Blogging with Squidoo

I have been blogging for many years, and I've been doing so just for the sheer satisfaction of having my presence on the internet felt and letting my friends know I’m alive.

Or no - I have been blogging because as my writer friend said – don’t let your creative veins run dry.

In college, our language teacher taught us about free writing exercise. How this works is that the teacher would give us, say, 5 minutes, to just write what flows out of our heads. This exercise is done to stimulate creativity in writing and that after repetitive free writing, creativity would just come naturally.

Now that I come to think of it, I remember that I had lots of notebooks filled with free writing exercises and none of them exists anymore. That’s the problem with analog technology – they easily get lost or decomposed.

Thanks to digital technology, free writing exercise can be very easy to archive and put in many places on the internet for friends and relatives to read your creative writings.

The benefits of digital free writing, now called blogging which is short for web logging, is even brought to better benefits with having potential earnings by just writing one’s thought on the internet.

I came across squidoo a couple of months ago. While squidoo accommodates any kind of writing from how-tos to love letters, it can also be a place for blogging. I started blogging on squidoo.

Squidoo blogs or any other posted on the site are called lenses. Maybe it’s called a lens because it magnifies the articles to be found in the internet with the squid’s (the mascot of squidoo) big eyes. Or maybe because it magnifies the key words to be easily found on search engines.

Another good thing with squidoo is that there is an advertising affiliate of sort program wherein the page where one’s articles is posted can have advertisements based on the key words pre-specified by the author before making a lens. This is can be neat way to earn money. And the potential earning can be shared to the charity depending on the option o of the writer.

Making a lens of squidoo, in my experience, can be confusing for a first timer. This because the choices of modules and other arrangements for the page can be hard to understand. But once one gets the hang of it, it can be a breeze. It’s work experimenting because there is nothing to lose anyway and everything can be modified later.

There is also a panel where one can view the actual earnings. At the moment, I still have 0 dollars but it’s not a problem. The important thing is I get to do what I do and the earning is just a bonus.

At the moment, squidoo claims that one’s writings can land on top pages in major search engines. But I tried to google one of my articles and I did not even see it on the results. I don’t know what happened but I will try to google in the next fee weeks and see if I find my articles finally.