The Internet is the premier virtual real estate of all times. It is spawning more millionaires that any other phenomenon in history. One of the more pristine pieces of virtual real estate you can find online is Seth Godin’ creation with the funny name “squidoo”. Squidoo is a true web 2.0 system that allows you to create web pages on the go, and promote them for maximum profit. All of this is free. In this article, I want to share some of what I learned about how to make money online with squidoo

To start using squidoo, here are some basic things you understand. Although squidoo is free, they do have a few rules which you must follow, such as rating your adult lens as such so that you do not expose adult material to children. However, as a marketer the rules are really easy to live with. If you are willing to learn how to put up a well created and optimized lens, you can make a full-time living from home just by making squidoo lens. By the way, a lens is the same thing as a web page. That is jus “squidoo speak”.

So how do you make money with squidoo? To begin with, you must build lenses that are worth reading. No one will read a boring web page unless they are extremely motivated; like having a gun to their heads. You will want to make your web page with short paragraphs, some easy graphics, and smooth writing that is easy to read. Bold headings with colors with help too. You may be very passionate about your subject but do bear in mind that you still must sell your ideas to your reader if you want to make money online with squidoo.

So let us get back to the idea of building a lens. You will want to choose a topic in which you are interested, and for which there is some amount of desire on the part of the general Internet population. This is how you can find a good idea. Go online to your favourite search engine and type in “how to” or “teach me how to”. When people are looking to solve problems, they usually type something similar. You are going to see a bunch of interesting results. Choose what you like, and refine your research with the Google adwords tool. Look that up too.

Maximize your own links and minimize non-owned links. There are lots of modules on squidoo and many of them are fun to use. But if you allow your readers to leave your lens by any means possible, you could be giving away money. You should control as many of the out-bound links as possible. Make sure that when your readers leave your lens, they are actually going to a link you control.

You should leave your feedback module in place so people can tell you how they like your lens. Sometimes you need to allow direct feedback from your readers so that you can make money online whether you are using squidoo or something else. In promoting your lens you should also bear in mind that squidoo its own adsense and other modules on every lens. This means that you are contributing to their sales just by building a lens. Do not feel that you must donate all of your earnings to charity.

Now that you have finished your lens, you are ready to promote it. I recommend some special places that you can use to bookmark or send you lens to. All of them are free to use. The more visitors you get to your lens, the better your opportunities for making money with squidoo. Look up the following and add your lens to them. Isleofsquid.com, squidom.com, lensroll.com, and squidutils.com. are good places to start. Additionally, you may jump over to pingomatic.com or pingoat.com. These are pinging services that will help you get the word out about your lens.

One of the ways you can make money with squidoo is to promote programs or services that will pay you residual income. Think about it for a moment. If you promote a program that will earn you income month after month from your one-time effort, isn’t that much better than having to make one-time sales over and over again? This concept alone can multiply your income many times over.

You can also make money with your squidoo lens by promoting multi-tiered affiliate programs that do not require a monthly fee from you. There are several people with such programs. A few you may want to research are Russell Brunson’s Second Tier, and Derek Ghel’s Affiliate Marketing Center. You can quietly recruit a small army of affiliates for these programs, and bet paid every time they buy. This is not a bad way to make money online with your squidoo lens.

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I was going to do a  video for you on how to  make the most out of your Squidoo lenses to increase their  ranking and presense, thereby driving more traffic to your websites.

I have come across these great videos which kinda saves me the trouble! Apart from watching these, it is also worthwhile visiting the blog at http://www.searchingdot.com/ and reading the interview with the Squidoo brainchild, Seth Godin.

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