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The payment we received from Squidoo today marked one full year of PotPieGirl being paid as a lensmaster. Wanna know how much I made on Squidoo each month? Want to see a spreadsheet showing my total earnings? Curious minds want to know, right? Right! Keep reading and see my Squidoo income stats for the past 12 months.
 
 

Squidoo Earnings – One Year Monthly Stats for PotPieGirl

 
I have to say that I don’t come across many other lensmasters doing this. Perhaps disclosing my Squidoo earnings isn’t cool? Oh well. I’ve never been one to run with the crowd. My apologies if this is tacky or if I am breaking some unwritten ‘code’ =)

First off, I am just going to show you my spreadsheet for my past 12 months of payments from Squidoo.com – then, we will talk about it. If you can’t see this spreadsheet clearly here on the blog, just click on the image and it will open in a new window/tab as a larger image.
 
 

PotPieGirl’s Squidoo Earnings Report

 
 
Ok then, raise your hand if you are shocked…..lol

For those that wandered here thinking that I was going to show proof that Squidoo is some ‘get rich quick’ scheme, I imagine you will be making a run for the back button on your browser. That would be just as well – I want to talk to the rest of you that are really curious how all this works…and how it CAN work for YOU.
 
 

About My Squidoo Earnings

 
Alrighty, now let’s talk about these earnings stats and also talk about some of my history making money online.

The stats above reflect Squidoo earnings ONLY from my advertising co-op share. MAYBE $25 in earnings for the entire year are from other Squidoo earnings modules such as the eBay module or Amazon module. I use my own personal affiliate links for all those programs on the majority of my lenses. So, basically this means these are the numbers reflecting my Squidoo AdSense earnings.

Squidoo pays out based on lens performance and breaks the payouts into three ‘tiers’ of payments. Your best performing lenses (Squidoo pages) based on the lensrank internal ranking system at Squidoo get paid the first tier payment. Your mid lenses get the 2nd tier…and your lower ranked lenses make a few cents as a third tier payout.

The Squidoo payment I received today was for a total of 87 lenses I had in the month of April. Now, if I had busted my bottom and gotten all 87 lenses in the top tier, that woulda been a really sweet check of over $642 for JUST AdSense and advertisement share. However, I only had 8 lenses worth the 1st tier payment. Getting lenses and KEEPING lenses in that top tier is HARD and takes dedication. I’m pretty tickled to have 8 of those lenses considering how little promotion of them I do these days.

Also on the Squidoo earnings chart, you can see the effect the infamous ‘Squidoo Slap’ had on the payouts we received the months following (Yes, I am a survivor of the Great Squidoo Depression…hahaha!). You can also see how Squidoo has recovered nicely =)
 
 

My History Making Money with Squidoo

 
I made a few lenses early in 2007 and received a grand total of 78 cents for them in June of 2007 (that ‘payment’ is not shown on the above chart). In the next month, I went from 4 lenses to 31 lenses (basically made a lens a day). I’ve slowly grown since then. This payment today was for 87 lenses I had in April 2008. I believe my dashboard shows 122 lenses today. My lens count fluctuates as I naturally make more, and also as I sell lenses to new, more attentive owners.

In August of 2007 I started this blog. By October I had a few niche sites of my own and by December I was really starting to see it all come together and I was finally really making money.

Now, I imagine y’all are sitting here reading this and then looking up at the spreadsheet of my Squidoo earnings this past year thinking, “Uh, Jennifer, In December of 2007 you only got paid $27.38 from Squidoo… that’s not REAL money!!”

No, it certainly is not. It’s not even enough to put a decent amount of gas in your car, is it?

I imagine a few more readers are now scrolling their mouse up to the back button to leave now =)

Here’s the thing… when I started online, I just about REFUSED to spend money on anything until I made money online to REinvest into my online business. I wanted things like an auto-responder account, and domain names and hosting for my websites… but the only way I was going to get them was to earn the money to buy them.

I knew I could go broke trying to make money online if I fell for every ‘guaranteed’ super-system of the day, so I spent my time making Squidoo lenses and writing articles to sell to Associated Content. Oh, and let’s not over-look something VERY important –
 
 

Another Way I Made Money With Squidoo

 
Guess what was on every Squidoo lens I made? Yup, an affiliate offer of some sort. Each lens had the potential to make me money….. money you don’t see in the above chart. While I kept on trucking making lenses and writing articles, the income started to come in. Millions? Uh no… hardly. BUT, my online business was earning revenue…and I now could re-invest that income into my business.

For this post, tho, let’s stick with only the earnings we see above. If that was all I had to re-invest into an online business, could I make it work? I did an experiment with one niche site I had hosted on Blogger. With that niche site, I made one Squidoo lens and wrote one article for associated content that linked to both the lens and the site. I decided to buy a domain name for this site. Associated Content paid me more than enough for my article to cover the cost of my domain name. Within 3 days of submitting that article, my experiment was back at zero cost to me (actually, a little bit in the black…lol).

It worked like a charm (you can see stats from this Squidoo/Niche blog experiment here). That’s all it took for me to be up and running and I haven’t looked back since.
 
 

Let’s Talk About Squidoo Earnings

 
If you are looking for a way to initiate an online business and you don’t have a website, or a list, or heck, maybe you don’t even have any money to spend – Squidoo is THE platform to get started. Heck, it’s not a platform, it is a SPRINGBOARD! With Squidoo, you can learn AND earn – FOR FREE. When you are ready to move on to building your own network of niche sites, Squidoo will be right there with you to help PAY for it AND to help PROMOTE it.

Do you know what you need to build a network of niche blogs? Really, do you know how much it would cost you each month to cover the necessary costs?
 
 
Let’s break it down:

Hosting: Low cost hosting is easy to find – and many of these hosting packages will allow you to have as many websites on one account as you want. For sake of math, we will say hosting costs: $10 a month

Auto-Responder (if you want to build lists): $20 a month

Domain Names: Again, buying domain names depends on the length of registration, whether it is a .com, a .info, etc and how many niche sites you want to make each month. Again, for sake of math we will say 4 sites a month (one per week) at an average of $5 each : $20 a month

Reality is, you don’t even HAVE to have an auto-responder account, but I wanted one. Without an auto-repsonder account, you are looking at $30 a month to build a niche website network of your very own.

$30 a month.

High side is $50 a month if you get an average-priced auto-responder account.
 
 
Fifty stinkin’ bucks a month.
 
 
Now, look again at my chart up top. Is $50 a month realistic to earn with Squidoo? According to my earnings, each lens is worth about 74 cents each a month (granted, that is a low average since my stats reflect my Squidoo Depression earnings…haha!) That’s chump change, right? Hardly worth it… But…. what if you went ahead, buckled down and cranked out 60-70 lenses?

NOW, you can REALLY start your own online business with NO money out of your pocket. Oh, and what if those 60-70 lenses also start earning you additional income from affiliate sales, too? Guess what? They most likely will!

Now, let’s even take this one step further. You buckle down, crank out a chunk of lenses. You start earning affiliate earnings and Squidoo earnings…. AND…… you also have 60-70 one page ‘sites’ on Squidoo that have been quietly testing niche markets for you. On that Squidoo dashboard in the traffic stats for each lens, you will have the real keywords that folks are REALLY using to find your information. Oh wait! Not only that, but you also have 60-70 Squidoo web pages that have each built up their own Page Rank that you can use those lenses to link out to other sites (hint: YOUR SITES).
 
 

No Website, No List, No Money… No Hope?

 
There IS hope…. no, it’s not just hope, it is REALITY. I am walking, talking, golfing, breathing, blogging proof of it. Oh, and know what else? I am FAR from a top-earner on Squidoo. Out-doing my Squidoo AdSense co-op earnings could be very easy for many of you. Very, very easy.

My Squidoo account pays the bills for my online business needs. My online business puts money in my pocket and pays for my family’s needs.

For those that have made it all the way to the end of this post, I bet you are flat-out shocked that the numbers above are “all” I make from Squidoo. That’s ok with me =)

My over-all point of this entire post (errr…novel..haha) is that yes, it IS possible to make money online without spending money you don’t have to spend. Is it fast? No sir, no ma’am. But it works.

As I always say – and I am walking talking proof of…
 
 

“If you are willing to do for a year what others WON’T,

you can spend a lifetime doing what others CAN’T”

 
 
 
Be willing….. Be determined…. Be Easy on Yourself and Be Willing To Make Mistakes. Get out of your own way and get started.

In one year, things could be a LOT different for you.