Making Money With Squidoo

Have you try making money with squidoo ?.Last month a colleague asked me to give Squidoo a try. So after much research, I signed up and placed a few lenses online with the goal to complete one new lens every week over the next few months. To make sure I understood how Squidoo worked and what made the lenses profitable, I researched various lenses and their lens makers. The formula for making money with Squidoo seems pretty cut and dry: create great content and promote the heck out of the pages. There is, however, one caveat: the lenses that receive the highest ratings tend to be lenses that have a good balance between: content, resources, and targeted advertisements (i.e. affiliate links).

Here are the tips I've used with my own online endeavors and which have been confirmed for success with Squidoo.

• Find a niche. Choose a broad topic you want to become an expert in or a topic you really enjoy. Write a single lens on that niche, then branch out into other lenses as they relate to that niche.

• Choose a single topic per lens. Focus on one part of your niche within each lens; instead of writing a broad, generalized lens that briefly discusses many areas within that niche.

• Write something concrete. Share information that isn't readily available on the Internet. Don’t be afraid to include resources you can’t easily find online. Share information based upon your own personal experiences.

• Offer a variety of lenses within your niche. Write how-to articles, quick tips, holiday related material, and personal experience essays. Include a gallery of samples and/or images, recommended websites, and supplies.

• Keep paragraphs short. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read online so keep them between 2 and 5 sentences. Each module should have no more than 2 to 3 paragraphs with a 100 word introduction.

• Break up the article with sales tools. Sales tools, otherwise known as money makers, are affiliate programs and/or products you sell yourself. With traditional magazine articles, the ads usually accompany the article via a side bar, the adjoining page, or sometimes above or below the article itself.

With Squidoo, the ads are a little more intrusive. They tend to be placed within the actual content itself and can look something like this: introduction, sales tool, part 1, resource, sales tool, part 2, resource, sales tool, part 3, sales tool, conclusion, sales tool, guest book. It’s also important to label each sales tool, especially if it doesn’t necessarily match the overall theme of the lens, i.e: Clothing for Pregnant Women or Work at Home attire for busy moms. Finally, if you sell a product or service that doesn’t fit the lens, but you want the reader to be aware of it, place it under your guestbook so that it’s less intrusive.

• Cross promote your lenses. Recommend one of your old lenses in one of your new lenses. Share your lenses with your newsletter readers, with your Twitter friends, on Facebook, in a byline on a forum, as a resource in another article on another site, or in a paid advertisement.

• Include images. Each lens should have at least one relevant image (preferably 3) and the image title should include a keyword relevant to the lens. When using images in your lens, make sure you own the copyrights to those images; don't just snag them off the 'net. Purchase them through a stock agency or create your own.

• Be personable and approachable. Include a guestbook and reply to commenters—either on Squidoo or personally by checking out their lenses.

• Update your old lenses with new information from time-to-time.

• Promote your lenses off site through social networking, forums, chats, article bylines, search engines, and various directories.

Good Luck

Happy New Year 2009

Happy new year 2009

If a promotion is one of your goals for this year, are you doing everything you can to make it happen?

It would be nice if hard work and talent would automatically lead to a job with more pay, more responsibility, and a better title. But in most cases, it takes more than that to move to the next level.

Make Yourself Known

Look at the job you'd like to have a year from now. Who selects candidates for this position? Who does that person work with and ask for advice?

"Then you systematically sit down and think about how you're going to make contact," says Helen Harkness, founder of Career Design Inc., in Dallas. There are lots of ways to do this. You can volunteer to serve on a committee with the people you need to know, for example. You can forward them articles or information that relate to their expertise.

Help Your Boss Succeed

Often, your boss is the person who will decide if you'll be promoted. But even if not, your boss will almost certainly be consulted. So impressing your boss is a top priority.

Marianne Adoradio, a recruiter and career counselor in Silicon Valley, suggests focusing on your company's key goals, then talking with your boss to find out which are most important in your department. "It's really important to be aware of what is going to make your boss successful, what is most important to him or her."

Start Doing the Job

You don't want to stage an office coup and start making personnel decisions that are your boss' responsibility. But you need to show that you can work at a higher level than your current position.

"People are easily promoted when they show that they can already do parts of the job they want to move into," says Steve Levin, principal of Leading Change Consulting & Coaching, in Portola Valley, California. "If you want to move from being a manager to a group manager, start taking on responsibility for what a group manager does. Start thinking like they do."

Then you can make the case that "I'm already doing the job; I just need the title."

"That's pretty irresistible to your boss," Levin says.

Have a Plan B

Many people think there's a system in place at work that will take care of them and their career path, Harkness says. "They expect it to happen 1-2-3, automatically. They do the right thing, and they're going to get that promotion. It doesn't work that way."

In fact, Harkness says, it can happen that "you do everything you're supposed to do and it doesn't work." It's important to understand that the workplace is uncertain -- and to know what your backup plan is if you don't get the promotion you want.

If the promotion was a stretch and your boss is encouraging even while turning you down, it may be worth spending another year gaining experience. But you may also want to looking outside the company.