Squidoo

Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest--and snap it all into focus. (You're looking at a lens right now).

It's a supersimple, fun and powerful way to share your interests, build your online identity and credibility, and connect with new readers and friends. It's all free, and you could even earn a royalty for charity or yourself!

Squidoo LLC was founded in 2005 by bestselling author, noted blogger, speaker and Original Squid, Seth Godin. The stated function of the site is to make it easy for people to create free pages (called "lenses") on their interests, and to earn royalties for their good content. Nearly 40% of all Squidoo users donate the royalties they earn from the site to charity. There are more than 900,000 handbuilt lenses on Squidoo.

Squidoo makes money from ads and affiliate links.

We give 5% of what we earn, right off the top, to charity. We keep 45% to cover our overhead and stuff.

That leaves 50%. That goes to charity or to the people who build the pages. And we leave it up to you to choose one or the other.

It's that simple. You can earn a dollar, a nickel or a dime at a time for your favorite cause or for you. Lots of lensmasters (our authors) are making $thousands a year for creating good, authentic, useful pages. Others make a few dollars here and there and donate it to charity. It really adds up.

Did we mention that Squidoo is free? Always has been.