One of my favorite ways to build backlinks, increase traffic to my sites, and make money online is using Squidoo. I’m sure most of you know what Squidoo is, but for the rest of the world, Squidoo is a social networking/content publishing platform that allows you to create “lenses” on whatever topic you would like to talk about. It provides an easy to use template where you literally jsut say what you need to and add whatever modules you would like, therefore no computer savvy is really needed except for the simple <a href><a> to make the links. As a result, many people that don’t want to take the effort to set up a self hosted blog or website have a way to get their thoughts out, which is great because that is really what the internet is for anyway; CERN (yes, the lab in Geneva) created the “world wide web” in ‘93 as a free platform to spread information so it works as a great analogy.
Squidoo is 100% free to use, in fact they actually pay you to use it. The company is the creation of the guru internet marketer Seth Godin. It is set up as a co-op, meaning that all profits made are split between the company, the users, and charity organizations. 50% of the profits from Google AdSense ads automatically generated on the pages is sent directly to the lensmasters, 5% goes to various charity organizations (the lensmasters can also opt to donate their proceeds), and 45% goes to the company. The amount of money that a lens earns is determined by a ranking algorithm to divide up the AdSense earnings. Money can also be earned via modules such as Ebay, Amazon, or others which each pay on the same scale based on the commission Squidoo earns except for these sales there is no ranking algorithm, just directly attributable sales as if it were your own affiliate link.
The main reason why I use Squidoo is not because of the AdSense/module earnings, but for 3rd party affiliate sales. I have a couple of Squidoo lenses that pump out a couple thousand dollars a year in affiliate commissions. The beauty of Squidoo is that it is nearly effortless to create a lens, I have one lens that has made me $1500 in the past 6 months and it took me 7 minutes to create it. The internal linking system makes it so that all of the Squidoo pages typically have a high page rank, and as a result they are weighted highly in Google. This means with minimal effort, you can have a high PR web page that is sharing profits that can dominate the search results for some keywords. Using this PR, you can then build relevant high quality backlinks to your own site and drive traffic or just directly drive affiliate sales. There is also a great community within Squidoo, and this makes it an ideal place for marketers or average joes to go to make a buck, build backlinks, or raise funds for charity.
If you would like to see my Squidoo lenses check out my bio page, Lensmaster Page. If you would like to sign up and start building links and earning money from Squidoo you can Sign Up Here.
***My RSS feed is now working, sorry about that guys. I saw a couple people signed up for feeds but then when I checked Feedburner it was empty, apparantly feedburner doesn’t play nice with WP Super Cache so I had to play around with the caching a bit. Should work great now, I would appreciate it if somebody tests it out for me 
Interesting lenses, I’ve had a look at some of the 22 and had a good few ideas. Many thanks.