Squidoo's Current Unsure Situation and A Good Analogy

The situation right now on Squidoo looks more and more scary. With the Squidtanic that looks like it's sinking, the different and contradictory measures taken, the deletion of a huge number of lenses, the locking of an even bigger number of lenses, the downgrading of lenses back to work in progress status, the decrease in the number of sales... we really feel like 3 years old kids whose parents are punishing them for motives only parents know (though in this instance I'm pretty sure parents are clueless themselves). Or worse...

While reading a forum this morning, I head to a post that made sense to me in that it compared the situation on Squidoo with an abusive relationship. The analogy was perfectly explained and this is really the way we can see things these days.

By the dozens, lensmasters complain in all forums where Squidoo is debated. However, very few of them actually left Squidoo, bringing their lenses along with them in order to move their content else where.

And that is where this looks so much like an abusive relationship.

Let's take the example of a woman living with an abusive partner (bullied or beaten each time the partner gets nuts).

However, this woman doesn't leave her spouse... It's really hard to leave an abusive partner... But why ?

Well, the woman loves her abusive partner with a passion ; and so lensmasters love the abusive Squidoo with a passion.

Although bullied or beaten, the woman has faith in her abusive partner when he promises never doing it again ; and so lensmasters believe Squidoo when they pretend all those changes that drive us nuts and are so tiring and seem to have no head no tail are good for lensmasters or that they're close to the end of all these troubles.

Bullied or beaten women often think they're at the risk of losing everything, from their social situation to their financial assets if they break the link of this abusive relationship ; and so lensmasters also think they're going to lose all their assets if they make the decision of leaving Squidoo.

While living with an abusive partner, the woman doesn't live alone, doesn't do things on her own ; and so, lensmasters think there's nothing good for them outside of Squidoo, there's no life, no hope, outside's risky for them.

Living with an abusive partner might make you think that the woman is adept of masochism, and so staying with Squidoo, endlessly re-doing their lenses to comply to HQ's rules and, for some, simply PLEASE HQ... makes lensmasters practice masochism.

When will it stop? Where is the abusive partner going to go too far for this to come to an end ?

Only the woman knows that. She'll stop loving her abusive partner because she'll understand or "think" that her abusive partner doesn't love her at all. And so, lensmasters will understand that Squidoo doesn't love them for themselves but only for what they bring to it.

Actually, being in love with an abusive partner is more often than not a one-sided relationship. And so lensmasters are involved in a one-sided relashionship with Squidoo: they love it, but Squidoo isn't in love with them. When love isn't shared fifty-fifty, it can't last for long.

When will the lensmasters leave their abusive partner ? When all their lenses will be locked without warning and no explanation, when all greenlight requests will remain dead letters, when they'll see by themselves how much Squidoo doesn't care about them.

And then they'll dare to open the door, see how outside looks like, notice that there's nothing dangerous living outside of Squidoo.

They'll also realize that they worked really hard this year 2013 for next to nothing - the most part of them having worked for really nothing. They'll know they shouldn't have been stuck on it that much, they should have been sleeping at night instead of modifying their lenses to learn the very next day that they had to re-modify them once again. They'll realize that all of this didn't make sense, had no actual and definite direction and that the end result wasn't the one expected.

Yes, this looks like an abusive relationship. Or a sect... led by a guru and his priests.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

The Squidoo's New Lens ScoreCard

Although I don't work on my lenses these days (weeks, months) - I daily check both the official and non-official (the free one) forums. The big debate these days is the brand new lens scorecard HQ came up with. This tool is supposed to help us see the weaknesses of our lenses: too many Amazon links, too many outbdond links, too few content - we even have a "high quality content" mark.

The beauty of this lens scorecard is that it works so fine that, from what I've been able to read in both forums, it flags actual content lenses as low quality ones and considers shopping cart like lenses as high quality content ones.  

The new lens scorecard even provided an EMPTY lens with a high quality content mark ! 

How could I trust HQ, their (highly buggy) tools and their notion of what's high quality when I witness such things (including their censorship, their closed eyes)? 

So your lens can fall for low quality - for example for too many Amazon links in it - and be turned into WIP. Ok, that's better than being locked, eh. But this doesn't mean that your lenses can't end up locked.

I checked a few lenses of mine so that I could see what the lens scorecard would look like on them. 

A first lens was 100% ok - oh wow ! I was surprised but the lens is actually filled with content, a bunch of content as it's my best 7 tarot spreads lens. 

However I decided to make an experiment with at least one lens. I took my Ice Cream Ball Maker | The Recipe lens and saw that its scorecard was at 91% only. Though it has a lot of content I reworked it a little bit.

What did I do :

• Removing 1 ice cream ball maker product and adding its content to the one left
• Removing one entire Amazon module including ice cream bowls
• Removing one Amazon sidebar module that would include ice cream sprinkles
• Removing some clickable photo credits
• The lens scorecard went then to 100%. Published the lens. 

I'll check later if the lens scorecard is still at 100%. Not sure about is since such mess happened to other lensmasters: their scorecard was at 100% and the very next day it decreased so much that these people got totally depressed !

If HQ wants lensmasters to be depressed, sick or worse, they'd rather let them know so that they can take measures an take a more or less long break from Squidoo and the mess.

Because whatever they come up with, they do it by steps: one day at a time, lensmasters rework their lenses (not me, I don't want to get depressed) and the very next day, bam ! HQ comes with something else that obliges these people rework their lenses once again ! 

Some of them are almost burned out ! HQ doesn't seem to realize that they are PAID for working, we are NOT paid for that ! 

As for me, I don't plan to let me take down, I'll never will. I won't invest all my time on Squidoo any more : it has become a thing of the past, working hard on lenses is also a thing of the past.

I'll just leave my lenses earn me money on autopilot and will move those locked whenever some end up locked - and they will. I think that the way things are going, Squidoo is losing its best assets, its best lensmasters, its best money makers and is going to stay with a bunch of useless pages that will please desperate housewives that will never click on the "buy" button.

It's going to look like a bunch of personal blogs that we can find in the billions on the Internet. Most of them having their fair share of traffic already.

The way things are handled, Squidoo looks like a sinking ship. This is the sad image I see these days.

If only they would hire some specialists to handle those problems... people who know what they talk about, what Google wants, people able to analyze the way the Web is turning.

Or better: leave people do the old fashioned way because there are millions of people who don't like change, who prefer things like they always were, people who will always keep coming to our pages because they loved what they saw, they know how we work, they trusted us.

Instead, when they head to our advises, our suggestions, they insult our intelligence, and call us "trolls" as per Seth Godin's own words.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

How Do my Edited Squidoo Lenses Perform?

As said in another post, I edited 8 prom dress lenses in order to comply to Squidoo's new TOS. I rearranged the titles so that they didn't include "best" and "this year" any more. For example, Best A-line prom dresses 2013 has become "A-line prom dresses are girl's best friends" - why girls' best friends ? Because A-line dresses flatter any kind of silhouette, hiding less charming parts of our body.

In addition to those changes, I removed most of the dresses featured on the page and added content in each Amazon module highlighting a prom gown. 

How did these changes work on the lenses ? 

To say the truth, traffic dropped like a stone and doesn't seem to recover. You may say that prom season is behind us and it's true, however, prom dresses have always got their share of traffic. Not by the thousands but indeed, they got their share.

Now that they have been changed, they get nothing at all.

The lens that was hit the most is the one related to formal prom gowns. This lens is the kind of page that used to get a lot of visit (along with the under $100 dresses) because it featured a lot of marvelous princess style prom dresses. Things have changed, the lens isn't a favorite any more. 

I'm not sure that flat headlines would help any kind of lens to raise to the top. Instead, when it comes to yearly/seasonal stuff, changing our titles from "best" and the current year into next to nothing will result in no traffic. But Squidoo is Seth Godin's site, lead by women who consider desperate housewives type lenses amazing so what can I say or do ? I want to protect my work, that's it.

 

I will allow until after homecoming for the lenses to recover traffic, if they don't, I'll move them to HollyDay as well; they can't do worse than on Squidoo, that is a fact.

See you soon for more news.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

Another Batch of my Squidoo Lenses Deleted...

Although none of my lenses got locked yet, I keep on cleaning up my Squidoo account. To do so, I had to delete another batch of lenses. Now I'm left with 169 featured lenses, one lens back in WIP and another never started.

I think that when I'll be finished with deleting my lenses, I'll own more or less 100/120 lenses in grand total. Indeed, I don't want to lose my Giant status - at least as long as I remain a Squidoo lensmaster. I can't delete too many lenses either because if HQ's filters lock too many of my lenses, I might be under the number of 100 lenses - and those 100 first lenses I built were "darned good", hahaha. 

On a more serious note, I deleted a bunch of lenses built in the past, during the two Giant challenges I attended in the former Ning groups. Those were content lenses, personal content lenses. You know, the kind of content that's Squidoo's nowadays standard : desperate housewives oriented content, desperately personal stories, absolutely boring stuff.

So I deleted them and, by reworking my writings I'm pretty sure I'll succeed at making them interesting and attractive for the readers. Especially the travel lenses I built. OK. I know that Squidoo readers aren't really interested in European stuff but I know that HollyDay.com attracts visitors from all over the world and, therefore will get its share of traffic.

The travel pages on there are popular. And so will these be.

I might even consider moving my Best European Vacation Destinations lens over to HollyDay.com since it's not getting the same amount of traffic than previous years. OK. Google and Squidoo want updated content, well since I listed the best places to go on holiday in Europe, there's nothing I can do. Unless I add yearly events; which is something I don't want to do since the too many events would require too much involvement in Squidoo and I don't have time for this.

So unless those holiday resorts moved and unless France sold the Riviera to Russia or China, the French Riviera is still in France and people will still find St-Tropez where it is supposed to be.  The same applies to all countries : Europe wasn't split these days, Italy, Spain, Greece are always at the same place and Etna didn't destroy Sicily yet.

One thing I noticed regarding this lens is that is was flagged back in March, I reworked it a lot and since then... visits dropped like stones ! Two months after the lens makeover, after the lens made more personal, carrying more "amazing" content, it doesn't get the 4 digit visits it used to in the past. It dropped to 2 digits. What a waste of time, what a bad idea to have changed this lens. 

After all, it might look good on HollyDay.com as well. I will think about all of this later... 

Other than that, I also deleted toy lenses, gift lenses and even two of my Friends sitcom pages! These will make stunning gift pages on my own blog. People all over the world just love Friends.

Oh and I'm going to rework that page on cupcake calendars as we're already in June and I want to be ready to sell 2014 and 2015 calendars. This page will also go to HollyDay.com.

Well that's it for today.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

What if HQ allows lensmasters to sell their accounts?

The thing I expect to happen is that now HQ allows lensmasters to sell their Squidoo accounts as they made it very clear that many members aren’t the kind of writers they want for the site any more.
After all pioneer lensmasters MADE Squidoo what it is – those who joined in the early days are those that helped Squidoo get their current authority rank. They also brought lots of money, in millions of dollars. But their days are over and they have to move.

With HQ allowing them to sell their accounts, they could move with a substantial reward for those 6-7-8 years of dedication and hard work and go elsewhere without a regret or money sitting in their accounts lost for good – with the feeling that they have worked so hard and promoted Squidoo everywhere for nothing.

Squidoo looks more like a magazine for desperate housewives looking for someone else’s stories to accept their miserable lives than like the stunning one-of-a-kind and probably best resource on the Web gathering all sorts of pages for ALL Web surfers it used to be until early this year. 

I’m not a desperate housewife, I’m a single mother, history oriented, and write on the Web to make money not just for the pleasure. I’m pretty sure many others think like I do.

From the two last HQ’s posts, I think I’m not the writer they’re looking for any more. So I feel rejected and, although I don’t really mind HQ loving me or not, I want to protect my assets. 

I don’t want my account to be locked and deleted for good and lose my hard earned money. I worked six and a half full years on Squidoo. So most of my lenses are still on there waiting for the day they’ll be moved to my own existing related sites or to be sold to someone who would be able to turn them into “amazing personal and emotional” stuff; which is something I CANNOT do.

This being said, I don’t have a single lens locked yet (may happen in the near future) and the 30+ I already deleted from my account were deleted because they could be locked one day and that I wanted to protect my work moving them elsewhere.

There is something else I think about. With lensmasters leaving Squidoo taking their articles else where, they're going to rebuild the links they already built to their Squidoo lenses. OK. Let's see what would happen if most old timers would leave: many of them used to build links through publishing in article directories like eZineArticles, and the like or social media posting, etc. 

What would happen if they all remove their links from their promotional publishing? Would Squidoo suffer? I'm  not sure it wouldn't get another smack because the number of links pointing to a specific site are also - or at least were in the past - part of search engine optimisation and... authority.

 

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

Editing 8 lenses, publishing and what now....

So now lenses with Best and the year in titles are more or less Squidon'ts. So, I had to take measures and modify my lenses accordinly.

The lenses I edited and modified are those included in my Prom Night portfolio. Since they feature prom dresses, I considered indispensable to add at least the year in their titles. Now they're just titled like any other type of general Webpage and don't let the potential buyer who's searching on Google for "Prom Dresses 2013" what they're going to find on my lenses -- this surely implies less sales.

Why did I modify the lenses ? Because by next month I won't be able to touch my lenses at all and that I don't want them to get locked because of their titles. Even if they lock them, I won't have time to modify them next month either and even so, who knows: they will probably be deleted.

So I did an effort and changed their content.

What's left now ? Well, posting remaining deleted lenses on my sites and promote them in order for them to be ready for the season.

Apart from that, I don't make any new lens since the new TOS. Making a product lens that is not personal is now a no-no so why would I bother wasting my time building a Squidon't lens that's going to be locked by tomorronw ?

Not that I couldn't make lenses that would be personal, unique (probably not amazing), original... Actually I have materials to make at least two new pages on the Web. 

Last month, I bought a henna flower ring and a palm tree opal ring. I ran a search on Amazon.com and wasn't able to find any of those rings. So what's the point for me to write about these rings? I really love them, I adore them. But won't write about them since these products are only available in North Africa and not in the US.

Another ring that I'd like to own and will probably buy this month is a Djerba Island symbol ring made out of silver and featuring the opal and turquoise symbol of the Djerba Island. Once again, no store I could be affiliated with does sell such products.

So why would I bother ?

Even making a lens that sticks to the new rules doesn't prevent the lens from it being locked in 24 hours, it happened to a bunch of lensmasters. This is the reason why Squidoo's so quiet these weeks: very few lensmasters publish something. They're scared, they're too shy to produce new pages.

Actually many of us are monitoring our screen and Squidoo dashboard, waiting for that lock to shine on it letting us know that a lens got locked. Or checking our inbox daily frightened that we could get this email claiming that our accounts have been locked. 

How can one be creative in such an atmosphere?

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

My input on HQ's blog post re: personal content

After having re-read HQ's post regarding "amazing personal emotional content" lenses, I wonder if my contribution will be accepted on Squidoo any longer. I know for a fact that my lenses that really make me money are those that provide my readers with a bunch of curated content from online stores, along with their description and not the lenses that are "personal" or "emotional" such as my Family Holidays in Broadstairs or Tossa de Mar or my Teddy Bear lenses, for example.
 

As a Giant contestant, I experienced that type of lenses: personal stories (not too personal though) and can state that they get almost no traffic nor do they make any sales. 

In reality, that kind of lenses is pretty useless in terms of money and if all we want is create non making money pages on the Internet, we'd rather go to Blogger which allows us to create content blogs without the troubles we face creating lenses on Squidoo. In addition, Blogger blogs get more traffic than other individual useless pages on the Web and more particularly to those "emotional, personal, amazing" lenses.

To be honest, I am not the type of person who would share their personal details, life or whatever. Nor do I share my pictures unless they're indispensable to illustrate my topic. I don't want the world to know me better than what I agree to share (next to nothing) and do not want pictures or my house or car or children publicly displayed.

When making a lens about products I like, I generally get straight to the poind as it is what my potential buyers are looking for. I never unveil my private life, unless it is an absolute need. The same applies when I look for something I want to buy : I don't want to hear anything regarding your private life. All I want is a description of the product, its size, features, benefits, disadvantages, tech stuff if needed, how will it fits in the house, the closet or any place it should be put, how it looks like in reality, are colors exactly the same as those listed by the manufacturer ? Etc.

In case I land on a page or lens that's close to those HQ wants us to create nowadays, then I don't read anything: I now that the page isn't what I look for from the very first paragraph and more likely hit the "close window" button. I'll then go to another site that will provide me with the needed information.

Let's take the 3 lenses I mentioned above as examples. All these lenses are filled with personal content regarding personal travels and personal choices and stories. I won't say that I entirely unveil my private life but all in all these are travels I did and things I bought for my son. While people interested in reading other people's life, these pages won't attract buyers since they are accounts of things I did and collect. Out of these lenses I think that, in 4 years I made three sales. Three sales ! Can you believe that ! Moreover, these lenses are ranked so low that I seriously wonder if search engines know that they do exist.

Not long ago, I considered the option to move these lenses to my own sites and turn them into something far more commercial than they are now. The two travel lenses could become suggestions for holiday resorts in Europe and the third one could become a fantastic Christmas gift idea.

These are the only ways those lenses could make me some money : removing the personal stories will attract buyers and not surfers.

I'm not sure that Squidoo can keep making money the way it did in the past if they oblige us to follow that new way of lensmaking.

People who buy from our lenses are looking for pages that talk about them, their needs, what they can expect, what they have to face when buying the featured product, not what I think, what I live, my problems or elses : they don't mind my life, they're only interested in the product and the way it will help them. When I write a lens, I write for my reader, not for HQ, not for myself... Moreover, I am NOT a self-licking lollipop!

Also, I highly dislike that someone else speaks in my name : I know what I want to read, I know what I want to find, I know what I have an interest in. I'm also convinced that a lot of web browsers think alike.

My conclusion: Squidoo has been managed by a great marketing team in the past. However, time has come for the site to be taken over by a team that looks like desperate housewives. At least it is the way the home page looks, the last posts by HQ look and the smell of Squidoo's future. 

Luckily for them there are many great lensmasters out there - especially in the art section - for them to provide readers with actual "personal, useful" content.

But the most part of the site is going to go to "my next door public garden" and craft stuff.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66