There are definitely a number of people on both sides of the argument. i.e. that feel Squidoo is a scam and then those that feel Squidoo is a legit opportunity for writers. To help you decide I will take a close look at how Squidoo works, then I will compare that to another revenue sharing site (that you may well find is better for your needs). When I am done I will share some of the secrets, to online publishing success, tricks I have learned through trial and error.
Squidoo Scam
by JaneG
In this article I will answer the question: Is Squidoo a scam or are they legit? Don't waste your time, find out whether Squidoo is right for you.
How Squidoo really works
Squidoo pays their writers via Paypal. If you can't accept Paypal payments in your country don't bother with Squidoo.
Money earned on Squidoo is split 50:50 between the site and it's writers. This is a little greedy, most similar site pay writers 60%. Revenue can be divided into affiliate(mostly Amazon) and pay per click(Google Adsense). You basically get 50% of the affiliate earnings of any of your pages. The Adsense earnings aren't distributed like that. The Adsense earnings mostly go to the top pages on the site.
Think before you act, because your choices have consequences
 Think |
The problem is you won't be able to create a top page on Squidoo, until you really understand the system. So the beginners make much less, than the experienced writers. This isn't fair in my opinion.
Even if you are experienced with Squidoo, like me, it's nearly impossible to track what is going on with all of your page. If they where scamming, me I wouldn't know.
Ultimately I wouldn't call Squidoo a scam. They are a little greedy and their system is unfriendly to beginners, but they don't cheat their writers. Read on for my take on a better alternative.
Are you happy with your slice of the cake?
 Slice of Cake |
Let's compare that with Wizzley
With Wizzley you start at 50% of the revenue from your pages, when you get to 50 quality articles they increase it to 55% and once you have 100, you get 60%. It might not seem like much, but say your articles earn $2,000 a month (not uncommon, at all) that means you earn $100 less on Squidoo.
With Wizzley you get paid directly by Adsense and Amazon. They pay monthly via check, outside the USA and by bank transfer inside. This system supports more countries than Paypal. It is also much easier to track your pages and earnings.
One of the major issues I have with Squidoo is that their interface is very dated. It takes me around 10 minutes longer to publish a page on Squidoo. This might not seem like much, but multiply that with a 100 or 200 articles.
Squidoo has a lot of good pages, but they also have a lot of low quality stuff. On the other hand Wizzley works hard to keep standards very high. If you publish on a site with great content the search engines are more likely to consider your content better and send you more traffic. In my experience Google has a love hate relationship with Squidoo. For 6 months they send traffic and then for 6 months they don't. That might however just be my experience.
You'll note that this page is published on Wizzley, that means I don't just recommend Wizzley, I use them myself.
Top writer tricks
The search engines prefer longer articles. In my experience a 1,000 word page always outperforms 2 x 500 word pages. I cut and paste my articles in Microsoft Word to get an accurate word count.
Page titles should be 4 - 8 words long. Articles with short titles are more easily buried by the competition.
Make sure that the words in your title are used a few times, in the article, but don't overdo it. This lets the search engines know that your title is really what the page is about.
Liven your pages up with other content: use pictures, polls, YouTube videos and Amazon modules to improve the look and value of your pages.
Write well, write often. Until you have written at least 50 articles here, you won't have much of a sense of things.
Initially you shouldn't worry about the next bit, but over time you should try to come to grips with it. Every page you create has competition and potential traffic. If the competition is too high your page will get buried, if too few people are interested in the topic, you won't get enough traffic. What you want to do is to target the sweet spot, where there is enough traffic, but not too much competition. I have included a YouTube video below that tells you how to do this. The gentleman who did the video is a marketer. Compared to him, you are going to be looking for key phrases with less traffic and competition. So where he has competition lower than 50,000 you should look at less than 10,000 and where he has 1,500 searches, 200 would work for you. I recommend staying away from the niche he uses as an example.
There is a lot of good information on this page. You might want to have another look at it later. Why not bookmark it. (CTRL+D) Then use one of those links above to register your own Wizzley writers account. After that, if you look at the top right of this page, there is a heart and a message button. You can use the heart to become my fan and follow what I write, you may use the message button to send me any questions you might have.
 Have you put it all together? |
Disclaimer
This article is merely a reflection of the opinions of the author.
I hope you enjoyed reading "Squidoo Scam" you might also like to check out top affiliate programs 2015
Updated: 06/27/2015, JaneG
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Do you think Squidoo is a scam?
Yes I do think Squidoo is a scam. I wrote 25 lenses with them and 4 were in top two paying tiers, then overnight the lenses jump up to 350,000 rank! Also you can see page rank 500 and overall 100,000,which means either way they are earning with the ads they put on everyones lenses. I going to write an article on their site about them and drop themif they don't dropme first because THEY SUCK!
I write on both sites, and find each has different advantages and is suited to different kinds of content. It's also really important to diversify so that you're not solely dependent on the income from one site.
There's one huge difference between Wizzley and Squidoo which you haven't mentioned.
Wizzley substitutes its own affiliate ID for yours 40-50% of the time, so you get none -- zero -- of the commissions from those sales. (By contrast, you'd get half of those commissions on Squidoo.)
However, on Squidoo, you can embed your own affiliate links with your own affiliate ID, and get 100% of those sales, 100% of the commissions. Squidoo won't take a cut if you use your own ID.
So, based strictly on how the sites are set up, you can potentially get a bigger chunk of income from sales on Squidoo.
However, Wizzley's advertising pays directly, rather than through a tiered payout system. So if your pages don't attract enough clickouts and other factors to get a high-ranking Ad Pool payout on Squidoo, then they may earn more through advertising on Wizzley.
There are good tips, you put in this article. I write for Squidoo, but I am beginner. I am not bothered with income, fo now I write for fun. But I do like it better on Wizzley.. My articles here are faster indexed, and they are ranked better than lenses on Squidoo. There are few things i like there, but also few things I don't. I don't like their front page, with so little choice of promoted lenses. So many lenses, but they mostly all speak about the same subject. Recently they had 6 lenses about flowers on front page...
Top writer tricks are very helpful for me. Thanks.
JLL - Revenue sharing sites deliver a useful, free service to writers. Giving them a easy way to earn money online. If you do it right you are going to earn a lot more, than if you where taking freelance writing jobs.
You just said you have no idea if you're being short changed by Squidoo and then in the next breath you are sure that Squidoo is not a scam.
Please make up your mind!
Squidoo is nothing more than a money making scheme using the gullible to create all the profit, and as there is a plentiful supply of such people out there it should come as no surprise that they are successful.
To top it all off, you use the fact that Squidoo is likely a scam in order to promote your own scam!!
Ah, Americans....
I don't think Squidoo is a scam -- I'm not bothered by their revenue sharing of 50%, and I have a PayPal account. I've learned a lot about writing on line by first writing on Squidoo, and so far I'm earning more per article on Squidoo than on Wizzley. BUT....Squidoo is so BUGGY, and Wizzley is much easier to write on. More and more of my writing time is spent on Wizzley, and I'm sure my earnings will start to rise here as well.
I really enjoyed / appreciated your Top Writer Tricks suggestions -- very useful!
I haven't written for Squidoo. I think I'll stay here at Wizzley. You write very informative articles.
In researching the article I looked at other people's earnings as well as my own. It is hard to say who will earn what where, but I do feel strongly that Wizzley is a better option for beginners and will beat Squidoo over time.
You have raised a few good points in this article. I agree with most of what you said. But don't you think, you should have written more pages on Wizzley before you start comparing and claiming it to be a better alternative than Squidoo. Just because Wizzley offers you a higher cut in the revenue doesn't mean you'll earn more from it. :)