Do you write for Squidoo?

In my popular posts about sites that pay you to write, I gave a nod to Squidoo.  At that time, I was fairly new to making “lenses.”  Lenses are the pages that you create at Squidoo, instead of articles or blog posts.  I created a few lenses, and then I just forgot about them.  Until last month.

Toward the start of November, I got an email from PayPal notifying me that I had earned a considerable (double digits, not quite triple) sum of cash from Squidoo.  Curious, I visited my Squidoo lenses and found out that one of my lenses had been featured as the lens of the day.  I had upward of 50 comments to approve, and my lens had actually ranked in the TOP TEN lenses for the site for some time.  I was, frankly, shocked.

My lens hadn’t taken me long to produce, and it certainly wasn’t as fancy as some of the major lenses out there.  But it was fun.  I just didn’t earn a lot from it at the time.  The only reason I created that lens was to be able to drive some traffic from my lens (at a site that has a high rank with Google) to my baking blog (which currently has a page rank of 3, not bad for less than a year in age!).  It seems to have worked.

Looking at the analytics of my baking blog more closely, I started to see that Squidoo was bringing in some traffic.  It wasn’t my top five, which is why it didn’t pop up on my radar earlier, but it was bringing in about 100-200 visitors per week.  That sounds like a small number, but if those visitors are subscribing to my feed, or clicking on ads, I’ll take them, no matter how paltry the size of the group.

Now, I am not a huge fan of Squidoo in some ways.  For instance, I don’t like sharing the affiliate revenue with another site.  They take part of the commission, and I get the rest.  Commissions can already be rather small, so getting a fraction of a small commission isn’t exactly the kind of motivation someone who writes online for cash really needs.

My other minor complaint is that it is kind of hard to understand how to create lenses.  While there are tutorials, the format isn’t as intuitive as writing a blog post or article.  “Hard” might be a bad way of describing it.  It’s not difficult, just counter-intuitive.

Those factors aside, Squidoo isn’t a bad idea.  The different layout makes it stand out from the crowd, and I can speak to how it drives traffic, and helps improve the ranking, of my sites.   But it doesn’t just work for niche blogs.  You can also use Squidoo to drive traffic to your articles.  If you write a lot about a broad topic, you can create a lovely list of “resources” for your Squidoo readers.  This would be especially helpful if you write for sites that pay you by page view.

So while I am not going to spend a lot of time writing tons and tons of lenses (the last drawback is that they take longer to create a solid, earning lens), I will continue to update my current lenses and maybe create niche lenses for my new sites.  Sometimes a change of pace can refresh my writing spirit or inspire me to write something new.

So, do you Squidoo?