Earn revenue for consolidating your expertise

The Internet age which we all are living very aptly epitomizes the old and known saying "Knowledge is power". We all need to have some kind of expertise. The expertise to be excellent at the job, the Expertise to carry out the business activities, Expertise to make a great leader, Expertise to be a better home maker, expertise to be a better dad, a better husband!!

The expertise could be in any avenue, it could be add an edge to your professional life, it could useful in Personal life. The expertise could be anything and everything.

But nobody is born with an expertise and so it has to be learnt, it has to be developed, it has to be practiced to be an expert. The Social network plays a key role in making us an expert as the knowledge, the expertise, the information, the know-how is shared, is available for everybody who wants to use it, gain it, practice it and most importantly take it forward and help it grow.

This post is meant to introduce you all once such social media platform. This post is in continuation to the series that is aimed at exploring avenues to that lets you have an alternate source of income.Coming back to the Social platform I was referring to, Its called Squidoo. It’s a platform that lets you share your expertise by creating something called as Lens.

 

What is Squidoo?

It’s a platform for user-generated content. It enables the users to build a page that features the best of what you know about a topic. The page you create is knows as a Lens. Its your lens, your take on the topic. You can have multiple pages to address multiple topics. The best part is its free.

 

What does a Squidoo page contain?

  1. You could add the RSS feed if the articles you are reading on the topic, the RSS feed of the articles you liked about a topic
  2. Add pictures
  3. Add products for review
  4. You can have polls
  5. Ask the audience of your lens to comment
  6. Add your own content.

A lens on London, for example, could include links to five restaurants, with a quick paragraph on each one. The lens could include a description of a favorite hotel, with a link to the hotel’s page about a specific suite. The lens might feature three or four guidebooks for sale on Amazon, some tourist memorabilia on auction at eBay, and pointers to Flickr postings of great sites to visit.

Squidoo attracts traffic from across the Web—people find a lens they are interested in, and it leads them to another lens, or to a product or a service they didn’t know about. The person coming to a lens is exploring—looking for new ideas and solutions—which is exactly where you want to be.

Squidoo pages form a social database—a human index of the best stuff on a given topic.

 

How Revenue is generated?

Every lens earns a royalty for a charity or its creator. The royalties come from a share of the ads that run on the site, as well as from directly earned affiliate revenue. An example? If a movie lover builds a site that refers to Netflix, and Netflix records a new member as a result, the person who built the site—the lensmaster—earns as much as $10. Build enough lenses and drive enough traffic, and it can add up.

   

How is it different from other Social Media?

The biggest difference between Squidoo and the other social services is that Squidoo adds value by juxtaposing ideas so they coalesce into useful meaning. A Flickr picture becomes popular because it’s clever or funny. A blog posting gains an audience when other bloggers decide it’s useful enough to refer to on their blogs. But a Squidoo lens works when it presents important information as part of a whole—when it’s a piece of the big picture of meaning.

 

A few ideas on Lenses…

A more sophisticated example: a lens presenting links to six technical articles on data security and cryptology, written by senior IBM researchers. Those articles have been on IBM’s Web site all along, but only by presenting them together, along with a narrative that makes it all clear, can the lensmaster offer a page that’s worth looking at.

Here are a few example of using Squidoo to give your fans a megaphone:

  1. A software developer builds a lens on the Project he is working on. Shares an RSS feed of the links that he refers for the project. A poll on the architecture of the project design. A discussion on the technology he is using. The developer gets to showcase his skills, meet fellow developers working on similar project or technology. The lens becomes his CV.
  2. A company asks every employee to build a lens about the business or about a favorite product the company offers. The lens would include new ways to look at the item, or dream about it, or use it. The lens could point to blogs or news clips or photos.

The best way to know the power of Squidoo, realize what it has to offer and yes earn extra bucks is to of course, use it. Get on with you exploration project on Squidoo by clicking on the logo. 

 

You are welcome to share your thoughts on this series and share any other platform that could add some muscle to the alternate source of income.

Post a Comment

6 Comments

  1. good share ..........................keep growing...
    giftwithlove.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Golden tips...
    rosesandgifts.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Randg..Do share the tips you are aware of and lets jointly fight recession with a second source of income.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the comment and wishes...I wish you the same. Keep growing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. An interesting post lately. I absolutely concur with your points. It’s because of this reckless spending behavior that has made them impecunious and moreover led them toward bankruptcy. Still they say that they can’t bear the fees as they can’t cut back on their cigarettes and trivial toys the snowmobile, PWC, 4-wheeler and moreover on cable bills. This is really ridiculous; something like that they have not grown up yet. This kind of approach cannot be expected from a normal fellow unless he/she has lost his/her mental health due to the unmatched pressure that debt has brought on his life. Whatever, they should tread at any means to resolve their financial difficulties.

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  6. Thanks for your time and feedback Marc. Comments are quite encouraging...

    ReplyDelete