How I got my Squidoo lens to #1.
Squidoo made quite a splash when it first came onto the scene. At first Google loved it like it was their own child, but in July of this year Google slapped Squidoo like a red-headed stepchild.
After all of this I still saw new ebooks and reports being created hailing the power of Squidoo for traffic generation. I'm always interested in new forms of traffic, so I thought I'd test it out myself to see if Squidoo is really all it was cracked up to be, or if people were just making a lot of noise to sell their reports.
I happened to already have a lens at Squidoo from a prior experiment that never got off the ground, so I did a little investigating to see what it took to get the lens ranked in Squidoo (not the search engines). My goal was to get my lens ranked number one in its category (Sports and Recreation) -- which I did, though at the time of writing this post it's now number two.
As it turns out, getting a lens to the top of a Squidoo category is a pretty easy task if you don't mind spending a little money. All I did was drive a bunch of pay-per-click traffic to the lens and got a bunch of positive votes (it's a pretty good lens, if I do say so myself).
I'm not talking about expensive pay-per-click traffic, either. I spent a mere $100 for 1,633 visitors from GoClick.com. I bid on a bunch of golf related keywords, and also on the overflow traffic from the Sports category (which is a neat thing that GoClick lets you do).
On top of that I purchased some pop-under traffic from TrafficZap. I sent a total of about 7,000 unique visitors to the lens between GoClick and Traffic Zap. Keep in mind that I did not expect any of that traffic to convert into ad revenue or affiliate sales. It's been my experience that neither send quality traffic, but I was testing a theory that external traffic to the lens is what makes for good rankings in your Squidoo category.
In case you're not aware, Squidoo lets users vote on lenses. I expected votes to influence the ranking, too. However, getting to the top in Squidoo seems to have little to do with the votes for your lens, and everything to do with the traffic you get to your lens. Here's a lens that has only one vote (and it's a bad vote) and yet is now the number one lens in the Sports and Recreation category.
Knowing that ahead of time would be enough to make me question the value of being well ranked in a Squidoo category. If it's that easy to get ranked (and believe me, my own efforts show it is), then you could get any kind of garbage to the top with a little money and even less effort. Surely Squidoo users would soon figure this out and stop visiting the category pages to look for new lenses to visit?
As it turns out, that's true.
In a period of a little over two weeks I got 1,422 visitors directly from Squidoo itself. So despite being number one for most of that time, I only managed about 100 visitors a day. Now, that's not so bad if you're not using pay-per-click traffic to keep your ranking up. But even if I got my lens ranked number one through other, free, means, would it be worth the effort?
Again, if you're not familiar with Squidoo, here's a little information: Squidoo will share the advertising revenue they generate from your lens with you. The ads are well placed, and there are many options for related affiliate product sales, etc. I used all of these methods on my own lens (which is about Golf). Very relevant ads were shown on the page, so no problems there.
The result? I've earned $0.01 in royalties. Yup, a whole penny from 1,422 visitors. Ouch.
I also peppered the lens with an affiliate link to a top-producing ClickBank golfing product (which I own myself and have found to be quite helpful).
One nice thing about Squidoo is how detailed its reports are. It tracks all of the clicks to external links on your lens, so you know exactly where people are clicking and how often. Squidoo tells me that I managed to get 25 clicks on my affiliate link from 1,422 visitors. That's a 1.7% click-through rate. Not that bad if you consider how much content is on the page. I didn't make any sales, though...
The bottom line is that being ranked number one in the Sports and Recreation category didn't do me any good at all in terms of revenue. The 1,422 visitors almost never clicked on the ads, and only a handful clicked on my affiliate link.
Does this mean that Squidoo isn't a worthy platform for monetization? Not necessarily.
It's very possible that search engine traffic or other traffic converts better than direct Squidoo visitor traffic. After all, it's a safe assumption that the majority of people browsing the Squidoo categories are already familiar with Squidoo, its ads, and how things work there. Naturally they avoid clicking the ads, since ad-blindness has already set in.
And it's also possible that a lens in a different category or on a different subject matter might perform better than the one I created on Golf. Some categories are more purchase-friendly than others. A final thought is that a lens might do better in terms of lead generation: getting people to opt-into a list instead of click on your ads.
All that said, though, I really expected a lot more from direct Squidoo visitors. I expected far more of them, and I also expected better results in terms of click-throughs and ad revenue.
My current recommendation is not to spend a lot of time trying to get to the top of your category in Squidoo until you've proven to yourself that you can monetize the traffic you'll be getting.
Please post your thoughts, comments, and personal Squidoo experiences below.
Enjoy this article?
January 23rd, 2008 - 12:51
I don’t think the traffic you get from Squidoo itself is really worth worrying about. I don’t worry about my internal rank, but it is great for getting to the top of google. Most of my lenses are in the top 10 for specific keywords. My best lens got over 500 hits in the past 7 days and leads people to an affiliate product.
I’m doing pretty well. The key I’ve found ~ thanks Jonathon ~ is links are key. I make sure to have a lot of links to my lenses to keep them at the top and driving traffic.
Jackie Lee
January 17th, 2008 - 23:24
About a year ago I set up a keyword rich lens on Squidoo centered around a CPA program that paid $17.00 per lead. Within 2 days the lens had top ranking for the keyword and stayed in the top 5 for a little over a month. During that time I made an income of over $300 from the CPA program.
After Google’s slap, the traffic and my income dropped dramatically. I eventually deleted the lens because the number of people clicking through to the CPA program or my main site didn’t warrant the amount of time I had to put into keeping the lens updated.
Sharon Bray-McPherson
January 15th, 2008 - 20:58
Jonathon, you are one in a million…the one we can count on to cut through the online marketing bull. Thanks for your insightful Squidoo review.
January 9th, 2008 - 01:37
Totally agree with you JOn
January 2nd, 2008 - 21:06
Squidoo isn’t exactly a waste of time but it certainly is over-hyped as a way to make money. It will help with links and getting indexed and such but it isn’t a way to get rich. Now if more people would just come right out and say that you won’t get rich with it maybe more people would see more cash from it because it wouldn’t be so plugged up with crappy lenses from people who were told it was a free way to make big bucks online.
Use Squidoo as a tool, not a form of income — that is just a bonus and shouldn’t be counted on.
Rhonda
December 30th, 2007 - 12:10
There will always be people out there that will try to invent a better mousetrap, but in MLM markeitng, it’s probably best to stick with what you know. Google, article writing, blogs, list building etc.
Diane Voisley
December 21st, 2007 - 08:29
Thanks for the report John.
December 14th, 2007 - 22:23
I emailed you the info Toby.
December 14th, 2007 - 20:45
Jon -How does one renew their membership to 3WayLinks?
We have tried but the SYSTEM keeps saying…that url is already registered…that email address is already in the sytem….Thanks T
December 13th, 2007 - 23:58
Good, helpful info, as usual Jon. Thanks!
I’ve got 7 or 8 Squidoo lenses on a mix of topics. The number of visitors so far ranges from 0 to several hundred. All of them have Amazon/eBay/CafePress modules that, combined, have made me $20 or so in a year and a half – most of it in the last 4 months.
On all of my lenses, I also have links to my other websites and some affiliate products. Traffic from those links has been moderate at best, with at least a couple of sales.
One thing I’ve noticed is that my lenses usually rank high on Google almost right away for my targeted keywords. I suppose if I worked a little harder at making sure I had highly visible links to my other websites and affiliate products, I would see more benefit from the Google rankings.
One more note: one of my lenses was picked as a Lens of the Day last month (linked above, I hope). Traffic went from 25 visitors a week to 300 in one day. It stayed in the Top 100 for 10 days and had quite a few ‘clickouts’ and Amazon/CafePress commissions. Still waiting to see just how much I’ll collect from AdSense clicks.
Keep up the good work, Jon.
John R. Cumbow
Out-of-print and hard-to-find books and
information for glass artists and collectors
December 11th, 2007 - 15:57
I think Squiddo visitors are kind of the same public other social media sites are attracting. The new advertising method on facebook doesn’t do well too. It looks like these groups of people are just like to hang around and are indeed not “I’m looking to buy something” minded.
Dave
December 10th, 2007 - 21:16
Thanks for the cas study, i almost set out on a squidoo building aqdventure but i thinki will stay with other avenues that prove more profitable. Although i think squidoo would work real godd for driving people to ebay auctions!
December 10th, 2007 - 00:27
I noticed a bump in the S.E.s for my website from about #15 to about #9 approx. 1 month after I created 2 optimized lens with links the site. Didn’t try for any traffic on the lens, just used them for SEO and it seemed to work. To date (6 months)have only had a couple dozen visitors to both lens.
It only took a few minutes to create the lens and I feel it was worth the minimal time.
December 8th, 2007 - 04:18
Option to used un targeted traffic is to rank higher in squidoo not for revenue for that traffic . Ive done myself early of this week(visit my blog for detail)and its work and i got 1 sale from total traffic sent to my squidoo lens. I believe my sale doesnt come from untargeted traffic that i bought but from surfer that click on my lens when it appears on first page for seo and internet marketing category.So for conclussion, sent as many traffic to your squidoo lens and hope someone will click and reading your lens when your lens appear in 1st page.
December 6th, 2007 - 19:41
Hi,
So it would seem some people are having luck with the Squid.
What about other area’s of traffic generation people talk about like Youtube, for one?
steve
December 6th, 2007 - 17:58
Bret:
Did you list your Lens with any of the Squidoo Groups, or when you say you did nothing, do you literally mean nothing?
Joining a Squidoo group should get at least a few hits. What is your Lens ranked at?
December 6th, 2007 - 12:59
I think the problem is that no one knows the alogrythm for Squidoo. So we don’t know exactly what makes for good clickthroughs.
The things I’ve tried is building more than one Lens so as to increase the possibility of clicks.
Using linkreferral (http://www.linkreferral.com/) to drive more targeted traffic. I get between 30 – 60 targeted hits a day with LinkReferral.
Updating my Lens regularly so it gets picked up and indexed regularly by the top search engines.
Writing articles that point to my Lens.
Use TrafficSeeker (http://www.trafficseeker.com/)to submit my site to search engines and directories automatically and periodically, and other stuff.
My pay out at the end of the month won’t pay the mortgage but it is better than .01 cents and improving.
PS: Google needs to go back and revisit its original values and how they treated people. Someone is going to outsmart them in this area and become a major competitor.
December 6th, 2007 - 00:51
Interesting expriement. It’s sad that Squidoo got slapped on the hand by Google, but then again, who hasn’t?
December 5th, 2007 - 17:12
Really fascinating study! I’m a big Squidoo fan, and could have told you for free how your hypothesis would prove out–Squidoo lensrank is completely useless for anything except vanity. Internal Squidoo traffic is extremely modest. In fact, Squidoo staff tell new users that in their forum (where I’m a moderator) once or twice a month. It ain’t about lensrank and it never will be.
Squidoo makes it very easy to rank extremely well in Google & Yahoo, and that’s what it’s best used for. It also makes a nice backlink for blogs & static sites.
As long as it performs the way it does now, I’ll always create a Squidoo lens or two to promote projects, products or sites. But so many people seem to look on it as a magic bean–plant it and grow a massive money tree. If that’s your expectation, you will be sorely disappointed. Squidoo is simply a tool to focus attention, esp. search engine attention.
The Captain up there knows how to plant the actual money tree, but so far he hasn’t told me how it works.
December 4th, 2007 - 19:24
As always, well researched and solid info, thanks Jon.
As some of you, I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a lens to support my business site, but after reading your post and some of the comments, I think I can get more bang for my time and effort elsewhere first.
December 4th, 2007 - 15:44
Jon as an internet marketer, it’s good to have the experiences of others, especially if I haven’t launched in that arena yet. I have a Squidoo lens that I’m not doing much with. My major concern is building up my main site. I think I’ll stick to that.
Thanks again for the research.
December 4th, 2007 - 15:09
I just wanted to chime in here with a few points from the other perspective. I’m currently generating about $500 a month from squidoo and about 20% is the adsense share from squidoo.
a few points:
1) squidoo is designed to convert targeted organic traffic from relevant backlinks and search engines. It is really good at this. I have some lenses that convert at well over 20% for various products.
2) yes traffic has an effect on how highly your lens is ranked, along with some other factors. I would agree that more traffic gains you a higher ranking internally. Now, if that traffic were targeted, imagine how well you would have converted.
3)the lenses that stay in the top 3,000 or so for the entire month usually get an adsense payout of $4-$6.. each. if you have 30 or 50 lenses doing that.. it adds up.
4) most of the e-books are bunk. The squidoo forum and some of the related blogs about squidoo (shameless plug) have pretty much all the information you would need. Surprisingly, the people that participate in these free mediums are usually the one making the most money.
5)in the last two months I’ve gained over 100 PR3,4&5 pages I can use to point at whatever new site I start. Indexing usually takes minutes..
Just some thoughts from the ‘dark side’ of using squidoo for profit…
December 4th, 2007 - 10:01
What fantastic research! Increasing your knowledge on various marketing methods is essential to building any network marketing business. There are so many different ways to market your product or site!
December 4th, 2007 - 09:38
Hi,
Good post Jon. I investigated Squidoo a few months back and found it hard to get a return on time invested. However, I think it has a use to conquer ‘long tail’ keywords in Google. I tested this theory and I am now pleased to report that I am #2 for ‘The Most Popular Poet On The Internet’ on Google. I was #1 for months but I’ve done nothing with it since. Thought I should share. All the best, Allen
December 4th, 2007 - 09:38
Wow! Thanks for the info! Squidoo has been on my list to get going, but after reading this, I will keep my efforts elsewhere for now. FYI, had an interesting experience on Sunday with StumbleUpon… after a couple of hours of creating a brand new site and only I like it one page there was over 750 unique views!!
December 4th, 2007 - 09:16
Great read…I kept hearing about all the Squidoo hype but haven’t started utlizing it…guess I probably won’t after reading this
and focus on other things can will drive more traffic and convert into dollars…one penny…OUCH! 
December 4th, 2007 - 08:32
John:
I didn’t use trafficzap on my lens, I purchased some traffic from them and sent it to my lens.
December 4th, 2007 - 08:04
Jon
I thought I’d give trafficzap a try but I cannot save the code in my squidoo lens – it won’t take the iFrame or the Javascript code. How did you do it?
December 4th, 2007 - 05:12
From reading the above it seems a new way of getting details of your websites on the web. Once you added the page and got to the top, all being well thats the only time you need to invest.
December 4th, 2007 - 04:48
Hi Jonathan,
Brilliant case study!
What a difference compared to the usual “I got a top page ranking” type reports some ‘sell’ us…
To actually see the fruits of your labour – or lack of…
You may well have saved a lot of newbies hours (if not days) of wasted time, that they can now focus on more productive methods of gaining traffic.
(If you see this comment – I’d love to reprint this article on my blog with links back to here naturally, do get in touch if you have no objection)
Warm Regards
Randy Smith
December 4th, 2007 - 04:10
Jon,
I’ve had the same experience with Squidoo. After reading all the books I thought being in Squidoo would mean a ticket to page 1 of Google.
I even put up a few “Best ever…..” lenses, but no visitors. I have the grand sum of $0.16 in my Squidoo bank account.
All in all a bit of a fizzer!
December 4th, 2007 - 02:37
Jonathan,
It might be worth mentioning that Squidoo placement ads via Google have been horrible profit producers for me, just for the record. There are several ways to utilize Squidoo for alternative streams of income (traffic, links, etc.), but from what I have seen, Squidoo users (who by general rule are just other lensmasters) aren’t “buy” oriented. They are very blind to Google ads and rarely click them. In turn, this creates lots of impressions because of lens browsers and no clicks, hence defeating the purpose of placement ads. Maybe others here have found success with this strategy, but not me. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who has!
Just thought I’d give you a heads up in case you considered this for the next Squidoo case study!
December 4th, 2007 - 00:21
I mainly use Squidoo lens to create backlinks for my sites. But I never focus my efforts on monetizing from it. It just works well with me as an seo tool.
December 3rd, 2007 - 22:37
Jonathan,
I have used Squidoo to to generate income and for backlinks/SEO.
My primary strategy is to use a keyword rich Squidoo lens to quickly get rankings in Google and pepper it with links back to the site I’m featuring. I try to use a mix of links to affiliate products and other content sites to keep the lens from looking too one-sided. Finally, using RSS blocks, I pull in feeds from my blogs, article directories, and also eBay auctions (I never use their Amazon or eBay blocks inside the content. They have plenty of ad real estate on the page already.)
I have one hobby/craft oriented lens that has brought me quite a few visitors and some affiliate sales. I’ve also generated about $8 in income from Squidoo. In all, enough to make it worth while.
My most recent successful project got me ranked #1 in Google for a long tail phrase in less than 3 days. I had a number of other blogs and social network sites pointing back at the primary website in addition to the lens. Within 3 weeks, the page on my primary site was #1 at Google and the lens is #2. Some of the other blog pages show up in the top 10, so I have 4 or 5 of the top 10 results directly linked back to the content on the main site.
Since lenses take so little time to create and can get you rankings so fast, I think they’re still worth the effort.
December 3rd, 2007 - 22:16
I actually got 3 lens into the top 100 by suing free traffic before Google changed their rules.
I’m now experiementing with another lens for a project I’m working on to see how high I can get one now with free traffic
{snip: no personal urls in comments please} is the lens I’m working on.
However it is a lot harder now than it was 6 months ago due to the increased number of lens and competition.
Keries
December 3rd, 2007 - 21:56
Jon,
What you may be missing is that right now your lens is listed on the first page of the Sports and Recreation page which is a pagerank 5 page.
So your lens will soon be at least PR3 or possibly even PR4 page. From there you can send some link love to a golf related site if you have it.
If you were to get into the top 100…
http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses
… your lens would be getting a pagerank 7 link!
December 3rd, 2007 - 21:53
I like to use Squidoo as a link generator, especially when using it’s RSS import capability. Getting them to rank in Google for long-tailed phrases, in addition to some select other sites, has been the best use for me.
I could care less about any traffic that Squidoo offers.
Oh yeah, I’m up to about $1.15 in royalties, woo hoo!
December 3rd, 2007 - 21:42
Jon, hi,
Thanks for a very interesting report..!
Just to offer my experience: I use Squidoo lenses and (please forgive the plagiarism!) I do 3 way links between them, my blog and my sites. What I found for a long time (several months) was that nothing happened at all – maybe 5 – 10 visits to my Squidoo lenses a week and negligible click throughs. (Not surprising with no visits!
)
All of a sudden about 6 weeks ago Yahoo starting sending me traffic – heaven knows why because I had left my lenses untouched for some time.
Now I’m getting a steady stream of traffic from Yahoo and my overall click out rate is 35.4%. That’s overall click out to any one of the 2 sites and the blog that I have tied to that lens.
Not a great deluge of traffic and my lens has never figured in Google, but Yahoo seems to like it and I’m getting a steady stream to my other sites now – so I’m currently quite happy!
Thanks again for your report!
Martin.
December 3rd, 2007 - 20:36
Hi Jonathan:
I have more than 100 Squidoo lenses and have been #1 in at least 4 categories several times over. Most of my traffic comes from Google and Yahoo, and I have never paid for traffic. I agree with Pam Dawson’s comments. Squidoo is a great tool for me, and the Squidoo community (SquidU) is very supportive of new lensmasters. I recommend that you give it another chance.
December 3rd, 2007 - 20:13
So far, everyone who is posting about having success with Squidoo seems to be using the lenses to send traffic to a different site that has monetization. Am I right? I might give that a go for another case study. Sounds promising.
December 3rd, 2007 - 20:09
Keyword focused Squidoo lenses have worked great for getting traffic to my main sites (which is where I make my money from). It’s also a good source for quality backlinks. You don’t have to build a master piece lens to get these benefits. Just 4 simple modules with some good content and that’s it. Bookmark each lens using some of the sites mentioned above and then move on to the next one. Simple as that.
December 3rd, 2007 - 20:08
Jonathan,
I really appreciate all the detail you include in your posts. It is really nice to get information from someone who has really tried a product or method. I get so tired of all the testimonals from people who have only read an ebook and never really tried what is being preached.
Thanks for sharing.
Jackie
December 3rd, 2007 - 19:50
Well it would seem that Squidoo isnt the money or traffic generator that is so called stated in all those E-books marketers try to flog..
Thanks for the report.
Steve
December 3rd, 2007 - 18:35
I have to agree with you. I jumped all over the squidoo thing and got ranked pretty high in google in the beginning.
I have to say I have better luck with myspace and facebook.
December 3rd, 2007 - 17:53
Hi Jonathan!
Someone on my list saw your blog and wanted me to comment about your post, so I did – here: {snip: thanks, but no personal links allowed in the comment text} – I hope it helps with your journey on Squidoo.
tiff
December 3rd, 2007 - 17:07
I never tried to promote through a Squidoo lens. Since I’m still trying to get to a reasonable level of online income, I prefer to go with proven methods an let others experiment with the new. I remember all the hype around Squidoo when it first started. It’s nice to get an unbiased report such as yours. I guess Squidoo is not all it was cracked up to be. Maybe someone will figure out a way to make something that’s worth taking about with it. In the meanwhile, I’ll consistently keep on doing what I’m doing. I know I’ll get to my destination.
Luc
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:52
Tom: I think Squidoo users are a microcosm of the general internet user. I don’t want to pay for anything if I don’t have to. So in your pages, or in your lens, what you offer must be that important – to get that click or sale.
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:50
Just to be clear .. Squidoo should *not* be disregarded. In fact I have it as part of my essential traffic toolkit package that I sell. Anything that’s as hot as Squidoo (hot as in terms of eyeballs and Google juice) must be explored.
But you need to explore Squidoo from multiple angles and figure how best use it. To use if for a “Adsense” model and hope to make money, just won’t work at this point.
When you think about it.. Squidoo is just one big blog that you are allowed to post on, and you are rewarded with well ranking pages. Now it’s up to you to figure out what’s the best way to work the situation for the ultimate $ goal.
I agree that Seth Godin is/was/maybe right .. but ultimately he’s right for himself. Squidoo being popular is great for him and his company, but it remains to be seen if the normal user can piggyback that success. Squidoo is also very closed on what can be done, they control the direct allowed monetization options and take a cut from the process.
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:50
Several months ago, I spent $50 advertising on their network with one of my experiements and it produced no sales. Arguably, I’d concluded that many of the visitors to Squidoo are not in the mindset to buy products or services.
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:44
The real power of Squidoo is to use to get page 1 rankings in the major search engines for a commercially valuable keyword. In this way you receive targeted traffic to your lens which is more likely to follow product recommendation links. Get it right and you can receive a significant amount of quality traffic.
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:44
Hi Jonathan
Thanks for the great info. I had always wondered about the guru’s saying how easy it is to get ranking in squidoo and for many months trying it out for myself has been on the “to do” list !!
Looks like it is going to be removed permanently now as it seems there are other more worthwhile things I can do in my endeavours for success.
Thanks again for sharing and have a great christmas.
Simon
December 3rd, 2007 - 16:22
Hi Jonathan,
I have a squidoo lens that I did not promote at all except to a yahoo group that I belong to, and I didn’t even get traffic from them. It earns about $18 a month with the amazon module. It does not have any internet marketing content, just popular culture.
Google seems to like it except when I added a keyword that I didn’t know was trademarked, then all google traffic dropped. When I took that keyword out, traffic resumed in 2 days. It does not rank that well in it’s given category.
I hope you understand my not giving you the name of the lens as I don’t want copycats. It can be done, though, if a lensmaster pick something that people want and not what the lensmaster may personally want to sell to them.
December 3rd, 2007 - 15:53
Directly, Squidoo itself has always proven a dead loss because I could never generate much internal traffic except spam comments. Even for some pretty decent content.
Indirectly it is a different matter. Google adores Web2.0 and Squidoo in particular – they obviously read and took to heart Seth Godin’s brilliant articles and manifesto for Squidoo.
So if you think through how to leverage the Google connection it can be interesting. I’ve seen astonishing short term coups including a Google Whack the day after the lens mounted. Unfortunately, they usually fade pretty quickly…
However, there are more direct and energy efficient methods for the ruthless to skin the Web 2.0 cat – like Bookmarking Demon, OnlyWire, and some unspeakable wheezes I’ve seen for leveraging StumbleUpon….
But what I really crave is a wheeze to game Digg – any offers?
Steve Henderson, Publisher
December 3rd, 2007 - 15:36
My experience has been about the same. I’ve mostly used Squidoo for getting a link to my site and for that it has been quite good. It usually shows up quite high in google fairly quickly.
I’ve made a few bucks from Squidoo (under $10) but have basically given up on that as a revenue stream.
I however have been experimenting with hubs and find that I’m getting more traffic. You can find out more at hubpages.com. I find them more attractive then lens. They’re not so cluttered. You can also monetize with Amazon, Adsense and affiliate links.
I enjoy the blog especially the real-life documentations.
thanks
December 3rd, 2007 - 15:22
Daniel, and to everyone else who has said that “they won’t waste their time on Squidoo”, you should keep in mind that Jon’s research was based on one lense with virtually no other promotion apart from sending junk traffic to it solely to see if he could bump up the listing in his chosen category.
My own feeling (and I do actually know this for a fact) is that Squidoo has enormous potential IF you work it right, build a cluster of lenses around one niche topic and gain “expert” status in your niche. It’s got the potential to be the next About.com, but you’re never going to achieve expert status with just one lense and certainly not if your promotional efforts revolve around throwing junk traffic at it.
Jon’s experiment was just that – an experiment. He’s said exactly the same thing himself. But don’t let that put you off engineering your own expert status on the site if that’s what you aim to achieve.
Mark my words – Squidoo users with “expert” status will make a LOT of money in the next few years. I can pretty much assure you of that.
Seth Godin rarely gets it wrong and I’m absolutely confident he won’t have done that with this.
By the way, I haven’t built a single lens yet, so I’m not some Squidoo missionary. I do have a plan however
~ Paul
December 3rd, 2007 - 14:58
Jonathan.
Wow! I am almost speechless. This post was amazing on how to get your squidoo lens in the number one spot for your category.
I always love the way you objectively and systematically approach issues with internet marketing and online promotion. Your research was phenomenal.
I now have something tangible to work with, my time – and I am certainly not going to waste it with Squidoo.
Sincerely,
Daniel Tetreault.
December 3rd, 2007 - 14:18
Hi Jon,
thanks for the report. I’ve been looking towards optimizing my Squidoo lenses and this helps focus on what’s more important on how to monetize it. It’s good to know you can get it ranked well this way.
For some reason the backlinks within my lens aren’t being picked up. Do you have any ideas why this might be?
I think that for sports the Squidoo Ebay auctions revenue share might work well. I imagine the paid for traffic won’t ever convert since most of those people are paid to read/visit members anyway.
But your tips on how to get a lens rank well is very insightful, and that if one focuses on creating a quality lens for monetizing within the Squidoo community of visitors, you can get a lot more quality traffic to the website you promote within your lens.
Lewi
December 3rd, 2007 - 14:04
Hi Jon,
Well done. I was never sure about Squidoo, but I like many others tried it out, and up ’til now had assumed my lack of success was wholly to do with me. I expect I made mistakes, but your report highlights the need to do one’s own research and not buy hype.
Regards
Charlie
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:40
Jon
I received a tip to get better rankings is to go and post at netscape as soon as you have made your lens.
Can’t really remember, but am sure there was talk of onlywire.com as well.
Great tip on using goclick.
Have you perhaps used clixsense.com to get more traffic?
Squidoo is still on my todo list…to little time, and I always seem to get distracted, to the extend that I forget about it.
Thanks, great blog!
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:32
Curly .. don’t forget the S&R topic page is also a PR5 .. so that’s a pretty good link to Jon’s lens.. so that’s sure to help in Google.
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:30
As a ranking quick tool, Squidoo is hard to beat – especially if you through some outside links at it.
As a conversion tool, I’ve never had much success with it across a number of genres. The problem I see is that every Lens pretty much looks the same, so it’s hard to really make your site stand out for action.
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:23
Hi Jon!
Thanks for great report!
.
I do wonder though, if the point is not to be #1 on squidoo but in top 10 on google
This seems easy enough withot ppc expenses. and is also one of the web2.0 tactics some big ticket launches recently promised would bring you to dominate serp…
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:22
Thanks for all of the insightful comments, guys. I love reading this stuff. =)
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:21
I’ve built 8 or 10 Squidoo lenses before. Originally I was getting some good rankings but those days are gone. There’s a fair bit of work involved for not enough results. I think there are better ways to spend your time and money getting results. Even just writing and publishing articles will pay off a lot more than doing those articles on your Squidoo lens.
There is probably a formula to make this work properly, but so far I haven’t found it.
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:19
It’s fun seeing your mind at work. Using junk ppc traffic to get your squidoo rank up so that a different type of traffic flow (squidoo) kicks in. Too bad the Squidoo traffic was junk also. That’s the sort of thinking that talented engineers do with physical systems.
I’ve always suspected that squidoo traffic was mostly other lens masters checking out your site for intelligence purposes or to get some links by leaving comments. The profitable traffic (in non-IM niches) come from average consumers with just enough computer savvy to know how to do basic searches on the SE’s. So how your lens ranks with the SE’s is what matters and Google doesn’t care about your lens rank within squidoo.
However, one benefit of a high lens rank is that you will be displayed at the top of a squidoo page called ‘Tag Search Results’ which gets indexed by google and is just a list of lenses sharing the same tags. If you’re at the top you are more likely to get clicked. So SE traffic can get to your lens via the ‘Tag Search Results’ page.
I’ve made some sales with squidoo lenses that are totally isolated from the squidoo community but get traffic from the search engines. Sites like squidoo are great because of google love and because of the ‘ownership’ that you have over them, unlike the static pages in an article directory.
December 3rd, 2007 - 13:12
Hi there Jon!
I just wanted to share something I’ve tested on my own.
For the past few weeks, I’ve signed up with 3 affiliates program. Then what I did was, I created 3 Blogger blogs, and 3 Squidoo lenses. I slapped up some articles to both and just leave it at that.
Let’s just say, I want time to tell…
And time ‘tells’ me that my Blogs ranked better compared to Squidoo lenses.
I know this is not ‘conclusive’ though but my impression is this: If I want to attract visitors using fr.ee methods than using Blogger is much better.
But when it comes to monetization…well, that I wouldn’t know yet. The difference was just ‘insignificant’.
I really appreciate you sharing your ‘test’ here and I always look forward for more. Who knows, I might repeat what you’ve done…just for the fun of it!
Thanks
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:55
A note to everyone who thinks I’m saying Squidoo isn’t worth the time:
That’s not what I’m saying! That may be true, but that is not what my experiment set out to prove (nor did it prove that). My experiment was simply to see if having a great ranking in Squidoo’s own category list would generate a lot of quality traffic. That question seems to have received a “no” answer from this test.
As to whether or not Squidoo lenses rank well in Google, or make for a good source of backlinks to other sites, etc., I really don’t know. Those sound like great ideas for future case studies, though.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:54
Hi Jon,I was quite encouraged to read your report,I wondered how they were reaching the No1 spot on there.I don’t think I will be chasing that,certainly not on your figures.
I do enjoy posting on there though and your report has confirmed my thoughts on the value of it in terms of results !I am a keen follower of anything you put your name to as it is always 100% genuine,Many Thanks !
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:52
Jon,
… this is a very interesting test you have done with squidoo.
I also have thought that squidoo brings in a lot more traffic. I even thought about also testing squidoo for getting traffic, but as your results show … it not really worth the time.
Jon, did you (your lens) get any good Google Rankings for a certain keyword?
Cheers
tony
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:47
I have only recently started experimenting with lenses and found that they quickly got a PR 3 page in G – so surely simply from that point of view it is an idea to build some lenses and have permanent links pointing to your site.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:47
Honestly, I doubt Squidoo “junkies” had a lot to do with it! They generally want to talk about their latest tatoo or why grape jelly beats peach perserves, or whatever! I did get some rankings for my terms using Squidoo, but a lot of it was from social book marking and blogs. There’s an advanced dashboard at SquidUtils that will ping several sites for you and bring in quite a bit of traffic. Sites like Digg and Propeller have to have a “story” to point at, so what I do is create the lens on Squidoo, then submit it to these social sites and that usually gets a rank in Google at least for a day or two. I’m currently working on an e-book about the whole method, so I don’t want to give away too much!
Sorry, Jonathan—didn’t mean to take over here!;)
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:45
Jonathan,
Thanks for the very interesting report on Squidoo. I have seen it around. I have never really been a fan of the graphics, so I haven’t done any investigations into it’s effectiveness.
Your reports are wonderfully detail and from what you say we can make a decision whether Squidoo is worth the effort.
For now I will stay focused on what I am doing and perhaps consider Squidoo again later.
Nick
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:43
Thanks for the report John. I have a couple lenses that I periodically update and see gradual improvements in ranking. Considering your work here, I doubt I’ll continue putting any more effort into it.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:43
Hi Jon,
Thanks for the info. You are a true professional when it comes to internet marketing. Anytime you talk about a product, you have done your research first unlike most gurus.
Thanks,
Jim
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:39
This is a surprise to me. I heard people tout about Squidoo all the time. So I think it probably makes people a lot of sales. I haven’t done one myself yet but bought a book teaching me how to rank high in Squidoo. I wonder if you will continue to create lens on Squidoo again?
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:32
Jonathan, hope you don’t mind me using your comments area to chat, but I’m quite interested in this. I’ve got people working on exploiting a specific niche for me on Squidoo and I’m interested in hearing other’s views.
Cotton Bowl, you say….
“I will say, though, that every sale I captured for Project Quick Cash and Google Assassin came from Squidoo. The PQC is ranked in Squidoo SEO at 92 and the Assassin one is at 145—-they both could have been ranked at 2000 for all I care, just as long as the sales are there!”
How do you think those sales were generated? Is that because the lenses were listed quickly in the search engines, or do you think this is from Squidoo traffic alone?
~ Paul
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:28
Cotton Bowl:
That’s a very interesting tactic, using Squidoo in combination with PQC. I’ll have to give that a try myself.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:26
Hello Jonathan,
I have a few lenses on Squidoo and did nothing to get traffic.
I have a whopping $0.18 in my account so far.
marie
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:25
Squidoo has some usefulness, but you are absolutely right about the importance of rank on Squidoo. Being #1 for any category on their site doesn’t amount to much! I’ve found the best success for Squidoo is to use it as a platform to either get backlinks to my sites or to get ranked using social bookmarking in the organic results. My “cotton bowl” lens was put up last night and I used a social bookmarking site to “report” my Squidoo article. This morning I’m on page 4 of the results for my keyword. I’ve already had 54 visitors and 9 click-throughs on my affiliate link to the tickets sales page. Not bad for less than 24 hours, but this could also be due to the craze over the game that was announced yesterday!
I will say, though, that every sale I captured for Project Quick Cash and Google Assassin came from Squidoo. The PQC is ranked in Squidoo SEO at 92 and the Assassin one is at 145—-they both could have been ranked at 2000 for all I care, just as long as the sales are there!
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:16
Hi Jonathan,
What you say about the spammy content sounds right.
I don’t know how the “duplicate content” issues would affect you if you were to duplicate the content that’s on your review blog to Squidoo, but you could probably snare quite a good readership on Squidoo if you were to set up a “cluster” of product reviews by creating a lense every time you write a new review and linking them together.
It wouldn’t be much extra work for you to do this, if any, and I think the approach you take when producing reviews (with stats, screenshots etc.) would lend itself perfectly to the structure of the lenses.
That’s sounds like a winner to me…. you’d pick up good search engine traffic, multiple prominent positions on Squidoo, and “lense-masters” (or whatever they’re called
) are always looking for ways to promote their lenses too, so you could do well promoting marketing related products to them.
I like that idea. I think it would work well for you.
~ Paul
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:14
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for a great study! I have a few squidoo sites and have had similar experiences, so it’s reassuring to know it’s not just me. I’ve sold only a handful of affiliate products from the sites, despite months of working to improve them. I haven’t done much on Squidoo since the google slap, but I do get regular free traffic to them. I always look forward to your emails with helpful info! Thanks again.
Joy
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:13
Jon,
I always look forward to your case studies. Just out of curiosity, I created a lens about 3 months back. I have not driven any traffic to it. I just wanted to see if it would get noticed on it’s own. I have 3 articles in the lens that are somewhat specific, plus several interactive areas.
Don’t get me wrong, I really didn’t expect anything. As of today that lens has had a whopping 0 visits. I would have expected at least a few hits from Squidoo’s search.
Again, thanks again for the great case studies. Keep up the good work!
–Brett
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:13
Also, Al – that rule says not to display google ads in a popunder box. It doesn’t prevent sending traffic to the page with it.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:09
I did one squidoo lens that went to the top of the search listings last week in one day. I was very surprised because others hadn’t even been noticed by Google within weeks. Haven’t figured out why it happened yet, though.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:09
Squidoo seems a good moneymaker for those IM’ers hawking products that promise #1 position and big bucks from sales.
Thanks, Jon, for helping us save some money by not buying the “hype”. As a newbie myself, let me say, you are certainly one of the good guys in IM.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:05
Paul:
I read that Squidoo was working hard to remove the spam lenses that caused the slap in the first place, so it’s possible that Google has responded to that and removed the devaluation. I hadn’t done much research on that, since what I was really interested in was ranking within Squidoo itself and not in Google.
Thanks for the suggestions regarding JonSays and Squidoo.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:03
Hi Jonathan,
Squidoo is still in a period of covering their initial start-up costs, which they make clear when talking about the revenue sharing program, so I wouldn’t expect that to pay well at the moment. All the same, 1 cent doesn’t exactly inspire you to spend a lot of time building lenses if revenue share is how you plan to achieve income through it.
I’m not aware of Google slapping lenses and I know of quite a few that do rank very well on Google. Or at least they were a week or two ago when I last looked. There are currently 566,000 Squidoo lenses listed in Google, so I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t been slapped too hard
I think you’ll probably find that your lense will attract free search engine traffic, which as you say should attract more income and more affiliate sales than Squidoo visitors, so I do think that building lenses is a worthwhile excercise.
Tying your lenses in with an existing web business is probably the way to go though. You should try tying Squidoo lenses to your new review blog and see how that works out. I suspect it would be a far more productive experiment in terms of revenue.
~ Paul
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:03
Thanks Jon.
I always thought that you should use Squidoo as a traffic funnel to your main site.
December 3rd, 2007 - 12:01
Great info. I always wondered about Squidoo and now that you’ve done the grunt work I don’t have to worry too much about their traffic. Maybe in the future I’ll look for better ways to monitize it, but for now I’ll leave it be.
Thanks.
December 3rd, 2007 - 11:54
Al:
Thanks for the heads-up, but it’s Squidoo’s AdSense account, not mine (they just share the revenue), and Squidoo’s TOS doesn’t say anything about pop-under traffic.
December 3rd, 2007 - 11:52
Jon,
You always do good research and let everyone know about it for free… Most of the ‘guru’ types would charge for these kind of datas
More power to you
PG
December 3rd, 2007 - 11:52
Jon:
Thanks for that very revealing report. It shows what I found out a couple of years ago already when I tried it myself…
Untargetted, unqualified traffic is junk!
It does not convert into anything. As far as I’m concerned all the companies promoting this type of plan are scammers.
–Steve
December 3rd, 2007 - 11:49
Jon, I think you breached googles TOS by sending pop-under traffic to squidoo. Check https://www.google.com/adsense/policies
“No Google ad or Google search box may be displayed in a pop-up, pop-under, or in an email.”
December 3rd, 2007 - 11:40
I would expect a weight loss or diet site to do very well, especially after the Christmas holidays!
Clickbank has TONS of product to lose weight and get six-pack abs.