Making Money with Squidoo: My Squidoo Payments

In August, 2014, Squidoo was purchased by Hubpages. The amount is my total earnings while writing for Squidoo. Go to Making Money with Hubpages: My Hubpages Earnings to learn about Hubpages and how much I have made here.

Squidoo is a great community that allows writers to create webpages (called lenses) and make money from these pages. You can make money from Squidoo in a number of ways. The first way to make money with Squidoo is by sharing in the revenue the site earns. Squidoo will pay users with the top lenses a percentage of the revenue from the Squidoo "ad pool." How much a Squidoo member is paid is determined by their lenses "lens rank." All lenses are ranked based upon traffic, time spent on the lenses, click outs, etc... and broken up into tiers. Tier 1 is for the Top 2,000 lenses, Tier 2: 2,001-10,000, Tier 3: 10,001- 85, 000, and Tier 4 are all of the remaining lenses. Tier 1 receives the highest payout (currently averaging around $45 per lens), Tier 2 receives the next highest payout (around $10 per lens), Tier 3 receives the lowest payout (around 40 cents per lens), and Tier 4 receives no payout (although some high ranked Tier 4 lenses receive some payout around 10 cents per lens). The revenue share is based upon money received from the Squidoo ad pool, text links, and chitika ads.

The Squidoo revenue share is not the only way to make money on Squidoo, you can also earn royalties from items sold through modules on your lenses. Money earning modules include Amazon modules, an eBay module, and a CafePress module. You will receive a share of all purchases made through your module and be paid by Squidoo. You can also make money with Squidoo by using Squidoo to promote affiliate program sales such as from Clickbank, Commission Junction, Google Ad Network, AllPosters, Zazzle, and more.

This lens, however, chronicles all of the payments I have received since being a member of Squidoo, Please be advised that I have not put as much time into my Squidoo lenses as many other people or made much effort to promote my Squidoo lenses, so I do not earn as much as many other writers. I mainly make lenses for fun on topics I am interested into or that I think may be useful/helpful to others. I hope to at some point put more time & effort into making lenses that focus on SEO and promotion of products to make more money, but for now I'm happy with the steady payout I make that combined with my other efforts to make money writing online helps to provide extra income and revenue for me.

In early 2013, Squidoo was "slapped by Google" and as a result traffic and ad revenue took a nosedive. Squidoo responded by constantly changing its rules, locking lenses, and locking accounts for those who didn't have the time to keep up with the new rules. My account was locked in mid-July. The plan with Squidoo after my account was locked is to transfer all of my old lenses to other platforms and start from scratch with all new lenses on Squidoo and build new lenses that comply with the new rules and filters. Those new lenses will likely not be created until 2014.

My first Squidoo payout was in February of 2011 for earnings generated in December of 2010.

In 2012, I made A LOT more money than I did in 2011, in part with the help of one of my articles reaching the covetted Tier 1 status and by the end of the year I was averaging 2-3 lenses in Tier 1. The earnings were helped by the fact that at the end of the year, Tier 1 was at an all time high and ranged from $50-$75 per lens.

2013 was a year of all time highs and new lows for Squidoo, as I was on a roll with lots of Tier 1 and Tier 2 lenses and making over $200 one month and just as I thought I was on my way to making $500 per month by the end of the year, Squidoo came crashing down. Squidoo was "slapped by Google" and lost a lot of authority in the search engine which led to less views and therefore, lower ad revenue with Tier 1 dropping all the way down to under $20 and then there was the disappointment of having my account locked and the migration of all my lenses to new platforms. My last payment for 2013 was in September as all of my lenses were taken off of Squidoo in mid-July. At this point, I have not created new lenses for Squidoo, but will update this page once I start doing so.

In August, 2014, Squidoo was purchased by Hubpages and many lenses were transferred over to Hubpages. I will leave this hub up to demonstrate how much money I made (and could be made) with Squidoo. Go to my hub, Making Money with Hubpages: My Hubpages Earnings to learn more about writing for Hubpages and how much I have made here.