This is 1Offs, a weblog about niche web marketing, online entrepreneurship, web design, user monetization experience, SEO, niche websites we like, and more.

Seth Godin’s social-blogging/advertising venture, Squidoo, has been acting deader than its namesake that are thrown on the ice of the Joe Louis Arena (oops, those are octopii!). Squidoo helps normal people build web pages called lenses. Lenses are another way to describe a niche site - one person’s view on a particular topic. Many have since tried their hands at being a lensmaster, but being a niche webmaster would have been more profitable thus far.

Squidoo has recently started payouts to its lensmasters. The top lens is currently earning around $30 per month. Which begs the question on what Squidoo has been doing wrong. Here are a few observations:

Squidoo lenses look like irrelevant parked domain pages. You may not agree with this evaluation but surf around the internet and you are bound to see some parked domain pages. Squidoo lenses seem to evoke a similar look and feel. The difference is that a parked domain full of advertistements may actually monetize better than a Squidoo lens.

Squidoo lenses have extremely poor ad placements. Unless you have your monitor at a very high resolution, you will not see any ads appearing above the fold. If the effect is by design, then the desired result must not be to convert the only Adsense ads that appear on the right side bar. The Adsense ads are also not blended into the content or the site layout.

Squidoo lenses have too many outgoing link leaks. A lens is meant to be an information aggregator on a particular topic. Readers can find many useful links from other resources on a lens that can distract them away from the page; never coming back. There are links out to Flickr photos, link lists to other websites. Smart lensmasters also litter the page with their own affiliate links (which don’t work because they are too obvious). Linking out is not a bad idea, but how many of these sites are reciprocating links back to the lenses? Which leads to the next deficiency …

Squidoo is losing the SEO game. Most lenses on Squidoo are unable to compete on search keywords and fail to rank high in SERPs. You can hardly find a squidoo lense without complimenting the search with the ’squidoo’ keyword.

Squidoo button layouts are poorly designed. Take a look at a Squidoo lens, you will see at the top of the article, a ratings tool, links to promote the lens to del.icio.us or submit to Digg. These features can help the lens get more exposure. But why would readers rate a lens or help promote it before they have finished reading? Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will notice that readers have no links to help promote the lens once they have finished reading. The design looks nice but it is counter-intutive and not user friendly.

Squidoo cares most about Squidoo. Compare Squidoo’s homepage to that of Digg, and Del.icio.us. (You may have to sign out to see what non-members see). All these web 2.0 sites rely on user generated content, but Squidoo’s promotion of user content is the least prominent. Squidoo promotional focus is on itself as it struggles to recruit lensmasters. Perhaps Squidoo should simplify and convert its layout to something similar to Google Search. This change may allow it to concentrate on being a lens content search engine / distributor?