PPC Versus Squidoo

Make Article Writing Pay

The pay-per-click world is still doing a lot of business, even though you yourself may have gotten tired of tiny payouts and the less-than-exciting world of clicking. The practice is definitely not entirely white-hat, though I'm sure there are plenty of proponents out there who would argue that point. Let's just say that if you're a webmaster and suddenly find yourself the recipient of 500 $.004 clicks, then you'll probably have a less than positive opinion of PPC.

One method that these sites often encourage is to write articles related to a hot topic, and then lard the article with referral links. Once people sign up to do PPC through your referral link, you'll get a slice of the proceeds. It's not nothing, but it does take a long time to add up to something.

Another way to make writing articles work is to write for an online publisher like Squidoo. This site is just getting more and more popular, even after recent Panda and similar Google search updates knocked similar sites off their PageRank pedestal. For some reason, Squidoo has proven to be resilient to the ever-tightening nets meant to keep gray and black hats off the internet.

I'm not suggesting that you write Squidoo articles and put a bunch of PPC referral links in your articles, because sooner or later the Squid Gods will notice. When that happens, they'll lock all of your lenses and all of your work will be gone. There's a reason that Squidoo survived Panda -- they keep the PPC's off the site as best as they can.

Instead, write your article for your PPC links, but instead of posting it on one of those useless article index sites, post it on Squidoo. Add some photos. If it's a halfway decent article, it will get some viewers. If you keep at it, you might just find that you're making a little money on the side. And if you're like me -- a refugee from the PPC world who made a new home on Squidoo -- you might just find yourself with a top-ranked article, and over $100 of passive income a month, and rising.

Once you get some traction writing on Squidoo, you can write your own eBook and pass along your new-found wisdom. Here's mine: 

No guarantees, of course. But I'm finding that my new white hat fits pretty nice.