Today I’m going to cover a recent reader question from Diana Bocco about Squidoo lenses, and whether or not you should take the time to create one to support your freelance writing services.

Question:

A lot of writers I know are using Squidoo and saying I should definitively have a page there. Looking around for freelance writing pages, I noticed you have one there too. Could you comment on what are the benefits, how well has it worked for you, etc.?

Answer:

I have quite a few Squidoo lenses and have, in the past, been a pretty big supporter of Squidoo. However, I wouldn’t say that any writer should “definitively have a page there.” It all comes down to investment versus reward.

When I was creating my lenses with Squidoo, there were far fewer people setting them up, especially for promotional purposes. At that time, I supported them for a few reasons:

• Their pages tended to do well in Google results.
• They picked up pagerank quickly (so you would have quality, relevant backlinks to your own site).
• It was still relatively easy to rank well in Squidoo itself, meaning people browsing the site were pretty likely to find you.

That’s since changed. There are far more users now, meaning a lot of competition for top spots. It’s much more difficult to rank well with a new lens when compared with lenses that have been there since close to the beginning.

To maintain decent rankings, you also have to update the lens far more often than you used to. This may not be a ridiculous commitment, but it’s still time taken away from other work.

I also very rarely see Squidoo lenses ranking in Google for anything service-related (and I’m constantly checking SERPs for freelance writing-related terms to see where my own sites currently are). Even the pagerank comes more slowly now, and not as much.

It also wasn’t that long ago that Squidoo came under attack due to the huge amount of spam on the site. While I know they’ve worked to clean it up, it demonstrated that Squidoo was as easy to manipulate as any social media tool, and probably not something you should invest a lot of your time and image in when it comes to professional services (given that other social media tools for interaction give you more control over what you’re associated with).

I don’t create lenses anymore, and it’s rather rare for me to update them. Even when I did, and when my lenses ranked pretty well, I think I only pulled a single client from my collective pages. In contrast, I published one particular freelance writing article on Work.com (one I did without being paid, although I’d written several paid for them previously), and it’s led to about a half dozen clients, including one long-term one. Even though you can earn a little extra income from a Squidoo lens that you can’t from niche sites like Work.com, what I got in return as far as exposure and financial benefits was really negligible with Squidoo.

So no, I wouldn’t spend time setting up a lens these days. Instead, invest time into a blog, improving your professional site, or looking into more stable marketing opportunities (that won’t be destroyed at the spamming whims of others). And if you do really want to set one up (b/c frankly, they’re still fun if nothing else), make it something relatively evergreen, so you don’t have a continual time investment to put in.

Have you had drastically different results? Do you get a lot of business through Squidoo? If so, feel free to share a differing viewpoint, and let us know if you’re new to the site, or if you’ve been there from earlier on.