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Web2 – Social Media

Web2 - Facebook, Hubpages and Squidoo
Web2 – Facebook, Hubpages and Squidoo

Web2 – Facebook, Hubpages and Squidoo

These three Internet, social media companies, part of the so-called Web2, Facebook, Hubpages and Squidoo have all been around for several years already, but if you don’t know any of them, just put the suffix ‘.com’ to their name in your browser and hit ‘ENTER’.

They are all different types of ‘build your own blog or website’ sites, which say that they will help make you money, but do they? We will look into the claim in this article.

Squidoo: I have had an account with Squidoo for may years. It is probably the most flexible of these three Web2 sites, but it is also very fussy. Years ago, I had 99 lenses (what they think is a cute name for web pages. At the time, all 99 of them were passed as being ‘good enough’ and they all made (some) money.

I think that the money earned is split 50-50 with Squidoo. You could build a lens in 2-3 hours, which included writing two or three 500-word articles on the subject of the lens. It was and still is very easy to add Amazon and eBay modules to your lens in order to monetize it.

However, there are dozens of modules to choose from. You are allowed backlinks to your site and Google loves Squidoo, so it is a very easy way to get your website noticed by Google. Some webmasters only build lenses for this reason, the income is very secondary.

Since Squidoo was affected (and scared half to death) by Google’s Panda crackdown, it has passed the buck onto its users. Ninety-eight of my lenses have been deemed unfit and delisted and two that I made last week were rejected. In fact, I haven’t earned any money on Squidoo for two years since they moved the goalposts.

I will try for another month and then abandon it as a bad job. In fact, it is better to put the effort into your own website and keep all the earnings that accept a rejection rate of 75%. Why populate their website with pure, unused content, when you can use it yourself?

It used to be a good place to test an idea. For example, if you thought a website on yellow hankies might be a good idea, you could build a lens and see how popular it was, before buying a domain name and building a real website. Squidoo is less valuable to users now than it was unless you are a complete novice.

Hubpages: it works in a similar way to Squidoo, but its webpages are called ‘hubs’. They too insist on original content, because they are scared of another spanking by Google, but they have even less to offer in the way of monetization of your hub.

I have been with them for several years and had five to eight hubs, but never ever made a single penny, although my hubs have been deemed good enough to be ‘showcased’. Last week, I was excited to see that I had made $7 in sales commission, but yesterday it was gone. Very suspicious.

It is worth a try for novices at Web2. It too gives good backlinks that Google respects, but don’t expect to earn anything from your work.

Facebook: I think that Facebook really could help you make money, but mostly in conjunction with other Web2 sites like Twitter. It has the exciting feel about it that Google had until seven or eight years ago., when it helped average Joe’s earn money with Adsense and before it became too high and might to talk to its users any more.

Facebook does not make it as easy to utilize all the facilities available as the other two do, but it doesn’t preach like they do either. They also offer real, 100%-yours opportunities for making money online. A test site made me $37 in one day and compared to the other two, that is pretty good.

by +Owen Jones

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