A radical statement but I now totally believe this to be true. Over the past 5 years I have built hundreds of web 2.0 pages and several dozen websites. The websites I have built have cost me many times as much in time, energy and money as the web 2.0 sites but have earned me only a fraction as much.

With the new Panda and now Penguin (?) updates I have seen my Adsense earnings fall from around £10 a day to less than £1 a day and my affiliate sales income from my own websites has never been very good. Plus I have fought a constant battle against hackers for the past couple of years.

So I have made the decision that I am not going to renew any of my domains as they expire. I will probably keep 1 hosting account (currently I have 3) and a couple of blogs like this one running for the time being.

I was going to either sell the sites I have left or strip them of their many pieces of unique content to use elsewhere but I really cannot be bothered to even do that. I am sure I will be far better off putting my time and effort into more web 2.0 pages which is where the vast majority of my income comes from.

There are still a huge number of make money online products and membership sites that promote the idea of making niche websites as a means of internet income, but they are selling a dream that has little basis in reality these days. The amount of work and the cost involved in building up a niche website to the point where it is making any profit at all is huge and the battle to maintain position in the search engines is constant.

From now on my internet efforts are going to be 100% web 2.0 including Squidoo, Hubpages, Wizzley and others. So easy, so simple and so hassle-free!

At the end of July, beginning of August it will be school summer break so parents will be trying to keep the kids entertained. Anything to do with outdoor activities for kids would be a good lens topic.

Eating alfresco is popular so lenses on products relating to cooking and eating outdoors are a seasonal theme.

Many families will be taking camping trips and vacations during August and there are a huge number of products relating to camping equipment that you can sell. If you’re not sure where to start take a look at the best-sellers list on Amazon for the category you are interested in.

Look around on Squidoo and find out what topics are already covered with numerous lenses and try and find a few niches that are under-represented. Make 5 or 6 lenses on different topics in the same general theme (such as camping) and link them together using the related lenses tool on squidtools.com.

The thing to take into account is whether you are better off using your own links or Squidoos links. A 50% share of the sale via Squidoo earns you around 4% so if you are not selling enough through your own links to earn you a higher percentage you will get the same amount and will not have to wait until you have achieved enough for a payout direct from Amazon.

I do a combination of both. Some lenses have my own links with Squidoo links. I earn enough direct from Amazon to get a payout every month (but as this is a cheque in dollars it takes a week or so for my bank in the UK to change it for me) but I also make a good amount from Amazon sales from Squidoo each month.

I maintain that PotPieGirls One Week Marketing is the best product for anyone who is new to Squidoo but this new product Shortcut to Squidoo Money is perfect for anyone who is already using their lenses as a vehicle to make money but is not making as much as they could, and at just $12.95 from this link HERE it is a no brainer.

Lisa, who has written the Shortcut to Squidoo Money lays out step by step how she makes sales lenses, selling mostly Amazon products, although this could be used with any affiliate accounts that you have. She even gives some examples of her best performing lenses. There is nothing startlingly new here but it is well worth a read even if you think you know everything there is to know about making profitable sales lenses and getting traffic.

There are however a few tweaks I would make that would improve this system in my opinion.

#1 Go for seasonal products that are not holiday related. Toys are great but Lisa admits that a toy lens that makes hundreds or even thousands of dollars in November/December will bomb in the Spring. Think about what people will be doing and wanting to buy in 3 months time and make lenses about those products.

#2 Stay out of the SquidU forum! There is a small but very vocal group of “lensmasters” in there that will HATE you if you are making sales lenses or in any way trying to make an income from your Squidoo pages. The advantages of dropping a link in the forum are far outweighed by the bad Karma that exists there.

#3 To interlink your Squidoo lenses, better than the featured lenses module provided by Squidoo is the module at squidtools.com – just put in the lenses you want to feature and copy the html into a text module – takes a bit longer than the regular featured lenses module but is more effective.

So to sum up if you are new to the whole Squidoo thing and don’t know how to get started making lenses to make money get the One Week Marketing Course HERE.

If you are already experienced but could use some tips on how to make the most profit from sales lenses get Shortcut to Squidoo Money HERE.

Although it has been around for a few years now, in my opinion Pot Pie Girl’s One Week Marketing Plan is still the best and most comprehensive guide on getting started making money with Squidoo. Get your own slice of the pie!

Here is the link to see what you get

One Week Marketing – Click Here!

Generally a new lens takes at least 3 months to start seeing any traffic so now (April) is the time to work on summer lenses and by May/June I need to be working on Fall and Halloween – although I may just forget about holiday lenses.

3 or 4 years ago Halloween costume lenses and Christmas lenses did really well for me but last year I made virtually nothing from them. This is probably mainly to do with the fact that there are hundreds of new Squidoo lensmasters all determined to get their share of the holiday pie.

photo: faungg

On the other hand seasonal lenses NOT holiday related, such as winter fashions continue to do really well for me so while I will not be deleting any of my holiday lenses, I probably won’t be making any new ones. Fashion lenses require a lot of upkeep and updating and are very time consuming but they do produce more sales than almost any other type of lenses I have. There is one category that outsells everything else but I am keeping that a secret for now.

Over the next 4 weeks I plan to completely update and re-vamp all my lenses in Tier 1 and Tier 2 plus do the same with all my Summer related lenses.

Having your own sites creates 10 times the work; 10 times the hassle; 10 times the number of scumbags trying to steal from you AND 10% of the income.

photo: jon.bell

I am now abandoning my websites apart from a blog or two, like this one. Sites that have been making money I will sell, the others I am going to let the domains lapse and slide into obscurity.

Web 2.0 – sites that belong to other people – are the way forward for me. Zero cost and Zero hassle.

In my opinion the days when an ordinary Joe could put up a website with a few pages of content, add some Adsense links and throw a bucketful of links at it, then rinse and repeat and watch a trickle of income grow into a flood – are long gone! Websites are moving more and more towards being the preserve of big business and I don’t even think this is a bad thing.

If I had stuck to what I know best and what works over the past 5 years instead of branching out into making my own sites, Adsense etc etc I would be a whole lot better off than I am now.

So those 5 years are behind and for the next 5 years ahead I am going to watch my basket.

My basket = making affiliate sales on Squidoo.

Image courtesy of GreekGeek http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/Greekgeek

Even after a good deal of neglect Squidoo is still my number 1 earner. By concentrating on this one thing for 5 years can I increase my income by a factor of 10? I intend to find out. August 2017, slightly more than 5 years in the future is a significant date for me so by then I plan to be making in excess of $10,000 per month from affiliate selling via Squidoo.

  To August 2017 and beyond!

Affiliate sales from lenses are up too and as we are moving into the highest buying time of year – just think of all that lovely Christmas shopping! - I am confident that affiliate income will be as high this year as ever.

Old Jetty

I have never really bothered with building backlinks to my Squidoo lenses outside of Squidoo but I think that is going to have to change.  For one reason, Google is still not giving back the authority(or the traffic) to my lenses that they once had.  The reason for the increase in traffic lies mainly with Yahoo and internal linking within Squidoo.

I am reluctant to start writing ezine articles just to give links to my lenses.  To be honest I am reluctant to write ezine articles for anything but I know it is something I have to do for my own sites and niche blogs.

Recently the very excellent Keyword Academy, where I am a member took over Connect Content and now I can use that to build links as part of my membership.  So my next step has to be asking for links to my lenses on Connect Content and see how it goes.  You can now get a month’s trial membership to the Keyword Academy for $1 – you’d be crazy not to!

I have added several new (unique) articles to the site and have Amazon products auto-posting to the site.

There are now over 600 pages indexed in Google for this site and traffic is increasing.  However, I have not seen any great increase in adsense clicks or sales.  This is probably because although a ton of pages are indexed, my site appears on the first page for only a handful of very long-tail keywords.

Brixham Lifeboat

Still, it is only mid October and I hope by the time the Christmas shopping starts in earnest my site will be popping up all-over for lots of buying keywords.

Squidoo is Improving

Traffic to my Squidoo lenses has improved remarkably!  It is now at its highest level for almost 2 years.  Making lenses again looks to be a worthwhile use of time.  Plus they can be used to build links to my sites.