The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. The SquidTeam: Seth, Corey, Megan, Heath and Gil Squidoo’s Inevitable Destiny Probably not on par with the lottery, but at least you can enjoy a cup of coffee on us. īelow you’ll find a statement of your money earned from March 1 to March 31, 2006. Or, check out SquidU’s tips for upping your earnings. If you’re more interested in spreading ideas and traffic than making money, just send your share to a charity, where every bit counts. And still others have pooled their money to send thousands of dollars to places like Room to Read, which helps build schools for children in developing countries.Ĭhances are that what you’re seeing now is just a drop in the bucket. But already some of you have earned as much as $30 (dinner for two!). We’re just out of beta, and we’re betting no one is going to retire on their lens earnings. (NB: If you got a cryptic one-liner email from us about this yesterday, please disregard it. It’s time for your first Squidoo paycheck. Subject: Your First Squidoo Paycheck (the real one!) It’s quite obvious from the email, as well as the Alexa trend (flat), that Squidoo is not seeing viral growth: I was forwarded a copy of the May email that Squidoo sent out to Lensmasters. But from what I see now, I wouldn’t bet on Squidoo being what Seth would call a Purple Cow. And Squidoo is still young and may very well reverse its current stagnation. When Squidoo launched last December I was as excited as anyone about its potential. To be fair, I have the benefit of hindsight. It would be like a Wikipedia with multiple entries on every topic – one for everyone who cared to write one. It’s unlikely that a Squidoo lens on a given topic (when there are a potentially infinite number of other lenses on the same topic) will ever gain that kind of authority. Wikipedia is group-created, edited and refined content, which gives it the authority it needs to get people to link to it. Squidoo shares little in common with any of the services above because no one person can really be authoritative on a given topic. People are also passionate about Myspace because the central plot of a page is you – and most people are pretty passionate about themselves. You can surf around Myspace all day just by clicking on a friend chain. Myspace works, however, because it’s a social network, with pages linking to eachother (your friends) in a way that produces massive inter-site traffic and networks-within-the-network. Good blogs generate stickiness and repeat customers, which is also a model that can be monetized.Īn example of a service that combines evergreen and refreshed content successfully is Myspace, which has both static content about a person and blog-like aspects where people can add fresh content. People go back to blogs every day to see what’s new. With all of this authority and inbound links (traffic), a site like Wikipedia could be massively monetized.īlogs, on the other hand, are the very essence of refreshed content. Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of authority for just about any piece of content. Sure, its updated and refined, but the idea is that content on Wikipedia is something that is fairly stable and can be linked to reliably, as I did above. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a site with evergreen content. Squidoo is a mixture of evergreen (static) and refreshed content. To borrow the metaphor, Squidoo could become an albatross around Seth’s neck. He also loses credibility as an expert in product marketing. If Squidoo doesn’t work out as planned, and I don’t think it will, Seth loses more than his time and whatever capital he’s put into Squidoo. Squidoo shares a percentage of profits with its authors. The person building the lens, the “lensmaster”, gets recognition as an expert in his or her area of expertise, and cash. The Squidoo idea was simple and easy to explain: allow anyone to build a single page, called a lens, on a topic that he or she is passionate about. So when Seth put his name behind a new startup last year, Squidoo, people noticed, and expected one hell of a Purple Cow. They build something first, then think about the best way to market whatever it is that they’ve built (often by hammering away at journalists and spending whatever capital they have on Google adsense, Overture, etc.). It seems obvious, but most startups don’t think that way. I routinely bring up his ideas when talking to companies about the best way to get media and early adopter attention: build an exceptional, attention-grabbing product (and if you haven’t, go back and start again). I’ve read all his books – my favorite is Purple Cow. Seth Godin is an exceptional marketing consultant.
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