If you’ve not put some articles on Squidoo yet you’re missing out on a great way to make some extra cash. For those you don’t know it, Squidoo is a bit like a blog or wiki with advertising. You can write about pretty much anything you like using the user friendly interface and the completed webpage, known as a lens, will carry advertising that you share in.

The advertising programs available through Squidoo are AdSense, eBay, Amazon, Cafepress and more to come. On these programs you will receive 50% of the revenue generated by your ads. You can also include your own affiliate links to other programs, these are entirely your own.

So why use Squidoo instead of building a website or blog? Simple, its just so simple! Anybody who has surfed the net and used a keyboard before can produce a masterpiece in an hour! Individual modules can be used for different purposes, the text you write, Amazon products that might be relevant, RSS feeds to keep an element of changing content and more. The modules can be ordered in whatever way you like so feel free to experiment.

Using Squidoo also gets your content in front of an audience quickly unlike standard websites which can take months to start seeing traffic. This is because Squidoo already has thousands of people browsing through its pages and also because search engines like Google love the ever expanding content so tend to index the pages quickly.

So how do you make more money? Simple again! Write some good content on a subject you know about, or which you have researched for your lens. Sign up as an affiliate with relevant programs at Commission Junction, Clickbank, Linkshare or anywhere you find them and place your affiliate links in your content using a little simple html. You simply write the links into your text modules using the affiliate tracking links the program gives you.

You can drive more traffic to your lens anyway you like, try writing articles and submitting them to article directories, join relevant lensgroups (Squidoo makes this bit real easy) comment on other lenses (and this bit too), bookmark your lens on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Digg, ping your lens at pingmatic.com, any method really other than spam email traffic.

By using just a little imagination you can have traffic flowing to those affiliate links and earning money. Some find it rather addictive and have many lenses on their pet subjects all bringing in an income. This is particulary effective for niche marketing, it is definitely better to have several lenses focused on say different breeds of dogs than it is to have one lens all about dogs in general!

There is a feel good factor here too as some of the revenue generated by the inbuilt Squidoo advertising goes to various charities, so the more you write the more they benefit. Squidoo represents money for you, money for Squidoo and money for charities, why would you not want to give it a go?