Squidoo Empire, A Really Big Empire Gone in Seconds

I am feeling sad for your friend and I can imagine how sad he is feeling now. In the end, He and all of us should learn one thing that you mentioned at the end of your thread. Never Put all the eggs in one basket, especially when the basket is not belong to you.

Thanks for spreading awareness cuz i've just started squidoo and dont want my account to get ban. Just tell your friend that there are millions of ways to still make money online so be confident! And best of lucl for a new bussiness.

One legged stool, bro.

Amen brother.

squidoo had become nightmare now for internet marketer that depends on it.

By the way, i believe your friend will wake up and make a lot of money using other method.

Is it hard to move from squidoo to hubpages? I heard that hubpages works better than squidoo in terms of view counts, money generation.

It's really hard to rely your business on other sites you don't control. Squidoo is similar to Adsense. Last week, my friend's account gone into oblivion for no specific reason.

Its always better to stick with your own-controlled business and not relying on other companies....
I feel sorry for him though... really sad news.

That sounds painful.

Did he have his content saved locally on his computer? At least then he'd be able to then use it on another platform.

I've not had good experiences with either Squidoo or Hub Pages. Both sites have a heavy hand when it comes to passing judgement on the sites you link to. Even when I've followed their TOS the results have been mixed with some pages suspended or account banned and others not.

I find it particularly aggravating that they'll suspend a page linking to a site with a lead capture form, regardless of the quality of the site or their interpretation of what constitutes a "low quality" site. All the while decorating the free content I provide them with their own advertisements for payday loan trash and other low quality affiliate offers.

These days I use them strictly for link juice to money sites and nothing more. If you lose a page build another, if you get banned, open another account. For whatever reason Google still likes these sites, will index their pages quickly, and still appears to credit target sites for their backlinks.

That's the problem with investing so much resources in something you don't own.

Now I've argued this point countless times with my guru friends, but here's a cold fact.

If he made the same exact content on his own domain, he might have only received 50% of the traffic.

Or 40%.

Or 20%.

Or 10%, but at least he'd still have it.

Food for thought.

Diversification baby

If your friend can earn a good living off of Squidoo surely he can rebuild with his own sites quickly. I'm not familiar with Squidoo, but hopefully he saved his content or can get it from Squidoo and use it on his own sites.

Buy some aged domains hopefully with some decent PR and build out sites with that content and rank them. If he earned from Squidoo, he can certainly earn from his sites.

That really sucks but I think similar situations can be said about most of us. Whether it be Adsense, Adwords, Google SEO, Hubpages, Squidoo, Tumblr... you just can't rely on 3rd party services.

I say the same things many have said here. Why put all your eggs in one basket?

But...

You would be surprised how many people don't know that a Squidoo lens, an article at an article directory, a WordPress.com blog, can be taken down. That you can be banned for no apparent reason.

If you knew how many people have talked to me, and thought Google basically owned the internet. People that thought, if you break a webmaster guideline of Google, you were breaking some type of internet law.

The fact is, many of us can't go back mentally, to a day when we knew nothing about the internet. A day when we knew nothing really about computers. When we learned how to send an email and thought, wow this is really cool.

Sometimes luck, works better than skill. A person that doesn't really know computers that well. Someone lucky enough to be able to send an email. Stumbles on a make money online with Squidoo product. They get lucky, they do well with a couple lenses. Learning how to create those lenses was like learning a new language. Now they make more lenses, and think, WOW this is pretty cool, I am a Squidoo god! Now they are hooked on Squidoo, and don't want to learn how to do anything else. They are in their comfort zone, and know how to do this one thing very well. They are proud of themselves for learning this, with their limited technical and marketing knowledge.

Now they get the rug pulled out from under them, and can't imagine what they did wrong. How Squidoo could do such a thing. The internet is for everyone... Why did they do this to me? How are they allowed to do this to me?

They don't have any idea why or how, everything went so bad, so quick. Why anyone would be allowed to destroy all their hard work they accomplished over the weeks, months, and years.

I've been using a computer since 1981. I was 9 years old when I went from a Vic 20, C-64, C-128, Amiga, 386, 486sx, 486dx, Pentium 90, Cyrix 6x86 133Mhz.... and on and on...
(Yeah I skipped over some)

I owned a retail computer store. I did programming for years...

I find myself often shaking my head going, "How can someone be so dumb!"

But then I have to think about the fact that they aren't dumb. (Well most of them lol)

They just aren't into this computer, and internet stuff as much as I am. They don't have the background I have. They probably aren't even interested enough to even have the background I have.

This guy and many others are probably exactly like that.

Many will say ignorance is no excuse. He/they should have been learning a lot more than just this. But I agree and disagree at the same time. This guy, like many, was probably very content with his earnings. He probably enjoyed making the lenses, probably enjoyed the money from them, and was happy.

But now he knows... it was a hard lesson, but he knows better now. So he should be able to rebound using his own internet real estate.

Squidoo is an awesome platform for learning the basics of IM. However, as one grows, it is advisable to start doing your own sites, platforms etc.

When you use a platform such as Squidoo, you have to remember that you are using someone else's site and they make all the rules. When you run your own sites, blogs, etc, you make the rules.

For anyone that does use Squidoo, (and I do), I would save all of the information and such to word documents. That way, if something happens and my lenses get locked, or account gets banned then at least I still have the content.

I have never had any problems with Squidoo. For anyone that is new to Squidoo, you should first read the TOS and familiarize yourself with them, very well.

When I first started in IM, Squidoo was very favorable in the eyes of Google, but as a result of all the spam and scams that started popping up, Squidoo got Google slapped, so they had to tighten down on the types of lenses, etc they allowed.

Just my 2 cents worth.!

Man ... that's a lot of lenses and work to lose all in one shot. I can only hope he saved his content so that he can reuse it, but my guess is he probably didn't.

Well, he'll just have to start over from scratch and build on his own property.

datingworld, I feel sorry for your friend & a valuable lesson on diversified approach to IM. thanks for sharing.

Squidoo is quite unpredictable. This last change in their system was a big change that obliged all lensmasters to correct their lenses’ appearance and exactly on Christmas, when most people want to sell their products instead of caring about corrections.

I’m using Squidoo as a free traffic generating method, which is helping my sites and blog, but I don’t recommend the creation of too many Squidoo lenses, neither for getting traffic nor for making money by selling affiliate products, exactly because they don’t respect our business, our opinion, or anything. They decide and do whatever they want, and whenever they want, without previously telling us that the system will change.

If they would tell us that they plan to suddenly completely change the appearance of our lenses, everyone would stop creating lenses until the change would happen. So, they do everything suddenly, without caring about our trouble each time they change their system.

I hope your friend will manage to do something else and make money online without depending on anyone else.

Imagine if he had of published all that content on his OWN site.

...oh wait

Always best to have everything self hosted and generate your own traffic via paid or free methods.

When I read your post I had to check the date immediately.

I swear It was from 2010.

Myself and a bunch of other marketers had their lens business whipped out in a second after Squidoo changed their TOS.

I lost about 2k a month in Affiliate sales - hurt big time and made me wish to quit IM.

Lesson learned, NEVER EVER rely on third party sites.

Imagine your friend would have made those 900 pages at his own domain, could have an authority site right now worth several thousand dollars.

Use Squidoo anyhow to drive traffic to his own site, as suggested by serious marketers.

If Squidoo then lock his account, he only needs to change his traffic strategy.

Well, too late for that but back then many of my friends got somehow access to their locked lenses so they could retrieve their content to publish on their own domains. I dropped Squidoo totally.

Hubpages is the same headache, even don't try to use it as your business platform.

Those are all traffic generation sources, nothing else.

G.

Like any good investment plan you need to diversify, invested money would go into Stocks (domestic and foreign), bonds, commodities. an article marketer could be diversified in the same way squidoo, hubpages, ezines, your own blogs and social media pages..

Best wishes for your friend on getting back on top!

well this just goes to show that you should

"NEVER RELY ON FREE SERVICES"

i have said this time and time again

sure you can create a few lens's and make a bit of extra money, but creating over 900 of them is just the worst thing you can ever possibly do

this also applies to kindle too

kindle is exactly the same. If they want to ban your account then they can do that at the drop of a hat and there isn't anything you can do about it

all of these places where you can make extra income do have their place

but should you be focusing all of your time and relying on these places for most of your income?

"Absolutely NOT"

the best way and it always has been is to have your own products which you own and sell and build your own list

once you have done this and built a good stable income stream you can then put a bit of time into things like squidoo, kindle etc

i made a blog post about not relying on kindle a few months back and the response i got didn't go down very well with a lot of kindle marketers but it was the truth and many experienced marketers shared my exact view

This sucks but part of me asks "what was wrong with your friend"?

Part of me believes that paranoia is a very healthy thing, and some people apparently don't have enough of it.

The minute I find myself completely absorbed in any 1 traffic stream, I also become extremely paranoid. Its the same thing with women unfortunately. I get involved with one, like them, but still don't trust them lol. I probaly should get back on topic here. But my point is, paranoia is a healthy thing. To an extent at least.

Thats why if you never find yourself paranoid about your job, or how you make your money, or even your partner... I highly suggest you start "practicing paranoia". Not to the point where it drives you crazy, but definitely to the point where you shield yourself from bs like this.

-Red

Wow that's crazy. Thanks for posting this, I'm sorry about your friend man.

Gengis

this is where we should all make use of the new "build your viral traffic network" part of this forum, just an idea..

I feel sorry for your friend. However, will it solved the "put all eggs in one basket" issue if one were to create multiple accounts? Say 200 lenses per account maximum..

Just curious. Hopefully this method will help the hardcore squidoo guys to be "a little" diversified.

Living a millionaire lifestyle on squidoo lenses and NOT breaking their laws? I would think at the very least merely having 900 lenses would be enough to irritate them...
Google, facebook etc don't like people over-indulging in any form.

Squidoo and other Web 2.0s are good for building solid Tier 1 backlinks to your money site but you should not have more than a handful of lenses/pages in any one account for this very reason!

Thanks every one for the comments.

I was not very active here from last few days, so couldn't post on the thread.

The Good news is that my friend's ban has been reversed.
His account came under some automated filters but when they looked into it, they reversed the ban and now all his lens are running normally.

He is over the moon now

But
What he decided is that he won't create any more lens and will never give his business into third parties hands.

He is looking into other ways of making money on line, probably improving his list, he already has a small list but will focus to create bigger one.

Thanks guys again for your comments.

When they ban you, can you still go in and access your content? I suppose he could reuse this on his own sites now?

Oops - - never mind, didn't read the last comment. Nevertheless, how does a ban work? Does it mean you can't access anything at all and your content is taken offline? I guess that means that as long as you have everything saved you can run it on your own sites once the content isn't indexed in Google?

Well, there you have exactly WHY you shouldn't rely on any 3'rd party platforms that YOU can't control. And that's also exactly WHY you should have at least 2-3 different income sources because what happens if you lose your 1 income source that you trust? Yes, you'll lose all your income..

Change the word LENS for google in my case...

I feel for him trust me !

My friend just lost his ebay account where 80% of his money was made. I've lost my amazon account which I poured hundreds of hours into (while back). There's no easy way to deal with it. The best thing to do is create your own site so that nobody can take it away and follow 3rd party rules as much as possible. Read the TOS before you go full fledged into anything.

Ouch.... big OUCH!

Reminds me of when I lost my adsense account a year ago. I only made pennies from it, but I was still incredibly devastated..

Any news if there's any chance of a recovery?

It sucks when big sites ban you without telling you any specific reason. Maybe there was a tiny policy infringement hidden somewhere in one of his 900 lens, but the webmasters probably can't be bothered to rectify since they have so many members to manage, even if it means the world to you. You can contact their support to explain your situation and argue your way out, but 95% of the time it is to no avail, sometimes not even getting a reply.

Good news is, if he can create 900 lens, he can definitely create just as much quality content for his own marketing purposes that will eventually outperform those lens. Time to get cracking on your own websites and expanding your income sources!

I actually see nothing wrong with doing this if you are just starting out. And if you are using 3rd party sites exclusively, you should at the very least be building a list with it. Then if the rug's pulled out from under your feet you still have your list to keep traction going.

But, yeah, at some point is an extremely good idea to be building your own websites.

Consider a relation between A and B. 100% of B depends on A, whereas only 0.0001% of A depends on B. In this case, A will even not feel if it loses its relation with B, but B will lose everything. That's what happened to your lensmaster friend.

Things goes crazy sometimes like this, as we have no control on that platform - SQUIDOO
Yes, it is good example to not to put all eggs in one basket.

If he has backup, he can startup a website and do something with it. (if he has no backup, try with Google index pages and get the content copy). The content can be used later on.

Anyhow, all those 900 lenses should have given him a good experience and deeper ins and outs of IM, so as an experienced man he can come back quickly, tell him not to loose his confident.

As a promoter of his own lenses, I am sure he is good at SEO, ask him to write direct letters to some companies on his area and get some SEO orders until he cover up and back on his usual other IM area..

While am generally a fan of Squido the wisdom of putting your eggs in multiple baskets makes obvious sense. I feel bad for the person who put so much work into his lenses. Developing multiple income streams can only help, particularly when the internet is an ever changing beast.

It is pretty bad when that happens - I have been there!

However it is not the end of the world, it just seems like it.

The KEY is to use Squidoo, hubpages and any other site you do not own as a tool to promote your OWN sites.

It is quicker to get a Squidoo lens out there and ranking but with your own site it may take a little longer initially but you own all of the content so the above can't happen.

Also you then have an asset you can sell.