Is it wrong to build Squidoo Sales Lenses? In my opinion, No. But I have seen some posts by other Squidoo lensmasters who were very negative about Squidoo Sales lenses. They suggest that sales lenses have low quality content that diminishes the quality of Squidoo. Is it right to have nothing but Sales Lenses on Squidoo? Probably not. I suggest that you do have several well-researched high-quality Squidoo articles along with your Sales lenses. The reason why Squidoo lenses rank well in the Search Engines is that Squidoo provides quality content on a variety of topics. And since being part of the Squidoo community is important to lensmasters' success on Squidoo, you do want to contribute to overall Squidoo success. At the same time, I believe that there are two types of Squidoo Sales Lenses - lenses that don't benefit the reader in any way and are made with the sole purpose of making Sales and lenses that solve readers' problems and help them in the decision making process.
I personally put a lot of effort into making my Squidoo Sales lenses the perfect solution for the reader's query. You may be surprised to find out that I have already spent 7 hours of planning and research on my newest lens Best Toys for 2 year old Girls. From coming up with the idea and brainstorming, to researching the topic, applying personal experience, and reading customer reviews of individual products, it takes time to come up with a solution of the reader's query. My goal is to help Parents, Grandparents, Family Members, or Friends to help pick out the perfect gift, and if I don't succeed in my efforts, I will not get any visitors from Google. Every one of my Sales lenses takes a lot of time and effort, and plenty of continuos improvements and frequent updates.
Do Sales Lenses diminish the quality of Squidoo? Some lenses do, I agree. But there are also other lenses that offer solutions to reader's problems or point readers in the right direction to where the solution may be found. Sales Lenses also contribute to the Squidoo Ad Pool. For example, my top performing lens Top Christmas Gifts for Girls 2011 gets 5+ Google Ad clickouts per day, making Squidoo $5-$10 or more per day in Google Adsense revenue. So to sum it all up, in my opinion, both, Squidoo lensmasters and Squidoo, benefit from Sales lenses, but it's also important to contribute well-researched quality articles to contribute to Squidoo overall success.
November 6, 2012 Update: My newest addition: Best Toys for 1 year old Girls has already taken me over 30 hours of research, planning, and content updates. However, it will be the perfect go-to place for anyone looking for the perfect gift for 1 year old baby girls - since I have already picked out the age-appropriate educational toys, narrowed down the choices to the best toys available on the market in 2012, and broke them down into categories to make the selection easier.
