I’m always looking for different streams of income that I can add to my bottom line. I like to diversify the sources that earn me money. Some people would say I lack focus, but I prefer to consider it a purposeful strategic move to not have all my eggs in one basket.
Anyway, if you’ve visited this site at all in the past, you know that I use Squidoo lenses for providing backlinks to my money sites quite a bit. In fact, I have over 60 lenses but the funny thing is that I never once considered actually using Squidoo to make money!
My lenses do earn me a couple of bucks a month, but I always thought of that as just extra “gravy” money. Since I always thought of them primarily as a backlinking tool, I never considered creating one that was geared towards making sales until I discovered that you could use your own affiliate links AND that they even have tools that help you do that!
I actually thought they frowned on affiliate links in lenses because they wanted you to use the Squidoo links but that isn’t the case at all. I stumbled across this page that has a bunch of tools for making ads with YOUR Amazon affiliate link in them and now I’m looking at Squidoo in a whole different light!
Once I saw that page, I got to thinking “Hmmm…. this could be an easy, quick and free way to test out new niches/keywords”! I’m always coming across cool products I want to promote or keywords I want to try but I don’t always want to go through the trouble or expense of registering a domain and making a whole new website on them and for this Squidoo is perfect!
I’ve always loved how Squidoo makes it easy to add videos, pictures and other modules to a lens and you can build a nice looking lens in an hour or two so it’s pretty easy to get something up on the web that you can make money from right away.
Personally, I would focus on building each lens around one type of product. For example, lets say you wanted to promote Desktop Aquariums. What I would do is find 3 or 4 models of desk aquariums over on Amazon that I wanted to promote. Try to find some that have customer reviews and a high star rating. Then do the usual keyword research to find some good keywords to focus your lens on.
Write a couple of paragraphs for the intro text module and include a photo of a desktop aquarium. Use your main keyword in there and, of course, name your lens with your main keyword. Add all your secondary keywords as tags and be sure to turn on the table of contents.
Then, below that make a text module for each of the products you want to promote. In the case of the example here, it would be for each desk aquarium model.
In each text module, include a picture of the product (use the amazon code to get the picture with your affiliate link) Write a description of the product and talk about the benefits as well as how high it is rated and what customers liked most about the product (to do this you need to read the customer reviews, of course). Then at the bottom, include a buy button and/or text link that says something like “CLICK HERE to find out more about the xxx product and see customer reviews”. You can get buy button graphics that Amazon allows you to use at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t6/a9
After these modules, add in some youtube modules with videos of your product (try to pick ones that aren’t sales pitches for someone’s website) and more text widgets with more unique content based on some of the other keywords you found in your research. I like to add in some text widgets with helpful information on the product. Sometimes I put in an ebay module and I always add a guest book.
The key is to focus on making your lens a good “authority” on the topic and not just be about selling something. Gain the trust with authority content and the selling will follow!
Of course, once you publish your lens, you will need to do some backlinking in order to get it indexed and ranked. I suspect they will rank more quickly and higher than a new blog due to the klout of the main domain – I’m experimenting on that right now but it’s too early to report any results (I will edit this later to add them in when I have them – Edit: Got up the morning after making the lens and it is #43 for its main keyword … will now point some more backlinks to it!).
There is one caveat here and that is the same caution that I would give when using any property that isn’t on one of your own domains and that is that you do run a slight risk of it being taken down. Most anything has this risk though so if you make quality lenses and aren’t spammy then you will probably be ok. There are some topics that Squidoo hates so you might want to check out their http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont content policy to make sure you are not violating their policies.
Using Squidoo like this can be a great, inexpensive way to add another income stream and to test out new niches. If you hit on some that do really well, then you can consider building out a full site on them and you can use your lens as an authority backlink to that site which should give it a good boost to start off with!
You can also sell your lenses, so flipping Squidoo lenses could be another added income stream!
I think these lenses can be a great passive income stream that you can “set and forget” because a lot of my older lenses still get lots of traffic even though I don’t do a thing to them.
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