Squidoo review: What it is and why you should care

by Tolovaj

Squidoo was a popular revenue sharing site, similar to Wizzley, Zujava, InfoBarrel and HubPages. Actually Squidoo and HubPages are always compared as the top two of the trade.

If you want to earn some money on revenue sharing sites, Squidoo wass almost a must to consider. There were many (I mean MANY!) options to earn with Squidoo, but a lot of its users didn't write on Squidoo for money.

There were many (I mean MANY!) things you could do on Squidoo and although this site is just a part of history now, I decided to keep this article, written when Squidoo was still one of the top 100 sites on web, where I collected top 10 interesting facts about Squidoo:

(All images: Clker.com, PD licence)

Share your knowledge

1. Squidoo wass a writing platform, where you could write on numerous, but not all subjects. Gambling, illegal download, dating, dieting pills and some other subjects were not permitted. Check their TOS before you start writing your first lens (this is how an article on Squidoo is called).Share YOUR view on Squidoo

One of the biggest beauties on Squidoo was simple. Non-English languages are not explicitly prohibited. However lenses in non English languages had more chances to get locked and deleted.

One big difference from Squidoo and blogging platforms was interaction. Most blogging platforms have only comment section for communication between bloggers, but Squidoo had several others too: duels, polls, predictions...

Interaction on Squidoo was well encouraged. It was lively community with more than 20 million unique visitors per month. Because of this activity a lot of lenses performed very well in search engines.

Making money on Squidoo

Squidoo alone gives you multiple streams of income

2. Squidoo had tier system for making money. Every lens had its own lensrank, calculated from many factors: freshness, traffic, sales, outclicks, time (visitor's) spent on lens, ... In general quality and quantity of traffic guaranteed high tier position. So you could earn money even without selling anything. This money came from advertisers.You can earn money with Squidoo!

3. Selling stuff on Squidoo was easy. There were numerous selling modules available (Amazon, Ebay, Zazzle...) and you could also place your own affiliate links in text modules if you had basic html knowledge.

4. You could sell lenses on Squidoo. It was extremely easy. You only needed to push a button for transfer a lens from your to somebody else's account. Or you could buy a lens. Prices vary. I have seen lenses for 3 and lenses for 3 thousand US dollars. Fresh lens, made from scratch is in Sell a Squidoo lens and earn!general cheaper. Well matured lens with good backlinking background and a lot of already made sales and high tier position could be a real money maker, so price is higher.

Update: on 28 February 2013 Squidoo turned the ability of lens transfer off. There were still ways to buy or sell a lens but now they are much more complicated.

5. You could support your on-line business with Squidoo lenses. With presentation come powerful links and I had used Squidoo mainly for this purpose.

Before I discovered this site, my e-store was about 100 in SERP for my main keyword and nowhere for others. Now it is on first page for all keywords and I have several number one positions, in one case for some time I even had first seven positions for one longtail!

Update: on 28 March 2013 Squidoo made all links pointing out of Squidoo nofollow. This drastically reduced the site's potential for SEO purposes. But there was I trick I discovered only few days later - links from modules called link-list stayed do-follow until Squidoo closed. Same was true for links from profiles until July 2014, when the ship was already full of holes. I can reveal the secret - I learned the tricks of the Squidoo structure so well, I managed to build PR5 links in less than two days, what greatly helped at promoting of my blogs. None of so called SEO experts used this tricks, because none of them spent so much time studying the structure.

It was fun!

You could earn points and cool badges

6. At the end of 2010 Squidoo introduced Squidoo monsters, some sorts of badges for achievements for every individual lensmaster. Some of lensmasters were not too happy with this, but only few of them used the option of turning them off on their profile.

Some monster badges were easy to achieve, some are much harder. Monsters for Lens of the day and Purple star were among the most appreciated.

Click here to check my Purple star lens about picture books publishing:)

Generous lensmaster gets a trophyJust a look at the monsters on one's profile can tell you a lot about a lensmaster. Is he active member of community or introverted SEO geek, does he like to play games, or he is more serious kind of person, is he competitive or real team player, is he on Squidoo every day or just occasionally... Of course you will never know for sure, but don't count on lensmaster who gave only 20 'likes' in four years to give one to you.

Apart from badges you can tell a lot about a lensmaster by his level. Level 80 is pretty hard to achieve and most of the most respected lensmasters are in this level. But there are already more than a dozen on the level 81...

By leveling up on Squidoo you get some interesting rewards but this is too specific for this wizz.

And there is special status: being a Giant squid, what means you have published 25 great lenses (manually checked) what I managed to do after several months of learning and working...

Great learning tool

7. You could learn a lot on Squidoo. Before I joined this platform I have had no idea about SEO and here you could not only learn all the tricks of the trade, you could actually ask lensmasters some more specific questions. And some of them will actually help you.

Learning tool for almost everythingForget about SEO, you could learn a lot on almost everything, from Asperger's syndrome to zebras.

And, because this community was so big, I had also learned a lot about human psychology (and being officially dramatist by profession I have already known a lot before). Here you could study huge palette of human characters and their emotions.

If you like to switch from your daily routine to some news sites, you could also replace this habit with new one: checking what's new on Squidoo!

Which one is better: Squidoo or HubPages?

(Please comment only if you have experience with both - this duel is moderated)
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HubPages with hands down!
BardofEly on 10/21/2012

I think HubPages but that is mainly because I find it easier to use.

katiem2 on 09/27/2012

I liked HupPages best as the site is more user friendly and I never made Squidoo more than a links site. Never earned a dime there whereas I earned a good penny from hubpages, plus I got on with the people, writers there best. It was always more active socially.

TiaMariaMartini on 07/15/2012

I think that there is more potential with Hubpages, but I cannot resist Squidoo and the monsters. I love them both, but if I HAVE to choose...

Squidoo all the way!
Thamisgith on 09/30/2012

I like both - but they are really quite different. I think there is more sense of community at Squidoo (just my opinion).

SeanMac on 09/09/2012

HP has gone down the tubes.

RubyHelenRose on 07/07/2012

I started with Hubpages, now I am hooked on squidoo, I learn faster there. So I will stay on both.


You can get a lot of support

8. Don't get me wrong. Not everybody on Squidoo was nice. But pretty good percent of its users understand humans can achieve more if we work together. You can find people who will offer you a word of encouragement, a good advice or a backlink.Who called for help? And if you persist with your work and building your reputation, all this adds up.

Squidoo had a lot of organized programs to help lensmasters to start, make progress, exchange information and so on.

It also had a lot of magazines, what are really sites to support lenses from specific niches and could serve as powerful backup in case if Panda, Penguin or some other similar beast striked again!

Fan clubs on Squidoo were dismissed because they were abused, but a lot of lensmasters organized themselves outside of Squidoo to support each other on social sites, shared blogging platforms and so on and on...

Squidoo for SEO

Squidoo lens creation was my best SEO move

9. Squidoo design was so SEO friendly for some time my biggest problem was that lenses made better positions in search engines results than my sites supported with these lenses.

Squidoo is SEO friendlyJust a mere look at design of the site can teach you a lot about authority (PageRank) and how it should be distributed through pages. Interlinking system is sensational, although there are some users who are tag squatting.

Spammers were problem on Squidoo but I believe this issue was not too big. At last two updates of the algorithms many other publishing platforms were badly hit, but Squidoo even made some progress (as a site, I can't tell for every individual page).

Update: Squidoo made some changes in November 2012. Not all were successful, so traffic and authority were decreasing from the beginning of 2013.

Squidoo lens creation was another textbook on SEO with html H1 to H7 tags, the non stop motivation to add images (spammers hate to do that) and default nofollow tags on sell modules.

Even if you don't have an idea what html is (I am almost there), you could make extremely optimized lenses!

My final warning

Testing is key to success10. Squidoo lens creation was addictive. I use it to support my sites and blogs but then realized my Squidoo lenses interest me more than my main pages. I created my articles on Wizzley to support Squidoo lenses but you can do the opposite. Or you can use it to test some keywords or...

Just don't forget this game can be great fun and also very time consuming!

Update: In September 2014 Squidoo lenses were transferred to HubPages (if lensmaster didn't opt out) and a lot of things changed, so i guess I have a material for two interesting articles:

10 facts about HubPages

and

10 reasons why Squidoo flopped

Which one would you prefer to read first?

Which article wozuld you prefer to read first?

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Did you use Squidoo?

Updated: 04/11/2015, Tolovaj
 
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Did you make money with Squidoo?

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Tolovaj on 08/13/2023

Hi, DerdriuMarriner. Squidoo is dead, but the business was sold to HubPages, their main (and actually only) competition (InfoBarrel and Zujava were comparably small sites with two- or even one-mean teams, today both just a part of web history). My articles from Squidoo were automatically moved to HubPages and are there for a decade now. Because I have already created an account with my name, I have to change the name 'moved' account from Squidoo. So now I have two accounts: Tolovaj and TolovajWodsmith (the latter coming from Squidoo. My posts from InfoBarrel (just two pieces and Zujava (about a dozen) are partly moved to my blogs and some waiting to be moved when I have more time.

DerdriuMarriner on 06/14/2023

Your summary statement considers HubPages, InfoBarrel, Wizzley and Zujava.

Have your articles that you published on Squidoo become unavailable or is it possible to access them elsewhere?

I know how and where to find you on Wizzley. How would I do so on the three other above-mentioned sites?

Tolovaj on 01/12/2014

You are welcome!

VioletteRose on 01/12/2014

That's so kind of you, thank you so much :)

Tolovaj on 12/23/2013

I had a problem with loading times too and used Opera for Squidoo only. In last months they added some code which is unfriendly to my Chrome, but it works well with Firefox. I noticed Java update can help at some issues and sometimes it is just a bug and all you can do is to try few hours later.

Anyway, if you decide to give it a try, the main problem at creating can be with 'low quality content' filter. If you bump into it, drop me a note, and I can give you a hand, VioletteRose:)

VioletteRose on 12/22/2013

I would love to try it, but I found it taking too much time to load. I tried to save a title many times and it failed. Maybe I should give a try again.

Tolovaj on 09/12/2013

Same here, jptanabe, I think there were simply too many changes at once and a lot of great writers focused on other platforms. Life is a constant change, we just have to move on.

jptanabe on 09/11/2013

Well, I can say I used to make some money on Squidoo, and was hoping to make more. But all the changes this year have led my earnings in a downward spiral. Ah well. Hoping to make some money here on Wizzley to compensate!

Tolovaj on 09/03/2013

I agree, Writer Artist, at the moment Squidoo is not something I would recommend to new on-line writers. On the other way it is still site with huge authority and with some skill it can be very useful for earning. With last change (review template which is still only in beta) the rules will be more clear and maybe this will help beginners to find their way to success too.

WriterArtist on 09/03/2013

New Squidoo is not very user-friendly with the skewed filters. You end up wasting time writing a simple article and then struggling for 2 to 3 days to figure out what is causing the filter to trigger. Not very motivating for the new writers who want to join Squidoo.


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