo lens (it has to be related to making or saving money).

I am encouraging lensmasters to comment on my guestbook by leaving the url of their Squidoo lens, so I need to spend a bit of time commenting on lenses that I like, this way lensmasters and their visitors will be aware of my traffic boosting opportunity and if they are interested, they will have to visit my lens.

Et voila! Updating and traffic, I have just killed 2 cows (or it birds?) with one stone!

A Simple Way to Make Money with a Squidoo Lens

When I first started to use the Internet to make money, I suffered from Information Overload: so many money-making ideas being thrown at me but no real plan on how use most of these in my advantage. I started too many projects without really knowing where I was going; I read a lot of articles saying that Squidoo was a good way to make money online so I created a Squidoo lens.

This was about 3 months ago; my Squidoo lens has a link to this blog, probably another one to my website and I really can't remember what else: I actually can't even remember its url address!

A few weeks ago, another Associated Content producer sent me a message asking me if she could use the RSS of my articles to put on her Squidoo lens. Naturally I was very curious so I went and took a good look at it: it is called Know It All Moms and contains a lot of advice on children, parenting, homeschooling, women's health and money (that's where I come in).

The interesting thing about this Squidoo lens is that it doesn't require much maintenance; there is an introduction followed by the RSS of Lisa Carey's own Associated Content articles, plus a few other RSSs, so the updating of her lens is being done automatically.

Since most Associated Content producers write on a lot of different topics, I wouldn't really recommend using RSSs, as this means you could get an article on the American election thrown in the middle of parenting articles, so selecting individual articles would be a safer bet. Another option would be to add the RSSs of different blogs, always with prior owner's consent of course. Using RSSs is different from copying whole articles, so there is no risk of being penalised by Google for using duplicate content.

One very positive thing about Lisa's lens is that it helps not only her own articles, but also other people's articles to get more page views, which means more money. She also uses Adsense and Amazon in order to earn money from her Squidoo lens.

This gave me a totally new outlook on Squidoo and how to make money from it and I think I might try another shot at it.