How Do I Keep Myself Motivated with Blogging

My tips to keep myself motivated with online affiliate marketing

 

First blog to profit from my brand new motivation!

 

As said in my latest post, I got my motivation back again.  I could get motivated with my online affiliate marketing business thanks to an online pal who posted something about a class on sale. After a bit of reflexion, I purchased the class and started working right away.

I was deliberately pushing myself in some kind of "get back to work trap" since all I was doing these past weeks was procrastinating, watching movies and series, and surely, certainly, absolutely, definitely - how awul - NOT touching my blogs. Hey, it's the end of year holiday season, all my blogs are related to this season and I didn't do anything!

So I spent $55 in this course (it's currently on sale) and have to say that I don't regret it. Once I was in, I couldn't jump out. Simple. The course is really well done and understandable - made by work at home women for work at home people, clear and simple vocabulary, which anybody can understand. There is nothing complicated in this course.

Actually, I readjusted my knowledge, adapted it to today's trends and search engines desires. I'm in the process of forgetting everything HP and other platforms with strict rules but that don't generate enough traffic worth talking about tried to force me to believe. And I'm glad: it seems to work.

What the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass did for me

Or more simply put: what did I do once I watched the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass videos and asked for help in their supportive groups. This program (and a bunch of others) are run by Pajama Affiliates Robin and Lesley.

1. Watching the many videos in the program

Oh Gosh! I've been watching movies and series for so long... Then I had to watch videos once again? Well in the end, this process was more valuable and less damaging for my brain: I slowly went from stupid series to interesting and educational videos.

And boy, you learn a lot - or I should say: you learn to forget a lot if you're are a former Squid or former Hubber or both! Especially if you're a blogger whose intent is to make money with affiliate programs.

2. Reading the masterclass video transcripts

After each video I read the related transcript. The video helps getting a quick idea, it also enables you to actually SEE things; the transcripts helps those newly learned things to stick to your brain cells.

So I've read every single word written after each of the videos and thought about what I've learned and what I had to forget. 

3. Head to the Pajama Affiliates groups

When I bought the Amazon Affiliate Masterclass, I was provided a membership to mastermind groups on Facebook. This led me to join both groups and find out that they are extremely supportive, creative, generous, and smart.

Joining the groups was the step which actually brought me to work again on my blogs. After all, one can always watch videos and read stuff without having to apply what we learned. In which case I would have been wasting $55. But I didn't: the masterclass just made me join the groups. It's something I did naturally - I wasn't pushed by anything but the desire to apply what I learned.

4. Check and see how the groups could help me

I must say that in the minute after I asked for joining, I was approved and welcomed with a specific thread. When I discovered what these groups are up to, I knew that I was in the right place. 

You have to know that there are several threads created specifically to encourage members - cheering threads (not self-bragging threads), daily accountable treads, promotional threads, and... bespoke threads that members can start when they need help.

I spent the first day reading the threads and, once again, twisting my brain cells to see if the things I read could apply to my sites/blogs.

5. Ask the Affiliate Pajama members for help for my sites

 

Second blog that is getting a major overhaul - see the changes?

 

As an example, my Holly-Day.com site is a site that is holidays related. However the topics were too broad and I couldn't focus on a type of posts only. Instead, that site featured informational articles - HP-like writings - which weren't adapted to affiliate marketing, with a mix of affiliate marketing oriented posts which differ so much from the informational ones that one or the other category looked strange.

But when you plan on earning money through affiliate links, you don't write articles that won't allow you to add a single affiliate ad, don't you?

I thus asked for help on how to make my sites more focused. And boy, the huge number of replies helped me a lot in making decision! Most suggestions met my very own conviction. 

That is when I sat down in front of my computer and logged into my blogs. And started working again. 

In my next post I will tell you what I did to my blogs.

See you soon :)




Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

What Have I Been Up To?

Lost mojo, no inspiration, hard times

What have I been up to? Well, nothing really. In this case, you might object that I've been up to something. And I'd confirm that I was up to nothing at all. Not all actually, but not much. So I didn't do a lot of work these past months. 

Also when I join my partner in his country, I just don't have any will to work, not even the will to turn the laptop on and check my sites, my Facebook pages, the groups or whatever. I feel so fine without any Internet connexion (my partner has one, but I never exploit it or very rarely) and without sites to update. 

The upsetting side of online working

First thing: yes, I lost my mojo. With big G's new algorithms and changed rules, all these animal updates (panda, penguin, hummingbird... what's next? rat???) it seems more and more difficult to make blogs/sites/pages stand out.

My sites suffered from these changes. And nothing seems to please this big brother. Believe it or not, some of them get more traffic after the season than during the season. I haven't found a reason; but this means that I didn't target the wrong keywords.

After big G, there's HP. There too, there is no way to make me work at all. I fear any unfeature of my remaining pages, I just don't dare updating them at all; and leave the pages as they are. What a pity... The low payment rate isn't any incentive at all. Why would I work hard on these pages for peanuts or worse: nothing at all. I haven't reached payout yet. Oh because I still have some former Squidoo lenses without a new home, I could add them to HubPages with some work done on them to comply with their rules. But I can't do that: too much work involved for constant traffic drop and no reward.

Thus what did I do all this time? Well watching TV series and believe it or not, I watched ALL Dallas episodes! Not the 2000 series, but the 1978 one. It was boring, it looked useless, I didn't feel any kind of pleasure while catching the episodes. But I did. And am glad I did. Because it changed a lot of things.

Hard times seem to be over, I'm recovering 

 

Now hard times seem to be over; I'm willing to work, once again. I have to thank Dallas for it. There are 14 seasons to watch. One after the other the quality becomes worse, the episodes are more and more boring. And if I hate something more than all these changing rules online, it's being bored. 

So as time passed, I stopped paying attention to the series, I didn't listen any more, and was thinking. Thinking about renewing my way of working online. 

There are two problems: the sites to rethink entirely and the fact that I still travel to my partner's country; which keeps me away from Internet and my sites. Therefore, I must draw my new site design and configuration while at the same time decide on a schedule that enables me to leave without losing touch with my sites, my Facebook pages and all the groups I'm member of. Not to mention that I have to find room form me prepare all my articles before leaving and schedule their publication. This means a lot of work while I'm home. Perhaps too much work. 

Rethink my marketing practice 

 

Yesterday, I made a purchase... I profit from a flash sale and bought the Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass from Pajama Affiliates and joined the groups that go with the purchase. It was a first step in the right direction. Watching the videos and chatting in the groups helped me a lot even though I was just over there for 24 hours.

As said earlier, things online have changed a lot. What worked 8 years ago do not work at all today, unless you built a highly popular site in a very specific niche as well as a huge following (plus mailing list). My sites were once popular but the day I put al my efforts on Squidoo and worked for some too exigent clients, I lost my traffic as my sites were neglected.

There was once a way to market products while writing a bunch of stuff - historical facts, and other things people do not actually look for. These types of pages attracted different types of readers: those who were looking for information and those looking for products. You could earn from Adsense type ads and also affiliate links. 

Nowadays, things are different. If you wish to provide information, you'd rather skip the affiliate marketing steps. Some closely related products at the end of the article are fine, yet they won't make you earn a living. Instead, Adsense type ads will provide you with the money you expect to earn from your work.

Instead if you want to earn money primarily from affiliate links, you will need to focus on products, product descriptions, examples of use, product images (lots of them if you review one product), etc. Your potential buyers don't mind the actual history behind the product, the year people first used them or which artist created a statue of a woman out of garage hoses.

In the past, people could spend time on the Internet looking for something and one could build pages that woud mix history, blah-blah and products. Today they want to find what they're searching for right away. Therefore, one must narrow our niches. You can object that there's nothing new under the sun. Yet the modus operandi is different from the past years when we already used to narrow our niches.

I can see it in my sites stats. Some categories always drive traffic, some don't. Some pages with low traffic rate but lots of products do make sales; the pages with lots of content and few products do not make sales. And even though I carefully choose my keywords, I have to rethink that side of the work too. 

The other thing I must change is the way I work:

• Have a strict schedule,
• Take time to prepare my articles from A to Z so as not to have to rework them five minutes after publication,
• Posting regularly instead of posting like a fool during the season (I quickly end up tired and disgusted),
• Prepare the same amount of posts as I usually do and schedule them for publication when I leave,
• Stop wasting my time,
• Stop procrastinating.

Ok long post after a long period of silence. I'm going back to my Affiliate Marketing with Amazon Masterclass as I don't want to lose my brand new mojo and inspiration.

See you soon!

Images in this post are courtesy of Pixabay.com

 

Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

EPD Is Getting Even Better!

Easy Product Displays new features

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. To be honest, there is nothing really new worth talking about in my marketing world. HubPages is slowly sinking - at least it's how it looks. 

I moved some Hubs over to Wizzley but without any real hope for the pages to be safe, since Google's shaking the site ranks and even its existence once again. WebNuggetz is, as always, a profitable and exciting option and Whyrll is also a good one. 

Apart from that, there is nothing new under "my" sun: to be honest, I don't really enjoy working online any more.

However, Easy Product Displays, my favorite marketing tool, is improving day after day and playing with it is fun. Actually it is the only thing that succeeds in having me logging into one of my blogs or those I'm member of. 

What is EPD?

If you do not know what Easy Product Displays is, let me tell you that it's the best tool that enables you to display Amazon, CJ.com, Share a Sale, Zazzle and other affiliate products: images + descriptions + buy buttons, all in one. 

The displays we can create with this tool are amazingly beautiful. In the beginning I didn't think this could make a difference on my sites, but I quickly realized that this incredible tool produced performing displays. 

And best of all, these past weeks, some upgrades have been made to the tool. 

Easy Product Displays improvements

1. AZIN search

 
If you are like me and prepare a list of AZINs for products you wish to display in your blog posts before posting, then this feature is for you. You can now type up to 10 Amazon AZINS in the search box, separated by a comma. Then click the search button and see all the products magically appear. See the picture below. Once the list appears, all you have to do is click on "use product" button. What a time saver!

 

Here is my display, created in just a few seconds. All I have to do is copy and paste the code into my page. I can choose between so many different types of displays...

2. Switch buy buttons

The other feature I'm fond of is the ability to change each "buy" button of a display. This means that, we can now mix any merchant in our displays. 

Let's say that I want to feature Frozen costumes from different merchants: Amazon, BuyCostumes and Halloween Costumes. But I want to use the three different buttons in one single display. It was not doable before - at least not automatically. But now, it's doable and in just a few seconds. 

Here is the basic display:

Now let's have a look at the right column of our creation panel. 

As you can see there is an edit button next to each product. This "edit" feature enables you to change each button in the display. This won't change other buttons.  Here's how I changed the buttons:

There are now three different buttons, one for each merchant.

This feature is not just a time saver, it also enables you to create price comparison displays for example.

3. Large series of buttons

Loads of buttons have been added to our backoffice. This makes it so easy for us to create product displays with the right merchant's button. Once again it is a time saver as before, for many merchants, we had to write their name next to the "buy" word if we used the customized feature - what we did before having more buttons.

Only a tiny bit of the iceberg

4. Share a Sale merchants integration

Share a Sale is now integrated to the merchants automation. So from now on those who opted for the SaS subscription in EPD are able to just use the EPD search feature to add their Share a Sale products to their display.

Personally I didn't subscribe to SaS option as I'm not affiliated with many of their merchants - I'm more accustomed to CJ's merchants and don't plan on leaving their network.

As usual, you can always import your codes in order to quickly and easily replace missing, out of stock or wrong products. It's easy as a pie and saves loads of work and time.

To say the truth, I'm pleased with anything Thomas and Holley come up with. They work hard for our success and ease of work.

Try EPD for three days without spending a penny

You can give a try to Easy Product Displays for free and for three days. You will find three different options for you to start building these beautifully crafted affiliate product displays: Amazon and Zazzle, Share a Sale or the full product, which includes Amazon, Zazzle and Share a Sale.

You can also subscribe on a cheap monthly basis or a yearly one - most interesting.

Just in case you don't remember what EPD can do for you, here is an updated video, that will walk you through all the wonderful features this tool offers.









Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

Former Hub Moves to WebNuggetz

My unfeatured HubPage was moved to WebNuggetz yesterday

 

Since the quality of my work is not good enough to HP, it's got moved else where. Actually, what I did is delete a similar page on my own site and pasted the former Hub instead.

The deleted page was entirely reworked (rewriting all texts and missing products replaced) and posted on WebNuggetz. This is because the Hub was too long and readers would have been bored with the huge amount of info. WN is perfect, ideal, amazing, wonderful, incredible for visual pages. The former Hub is too long and needs additional pictures. In addition, I have to find related products to feature as after the move from Squidoo I had to remove 90% of the featured masks from it.

Fingers crossed for the page to be as successful as it was on Squidoo. I'll never know how it's worked on HP since it didn't have a chance to make a season. Never mind, it's now safely hosted, hehe.

EPD features discovery

While working on that "nugget", I also discovered some specific features on Easy Product Diplays. I knew some of them but never thought of using them, and some, I never knew. 

The first one I really love is that I can have a product floating to the right or the left of my text directly form my EPD dashboard. This feature is a time saver especially when I want to copy and paste a former lens or hub into a new page. This feature helps me not to have to paste the content first on a Notepad so as to get rid of the formatting code contained in those old pages. The system allows basic HTML, though. I can thus add titles, subtitles, italic, bold, underlined texts along with text links. 

Another feature I love is that I can opt out from displaying a buy button. That is something I accidentally discovered. And with this great option, I can even add text beneath my featured products just like I did in Squidoo modules (well over there text was to the right of the product).

It was fun to make. All I had to do is uncheck the buy button option, and type text in the product name form. Then I changed the font into one that matches my site and pasted the code in the page.

Because I forgot to add a buy button to some items, I also worked with the import code feature for the first time. This one is a big thing! When you create an array of 12 or more products form your affiliate programs, you don't want to have to re-do all of them in case of missing products. This is where EPD is fantastic! Instead of searching for all item codes, just grab your existing EPD code, go to "get code" tab in your EPD dashboard and click on "import code". This will make the system display your articles and enable you to just replace the missing ones.

It saved me time when I had to just add a "check price" button! 

Price comparison for the same product is also easily done using Easy Product Displays. How many times do you find a product that is cheaper in an online store than in another. However, you know people will want to buy it from the other store. Doing a price comparison will help them buy the cheaper one. 

Another use for such a feature is for example, some products that come in sets of 2 or 3 products (perfumes, beauty products, etc.) Using EPD I can show that this store sells a set of 3 for the same price as that store sells a set of 2. I plan on using this option for future gifts and Halloween costume articles I'll post on my sites. 

When searching for products, for example, Venetian masks, if I want VIVO products displayed first, all I have to do it type "Venetian masks - VIVO" in the search feature. This way these authentic masks will appear first in the results. If I do not want them to appear in the results, I will type "Venetian masks -VIVO" (--> minus sign).

Also if I'm in a very productive mood - which happens very rarely - I can search for dozens of related products before adding them to my article. In EPD, I can type up to 10 ASIN codes each separated with a comma. The system will provide me with the 10 products so that I can add them to the display.

I hate having to copy and paste all Zazzle codes and then remove excess code from them in order to paste the good part on my pages. Using EPD, I can just use the link code, then click on the fetch button and the Zazzle item will magically appear in my EPD display. 

How to use the fetch feature

Well, that's it for today. See you soon for another trip in the fabulous world of Internet marketing.




Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

My First Unpublished Hub for Quality Matters

Spammy Hubs

So early this morning (I'm in Europe so evening for you is morning for me) I've received my first notice for a hub unpublished for quality reason. Hm... the title was "friendly" - "A Friendly Heads Up: Your Hub Could be Featured!" Er... my hub WAS featured yesterday. Let's read (portions of) this email.

Dear justholidays,

We wanted to let you know that Best Venetian Masks for Masquerade Parties has the opportunity to become Featured! Didn't know it was not featured...

Featured Hubs are... They are also made available to search engines... strongly recommend dusting it off and making a few improvements. I just updated that page (second time since it made the transfer from Squidoo)

The perks of a Featured Hub don't end at increased visibility online. Featured Hubs are likely to be more successful... Not sure about that, traffic started to increase as soon as I updated it, but when it was still OK for you it didn't get any kind of traffic at all! Not to mention that my HubPages traffic is dysmal compared with dying Squidoo traffic (incredible uh!)

It's possible that your Hub is not Featured because it contains spammy elements. Thank you so much for insulting me! Perhaps it was written for a link, Wow! keep on insulting me, please, you can't imagine how pleased I am! or has too many unrelated or distracting products capsules. Yes, 7 Amazon ENTIRELY RELATED capsules on a grand total of +/- 2,500 words. Even Hubs... We recommend that you remove any spammy elements that might be present in your Hub. Unless Amazon capsules are spammy elements, I can't remove anything BUT content... which is not what you want, is it?

What else can you do to improve your Hub? High-quality Hubs are original.... My Venetian mask hub was probably not a high-quality page but I was proud of my work and don't want to ruin it so as to match your standards. I'm sorry but Venetian masks are VISUAL stuff not just boring endless content.

Thank you for taking the time to update and improve your work! I won't waste my time reworking a hub that doesn't get me the same traffic rate as it did on its original home so as I always did when Squidoo started getting mad at locking lenses, I deleted the hub. It's going to generate money for me on another site or platform.

Cheers, Cheers :)
The HubPages team Justholidays

That is how I fix a low quality, spammy, violation, whatever page on a platform where I can't control anything. Even though we don't have complete control over our work, we always have the liberty to pack and leave. 

I've deleted 9 hubs since the big move from Squidoo. More will follow, of course, especially the Venetian pages since the one deleted today was part of a series. Without it, the others don't have any meaning any more. 

Thank you HubPages for making me feel like a spammer, a cheater, a loser... Well actually I don't feel like that, but if I was as sensitive as some writers are, I'd be really depressed. I'm not, writing is not my life, I just write to earn an income to enable me to get together with my foreign partner some times in the year, because he is not allowed to travel from his country to Occident (documents are hard to get and my country doesn't deliver such visas nowadays). That's all my writing is meant for. It's just going to earn me money else where.

More screenshots of this hub

 

Yes there are big pictures on the page, but these pics are there for illustration purpose, no link on them. If they're part of a mask that is for sale on Amazon, I added the related Amazon capsule somewhere. Is there anything more related to a Colombina mask than a Colombina mask? 

White Colombina is there to show what an original one looks like, the other one is just more intricate and makes the page look nicer. OK, I could remove the white but I've never agreed to test over and over again just to have a page republished. There are only 24 hours in a day and I have different sites to take care of.

 

How to make a moretta mask tutorial - what a spammy capsule!

Personally the only spammy elements I can see on this page are the floating ads that follow me wherever I go on the page. Impossible to get rid of them. This is what I call nuisance... I rather liked the older ads, those that don't move, that are text based and don't distract me from what I read. Even the new Adsense layouts are absolutely ugly and a real shame. There's nothing that claims "I'm an ad" more than those.

Since I updated another hub yesterday, I'm pretty convinced that it's going to be unpublished as well in the coming hours. However, because it is one that is part of those Venetian pages, it is going to be deleted anyway.

I feel that I'm beginning a long, very long journey deleting unpublished hubs... 




Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

My Favorite Affiliate Product Display Tool

Easy Product Displays Search Feature

My favorite affiliate product display tool is what I'm going to talk about. It is not Squidoo or HubPages related. It's an entirely different subject. Yet it is the perfect tool for those who plan on leaving HubPages for greener pastures (hear: their very own site or a platform that allows page personalization).

How to display products on a page

Nicely displaying products on our pages is a must for us, former lensmasters and other webmasters. We were accustomed to nicely craft our pages and still love doing so. However there are very few online software that enable us to do so.

My sites are now all on a WordPress platform and although I was accustomed to HTML and CSS writing manually on my older sites, I enjoy the ease of use of that platform. This is a big time saver and I definitely love writing on it. 

But when I want to add products on my pages, I still have to play with HTML or CSS so as to display the items in a good way. This is where I waste time. And believe me, I often waste a lot of time, because I want my displays to be as nicely crafted as I can. Then when I conceived the table, I must look for the products on sites like Amazon. Once I found the product, I must make sure I enabled the right tracking ID so as to know which site generated which sale.

After that, I must open each product page or go in my affiliate site backoffice and search for each product in order to get the URL, the image link and the product name. Paste each of them in my table. Once one table is done, I must create another.

There are some free tools I tried for the purpose. However, once again, I had to look for products, find links, copy and paste them into the forms and then copy and paste their code into my pages. Most of the time, I had to get back to the settings so as to have my product display fitting within my pages.

I even paid some plugins to do the job. Sadly one of them doesn't seem to be updated in a long time as it doesn't work any more. Another doesn't enable anybody to reach the actual product page. When I realized that, I had to deactivate them and look for another way to add affiliate links and images in my pages.

Easy Product Displays 

Easy Product Displays Layout (flow - 200 pix)

 

A friend of mine offered me a free trial with Easy Product Displays, a superb tool that allows me to create affiliate displays on all of my pages, in any way I want. Plus I don't have to browse Amazon or Zazzle to add those products, all I have to do is type my keyword and choose the product directly from my backoffice. 

My affiliate program IDs are saved in my profile, so when I start my search for products, I only have to select the appropriate program and ID (once for all searches).

For other affiliate programs like Share a Sale or Commission Junction I must copy and paste the product links, though. However, they will soon integrate Share a Sale into the system. This will help me save big time once again!

The little plus is that I can choose between several layouts (14 different static layouts and 7 flow templates). I can also add borders or no border, I can also choose what I want to be written on my button, choose its color and even select some pre-designed Amazon, BuyCostumes, Zazzle, etc. buttons in addition to be able to link to a customized button I host on my own site. 

Everything can be personalized in a display. Want a big 400 pixels image? It's ok. I prefer 3 x 200 pixels images? It's ok as well. I can set the font size for the description and the button. Border, no border, rounded button, square button, and so on.

As soon as I'm finished with the desired settings - which I can save for later use on another display - I grab the code and paste it into my page. The code is designed to fit within most Web pages and the way products are displayed will adapt to my site. 

As an example, when I select 150 pixel images, my site will feature 4 x 150 pixels products in a row. I can add as many products as I want, they will all become 4 rows of 4 products. The last row will include the remaining products - 3 if I added 15 items and 4 if I added 16 items. 300 pix will enable me to present a choice of 3 items per row and so on.

On top of that I can also add text and align images. But there is more... As a marketer, you surely know that you have to update your product pages all the time. I hate that task! 

With EPD, I can easily upate them, all I have to do is import my old code into the system and replace the missing products, then grab the new code and paste it into my page. There are so many things I can do with it. Too many to be listed here, actually.

So if you are looking for a tool that helps you save time when you want to display arrays of products on your web pages, then don't look further, Easy Product Displays is the only one you will want to use. How to videos are available on the site. 

Check EPD in action

I definitely recommend this tool.



Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.

Squidoo vs HubPages Traffic

So early September, my 36 remaining lenses moved to HubPages. As the announcement stated, HubPages is now the largest site of its kind. However that doesn't mean that former lenses get as much traffic as they deserve and used to get. 

HubPages traffic is dismal...

When former lenses turned into Hubs, traffic was not a big problem as they generated the same traffic rate as on Squidoo. For some, number of visits was even higher. But as soon as Google launched their latetest update, traffic dropped like a stone and never really stopped. 

Right now, with Christmas season in full action, my only one related Hub doesn't get more than 15 visits/day. It's a page that was successful on Squidoo, not for its traffic, but for its huge number of sales. 

Christmas trains riding around the tree add to the magic of the season. This former lens used to receive if not an incredibly huge amount of visits, at least it generated a huge number of sales! Those visitors were actually buyers.

Now that it's turned into a Hub, it's getting very low traffic - 15 visits/day is nothing compared with what it was on Squidoo - and it has not generated a single sale since the move. Last sold Christmas train was in the latest days on Squidoo.

It's unbelievable!

Unfeatured Hubs

I've been without an Internet connection for a few weeks so when I got back online in the end of November, I found some threads about unfeatured Hubs in HubPages forums. 

It seems that a few rules have changed since the initial FAQ put together at the time of the big move. Now Hubs that benefited from the 4 months grace period aren't protected against "lack of quality", "lack of engagement and traffic", etc. They thus can be unfeatured without warning for those motives.

This new rule is, in my humble opinion quite unfair to former lensmasters since many of them, caught in the big holiday season hullabaloo, couldn't fix those moved lenses. HubPages knew it, Squidoo staff knew it as well. Still instead of waiting till the beginning of the year for the move, they acted right in the middle of the biggest season for Internet marketers.

A more natural way to move 450,000 lenses without hurting HP as a whole would have been to unpublish all of them when they reached HP's site in January, then have each former lensmaster rework/fix/modify/whatever, in order to publish them one by one. At their own pace. Less stress, less worries.

There would have been no grace period, many lenses wouldn't have been deleted by lensmasters who knew they couldn't work on them in the 4 months grace period. 

Most lensmasters would have left their holiday lenses on Squidoo as they knew the site would have got decent traffic from Halloween till Christmas. Not the traffic rate we were accustomed to, however we would have had a decent holiday season.

There wouldn't have been this mass exodus we witnessed in August and HubPages would have transfered the best lenses instead of a good balance between good and bad pages.

On top of that, Hubbers wouldn't have been angry after Squids for having joined the party and wouldn't consider them as guilty for HP's traffic drop.

A ruined holiday season on both sites

Because of this, many have got their holiday season almost if not entirely ruined. A big part of these now unfeatured Hubs have been deleted as former lensmasters were misled when they agreed to move from one site to another.

Some play the game, mostly because they have no other place to host their former lenses. Others trust HP enough to give a try to fixing those unpublished pages. But those who have their own sites or are members of other platforms move these Hubs else where.

I'm convinced that the only one individual that earned something in the selling of "Squidoo's best content" is Seth Godin. He sold that content to HP and thus made a profit. HP bought the content and right after the transfer, was hit by Google's update which in addition to its average mess penalized the site for spam or something like that. The "nice" side of Google is that they don't tell you more than "spam"... so you don't know what to do to fix the problem either.

As said, because of this update, HP lost traffic and thus money. Former lensmasters lost traffic and thus money. I'm also convinced that, apart from a few exceptions, even those who moved their lenses in August didn't make as much money as they did on Squidoo with those specific former lenses. 

None of my Hubs were unfeatured for lack of quality yet. They might be hit one day or another, though. However, given the poor traffic figures, I don't think I'm going to take the chance to allow them to stay on HP. Valentine's Day is near and I will unpublish most of these Hubs so as to delete them and move them else where. Hopefully they'll get their traffic share - I'll relocate most on my own site and those that are too similar to existing pages will be hosted on other popular platforms.

So here we are. Another poor Christmas season. Another badly conceived project. Another proof that we definitely should have control over our work and our assets.






Posted by Holly Day a WAHM who is able to turn any day into a holiday.