My Squidoo Earnings Payout!

I blogged about Squidoo a couple of months ago when I joined up. It's a pretty unique social networking site where you get to create pages on any subject that you want. Unlike myspace, facebook, etc it's unique in that it's main purpose is to earn you money! I received my first payout yesterday for $17.48 or a little over £8, first I knew of this was an email from paypal telling me the money had arrived!



I didn't think too much at first until I read more and did a few searches but not only can you earn cash from creating pages you can drive traffic to your website, make pages about gadgets and gizmos that you can place your affiliate links on, or even take the easy option if you don't want to have to manage an affiliate account as squidoo has over 1000 affiliates already and a very easy interface for you to advertise their products.

I only joined up at the very end of June so July was my first month on squidoo and I didn't spend to much time on it. The lens that I did spend a lot of time and effort on was my Perry Mason Lens, though I don't think I got it completed to my satisfaction until August and I'm still tweeking it occasionally.

Imagine my Surprise when this lens earned me over $15!!! $4 of this was for being a high ranked lens, though it never made the top 100 on squidoo, it did spend a few days inside the top 200 on occassion and does get about 40 hits a week. So this $4 was a payout for being in the top tier on squidoo as a share of the sites adsense revenue, but where did the rest come from? Well, squidoo don't do much to break down the sources of revenue as yet, though this could have been from referalls to ebay or cafepress as they were the only money making modules on the page apart from Amazon, and they do log your amazon referalls, though I only had one purchase via amazon, and that's a pre-order which won't ship until next week, so earnings from that won't come through for another couple of months. Visitors may have gone to ebay to look at Perry Mason items I was showing there, or they may have bought items off Cafepress I was highlighting. Other lenses earnings varied from 4cents each for the work in progress and minimal lenses that haven't had much traffic and I keep meaning to go back and finish these, and 73cents for other lenses that were getting reasonable traffic. Though I must mention that these other lenses have sent traffic to my site, and also earned me commission from people following links on them to products I was recommending so am very pleased with my first couple of months on squidoo!


Next month should be even better as squidoo traffic was considerably down in July due to getting a slap from google due to allowing the creation of 'spam' pages, this was something squidoo jumped on very quickly but it did have a huge impact on visitors to the site and rankings on search engines for google which didn't really recover until August

I know that at least one visitor did go to cafepress to buy an item, as it was an item I created in a Cafepress store I was inspired to open by squidoo's interface with them, so not only did I earn commission for sending a customer there, I earned money as they bought an item I had created. For more info on Cafepress and how to earn money selling stuff from coasters to coffee mugs, stickers to wall clocks and aprons to thongs all with your own designs on, just click on this banner - and sign-up, it's real easy!



So what are you waiting for? Sign up to squidoo now, if you use this link you will also get an extra $5 when you earn your first $15 and so will I!

Squidoo - Earn money online by writing reviews and content

Squidoo - Is a pretty unique community site allowing you to earn a share of the advertising revenue generated by people visiting the page you created. Whether it's a review of a book, restaraunt, night out or a rant, if it attracts visitors you'll get income! You can even use it to signpost your website and increase SEO (search engine optimisation).

For an example you can visit the page I made about Absinthe

If you sign up via my referral link you will also earn an extra $5 when you have earnt $15 revenue through visitors either just viewing your page and more if they click through from links on your lens (squidoo call each entry a lens)

There is no limit to the number or subjects you can create pages on and payouts are monthly via paypal. The minimum payout is actually a ridiculously low $1

I'll report back in a few weeks to let you know how I get on with it and what sort of earnings I have made. I don't expect to make bucket loads of cash, but I'll see if I can make some interesting content and what sort of things I have found worked!

Buy It Now with Google Checkout

Over the weekend I got a little distracted from my main task of working on my Amazon aStore Tutorial. I was asked what other payment methods I used by an eBay customer who was having problems with using paypal to pay for an item he'd won on eBay. Until this point I'd relied on paypal, though not happily due to their high proportion of fees.

This enquiry prompted me to look at alternatives to paypal, in particular the recently launched Google Checkout. Well, as a google account holder I found it a breeze to set up compared with paypal and the big advantage they are currently promoting it with NO FEES UNTIL 2008! I'm not sure whether this offer will run for long, as it may just be an incentive to people to sign up and once they have the targetted take up they may then withdraw the offer I suspect, whilst of course honouring the offer to those who have already taken it up! The other thing Google are doing to promote this rival to paypal is working with some big retailers to offer £10 off orders of over £30!

I had a play with the buy it now buttons on my googlepages site, and found it quite easy to add buttons, so am just waiting to see if my customers find their way here to buy stuff that I have cheaper than on amazon & ebay as I don't have fees to pay!

Lastly, Apologies to those that were expecting me to be providing instructions on importing/ exporting category lists for aStores, I did some work on this and it wasn't quite so straightforward as I thought it would be. I'll try and spend some time working this out during the week, and will update here when it's live.