Article Writers Make Money Writing on Squidoo

Article writers have you joined Squidoo yet? If not you are passing up a great opportunity to make money writing articles on Squidoo about subjects you enjoy.

Squidoo lets you write from home and enjoy your existing lifestyle. Squidoo is perfect for freelance writers and bloggers. In fact Squidoo suits virtually anyone wanting to make extra money writing while working from home.

There are a lot of ways to make money writing articles on how to sites such as HubPages and Triond. Squidoo is another such site that offers its article writers (known as lensmasters) a revenue share of income earned through ads and affiliate programs from the likes of Amazon, eBay and CafePress.

Squidoo lets you write articles (known as lenses) about most subjects. You can even recommend products and add affiliate links such as eBay and Amazon to make money from sales. For example if a reader likes your article about quality frypans they may be encouraged to purchase a new frypan that you have recommended in your lens. You benefit directly by receiving a percentage of the royalties from that sale which currently are 50% of the commission paid.

In addition Squidoo displays Google ads and others ads like Infolinks on your lens that generate revenue. You get a share of the revenue of ads depending on your account 

Yet another great way to make money at Squidoo is by earning referral income. For every friend you invite who earns their first $15 you get a $5 bonus. Not bad eh?

Another great thing about Squidoo is that the more you write the more money you are making for charity. You can choose to have the proceeds of all, some or none of your lenses go directly to charity. In addition remember you are raising money for charity everytime someone makes a purchase of a product you recommended on your lens because Squidoo donates 5% of every commission earned to charity.

While article writers get 50% of any affiliate sales the income earned from ad revenue is distributed differently from most other sites. To counter fraud Squidoo has chosen to put the revenue earned into a community pool. Squidoo distributes the earnings to lensmasters on a PayRank scale that is based on the average LensRank and traffic of each lens also accounting for the number and quality of lenses in the lensmaster's account.

The PayRank system for article writers is questionable in my book and the only downside of being a member of Squidoo. Lots of other revenue sharing sites display ads such as Adsense 50% of the time in the writer's favor which to my mind is a better system. The main problem with the Squidoo community pool is that if you are a new lensmaster you are penalized by the ranking system and get virtually no ad revenue until you have quite a few lenses written. The ranking system grades lensmasters into tiers with the top ranked article writers receiving the largest share of the pie.

Essentially this means that if someone were to click on a high paying ad while viewing your lens you would not get the benefit. You may only get a very small percentage of that revenue if your rank is high enough for payout or worse still nothing at all. More highly ranked lensmasters with less high earning clicks but more lenses would get most of your share.

Conversely though the Squidoo system does encourage article writers to write quality content that will generate views and promote them to the paying tiers. With effort and good writing skills this is easily achievable for good article writers.

Squidoo Tier System Payouts from the Community Ad Pool

• Tier One: Lenses with an average LensRank of #1 to #2,000 get 25% of the ad pool.
  
• Tier Two: Lenses with an average LensRank of #2,001 to #10,000 get 17% of the ad pool.
  
• Tier Three: Lenses with an average LensRank of #10,001 to #85,000 get 8% of the ad pool
  
• Last Tier (the Zero Tier): Lenses with an average LensRank more than #85,000 get 0% of the ad pool

Payout of Squidoo earnings is via Paypal. Squidoo's default cash payout threshold for article writers starts at $10. One point to take note of is that if you haven't reached the payout threshold in 12 months Squidoo assumes you have abandoned your account and reserves the right to redistribute the earnings to charity and their overhead fund. To avoid this occurrence you will need to keep an eye on your account. I recommend that you set the threshold to $5 initially given that your earnings are likely to be quite low at the start.

Other nice features about Squidoo is the intuitive interface which I think is the best I have seen on these ad revenue sharing sites. Squidoo guides you through the process of publishing a lens. The help section for Squidoo article writers is also good. Published lenses are nicely displayed and Squidoo offers a choice of themes to further customize the appearance of your lens. Squidoo also has a very active community.

What I like about Squidoo is that Squidoo will help you increase traffic to your website or blog and raise its credibility. Not only can you link to your website or blog in your article and get direct traffic you will also be getting a valuable backlink to your blog. Squidoo has a good Google PR4 ranking so it is quite often possible to get your articles on the first page of Google in search engine results depending on the keywords used and the level of other competition.

Squidoo has a nice interface and an active community at least as busy as HubPages. Apart from the Adsense revenue issue, Squidoo offers good opportunites to make money writing articles. If you concentrate on writing articles that recommend products you are likely to do better at Squidoo given the tier system for paying out ad revenue earnings. 

While the tier system is annoying and seemingly unfair it does give you as an article writer something to aspire to on Squidoo. Also consider that if you were to write the same article on your blog it may get very little traffic indeed so you may earn no Adsense from it. Plus Squidoo offers the chance to get your lenses on the first page of Google and really start to cash in on Adsense revenue. To my way of thinking it is far better to be part of a community receiving traffic than writing articles that languish on blogs unread.

Sign up to Squidoo is easy and brief. If you sign up with my Squidoo referral link we can support each other on our respective journeys to become a Giant Squid (lensmasters with at least 50 terrific lenses). Remember the longest journey begins with a single step.

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