What is the biggest secret to making money online? Did I hear you say – Traffic.
Well Yes and No. Not just any traffic but traffic that converts – either into clickthroughs for your Adsense, Kontera, Infolinks earnings or sales of your Amazon, EBay or Clickbank Products.
Therein lies the holy grail of internet marketing. While it may be comparatively easier to get traffic, getting traffic that converts requires quite a bit of skill and patience online. This waiting or learning period if you may – is what separates the wheat from the chaff. This is the brick wall that scores of internet marketers are unable to breakthrough and thus fail to be really successful online. When they put in funds for domains and hosting month after month while only seeing pennies in return for the first 6-8 months – it can be frustating. That is where most people quit.
What if I told you that you don’t need to reach that brick wall and still make money (not a lot – which is what you would reach if you crossed that brick wall) but still something that will make your online time worthwhile. Can I see your eyebrows raised?
That my dear friends is where Squidoo comes in. To make money on Squidoo(link to home page) you need to understand the squidoo’s proprietary algorithm of lensrank. The higher your lenses rank the better will your payout from Squidoo. One of the biggest factors for ranking high on Squidoo is Traffic. But the fun part is you need not worry about amazon sales(althought anything more is always welcome) or adsense clickthrought. You will be paid from a pool of adsense income earned by Squidoo whether it was directly generated from your page or not. Therein lies Squidoo’s potential to earn you a decent chunk of change.
You don’t need to own a domain.
You don’t need to pay for hosting.
You just need to know how to write. You just need to know how to make Google answer all the questions you have.
Sample this.
As per the latest payout for June 2010 the tier 1 lenses (top 2000) were paid approximately $23 per lens.
Tier 2 made almost $4; and
Tier 3 lenses were worth $0.20
If you had 10 lenses in that top tier and and 40 lenses in tier 2. Your 50 lenses would be earning you an income of $400 a month. Did I mention another thing here – this income would be recurring as long as you spend a fraction of your time maintaining these lenses.
What I invite you to consider is as a newbie to online marketing, you startoff with Squidoo. Build those lenses. Learn the ropes of Online marketing – Get familiar with keyword research, On page SEO,Off page SEO, backlinking, promotion etc. – all without paying a single buck.
Get yourself those first 50 lenses – make that initial $200 – $300 bucks which sets you a recurring online income. In 3 months time, after you hit $ 200 you’d be looking at a paypal balance of $500+. You have completed your primary certificate course in internet marketing. You have learnt the basics. It’s now time to go out to the big bad world and start exponentially increasing your online revenue. In fact as a starting point. Pick out your best performing lenses and convert them into blogs and use your existing Squidoo lenses to point to your blogs and monetize your blogs with adsense, infolinks other affiliate products. No longer sharing income with Squidoo – keep all of it for yourself.
What I would also like to mention here is that once you’ve reach an online income of atleast $200 to $250 monthly on Squidoo- My analysis says that you have got a sufficient amount of experience and mastered the basics which will hold you in good stead.
What this approach will do is allow you to make mistakes and learn them at Squidoo expense. Squidoo’s ranking system will give you a sense of which ones are doing good and which ones are bad. You can explore 50 niches. To do that outside Squidoo on 50 domains would cost you atleast $400 upfront in domain registration. Did I also mention that along the way you’d be able to make some good online friends and build a brand identity?
Think about it Newbies!
