Craig Banks owns Daybreak Web Designs and loves Squidoo.com. You can find his lenses here. He’s got over 100!
As a web designer he creates a lens for each website, part traffic generator to take advantage of Squidoo’s huge traffic, and part search engine optimization for those deep links, one way links, etc.
For example:
http://www.squidoo.com/chincoteague-island/ helps to promote http://www.chincoteague-island.net/
http://www.squidoo.com/fresh-seafood/ helps to promote http://www.fresh-seafood.net/
http://www.squidoo.com/charter-boats-guides/ serves http://www.charter-guide.info/
http://www.squidoo.com/commercial-fishing/ serves http://www.commercial-fishing.org/
I asked him how much money he makes from Squidoo and here’s his answer:
I am more likely to generate income by sending human traffic from one of the Squidoo lenses to a website that I own. The great advantage is that this gives me multiple chances to have a reader provide some source of income. For instance, a visitor to the seafood lense might end up on one of our travel sites, our seafood site, the commercial fishing site, a regional fishing site or our cafepress t-shirt and gift store.
The system starts to work when we are able use Squidoo as a tool to help web users find relevant products and services. These are often well defined niches. For example pier fishing enthusiasts might visit the Squidoo Pier Fishing lens, notice one of our pier fishing t shirts and make a purchase.
Another great strength of Squidoo is its ability to be an asset in the search engine rankings rivalry.My goal is to have not only my own site in the top 10, but to help fill those other spots in the rankings with great resources such as Squidoo lenses. Of course its very possible that a Squidoo lens can overtake one’s own website, especially if the main site is new.
To answer your question, its more likely that I will receive income indirectly from a lens, but both events are possible. The ease of lens creation allows lensmasters to target keywords that ordinarily would have too small of a niche audience to make it worthwhile to target. Those lenses can get modules added to them which are geared towards direct sales while our links on the page will still bring in at least occasional traffic.
It’s not unusual for me to have many lenses that direct traffic to a particular website or family of websites, each lens focusing on a tiny segment of audience. My situation makes this work since we have a family of inter-related sites, allowing one lens to help promote multiple sites.
As for lens creation, I pay particular attention to URL selection, titles, adding unique content and adding modules that provide updated content such as rss feeds and guestbooks. If the promotion of one of our sites is paramount, I will focus on that. If its less important I can install modules such as an Amazon Plexo or an Ebay module, thereby increasing chances of direct sales. One might use an entirely different strategy and set of modules if direct income was the sole reason for the lens.
Of course many lenses are simply for fun. I am happy to report that while my web projects went from hobby to business long ago, Squidoo is the one remaining place where I can go and create pages simply for enjoyment.
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