Creating Squidoo Lenses : Too Much Fun! (Part 1)

Are you familiar with Squidoo.com? Well I wasn’t until a little over two weeks ago! To me, this site is like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Wikipedia, or almost any other social media sight you can think of pretty much rolled into one. It might just be my new facination with the site but I am totally addicted. Pretty much like I was addicted to Twitter when I joined but even this site has torn me away from Twitter for the time being. Although, when you update your lens (page) on Squidoo you can automatically have it tweeted to Twitter. How cool is that?

So far I’ve created five lenses (which is what they call pages) that are kind of like a Wikipedia page that you can create content on any subject you can imagine and one group lens. If you have something you believe you are good at and want to share your knowledge, then Squidoo is a great place to do just that!

One of my lenses is linked with my blog here to help promote it. It's called Come Check Out Nochipra's Blog Spot . I’ve placed content on there referring back here listing my latest blog posts, encouraging people to stop by to participate in my surveys to the left of this post. Given updates about what I’m doing on the web during the day, etc.

But, the best part is that you can actually make income from Squidoo without actually having to do anything other than market the lenses to generate traffic! You decide on the affiliate ads that you want to place from Amazon, Ebay, or Cafepress. I believe that at this time they are the only three I‘m sure will give an affiliate profit? There are also google ads and other ad profits that get put into a pool and depending on how your lens does, then you can get a portion of that too. It’s a totally cool system in my opinion but you do need to promote your lenses and get them seen.

Another lens I created was just for fun called Dinner Recipes Tonight . The concept behind this lens is to have people come together online at dinner time and share their experience with everyone from the actual recipes they made, to whether their family enjoyed the meal, how the night went if it was a date, etc. To expand on the discussion on how the night went I also created a Dinner Recipes Tonight Group . This is where they can go into more details if they wish, about their frustrations of cooking dinner in a hurry, how the kids interrupted their cooking, expand on how their dates went, etc. With more of a discussion group type setting.

The next lens I made was The Debate Club. This lens has debate questions where you can choose a side and express your opinions on different subjects that I post. At the moment I have 20 questions listed but more will be added later. This lens along with the Dinner Recipes Tonight lens seem to be my most popular.

The last two lenses I created were What’s Your Blood Pressure Now? And What’s Your Blood Sugar Level Today? I just created these two lenses in the last few days. My purpose in creating these was to have lenses where you could come and keep a record of your blood pressure and of your blood sugar if you’re a diabetic. My inspiration came from Chip who had a really rough experience recently with a 10 day hospital stay of which I’ve blogged about in a previous post or should I say ranted about? Anyway, it was definitely not a bed of roses! Since he got out of the hospital we have done some pretty significant changes in our lives including checking his blood pressure and blood sugar every morning and night. These two lenses are designed for me as well as anyone else who needs to keep a record for any future doctor’s visits. I believe it is important for anyone with medical problems similar to Chip’s to keep a close eye on these numbers.

I’ve tried to keep my lenses interactive which my visitors seem to enjoy. The majority of the lenses on Squidoo are very informative text lenses with a wealth of information on just about any subject you could imagine.

The potential to be able to make money on the site is very exciting as well. You can choose to either have the profits from your lens sent to your own paypal accout, have it donated to charity, or split it both ways. There are several different ways that you can make money on Squidoo.com. This video is one of the better ones I’ve found that gives good information on the different ways.



I’ve become so excited about creating and potentially making some much needed extra money on Squidoo that I couldn’t possibly put all the information I’ve learned into one post. So I’ve decided to break it up into parts where I will share with you my experiences on things like; what I’ve learned about how to make a Squidoo lens, how to promote the lenses, and of course how to make the money from the lenses.

I hope you will find these posts informative and I have not forgotten about my previous series of posts too. I will be doing posts on Informative Youtube Videos on blogging and social media.

Please consider following my blog to help me achieve my daily goal of gaining at least 3 new followers a day. There is also a fun poll that you can vote on to the left of this post. Let your vote be heard!

If your interested in signing up and getting an account with Squidoo please consider using my referral link to do so. It will be greatly appreciated and when you make your lenses, let me know that they are ready and I will come visit them. http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/Nochipra Thank you.

Happy Blogging!

Nora