Squidoo was the residence of every affiliate marketer. I should rather say that it was the residence of every internet marketer. It is one of the easiest of methods to promote anything that you wanted – your blogs, you own products, your affiliate products, you adsense revenue generating websites etc.

Are you wondering, what has happened to Squidoo?

If you have been using Squidoo, I am sure you will have received an email from them by now. The subject of the email read – “Squidoo Newflash! A policy update“.

What is this Policy Update all about?

Let me explain the reason for the policy update, in the words of Squidoo itself -

We’re going to double down our efforts to help you make good stuff, via education tools, newbie programs, an ever-growing Giant Squids program, and constantly developing valuable new publishing features.

At the same time, we’re making the not so good stuff a little harder to create. And the bad stuff, the really useless, really wasteful pages, and especially harmful pages, those don’t stand a chance here.

Though they claim that 99% chances are you might not even notice the changes, I beg to differ here. You would indeed notice the changes if you have been active on Squidoo for some time promoting your affiliate products like weight loss etc. Wondering why? Let us first see the policy updates –

No Spam - Squidoo has always been against spam like a good netizen. So there is nothing new in it.

No more X-rated or Porn lenses - We are not in Squidoo to create X-rated lenses, so I am not bothered.

No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List – This is something that I am actually interested in. Now what is it that Squidoo calls “Junk Topics” and what is “SquiDon’t list”. We will talk about it in details below.

A new limit on overly promotional lenses – This appears to be a confusing policy at the outset. What does it mean by “overly promotional lenses”? What Squidoo has to say on this is as follows -

If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it.

Should I be bothered about this policy update? Yes, you should be, because your lens is sure to be affected, if you have been using Squidoo to promote your products.

Though the first two parts of the policy update will not concern you and you will hardly notice, as rightly said by Squidoo, the later two are something that you need to be concerned about.

How does this policy update concern me?

If you are an internet marketer and you have been using Squidoo to promote your products, the following two things hold good for you -

1. You Squidoo lenses will have quite a few links pointing to your domain name on which you have your squeeze page or, product sales page. As per the 4th policy update above, Squidoo will lock any lens that has more than 9 links pointing to the same domain. So if your lens is one that has more than 9 links pointing to a single domain, it is likely to get locked.
2. If you are an internet marketer, you are sure to have a few lenses on reviews or, information about the products that you are selling. For e.g., if you are promoting a weight-loss product, you might have a review page on the weight-loss product, at Squidoo. All such lenses will be locked by Squidoo. A list of such topics can be found at http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont

So these policy updates in a way will affect me as I am an internet marketer. But, I would not want to look at it the negative way.

Let’s take a look at it this way – there are numerous absolute rubbish and crap lenses all over Squidoo that are reviews (though you will find nothing in terms of a review in those pages). These lenses often tend to divert the information seeking internet surfers to themselves, thus rendering good informative lenses absolutely useless. These new policy updates will mean that only good quality lenses will persist and the rest will perish. So in a way, that will improve the quality of the information found on internet and if you are one who can offer good quality information, you will win the “Survival of the fittest” contest.

About the backlinks – Why should I be bothered? A good internet marketer can grab the attention of the reader with just one link in the content. Here, you still have the option of building 9 links to your website which is more than enough and which if used wisely can help you build good amount of traffic to your blogs or, sales pages.

What is the SquiDon’t list?

Squidoo maintains a list of not-to-be-made lenses in their directory called as the “SquiDon’t List“.

This list give you a broad idea of what should be a topic that you should choose and what topic should you avoid. You will get more information on this at the SquiDon’t page at http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont.

P.S. :-Read through the information given in that and you might also get a few ideas for lenses.

This effort of Squidoo is to make the internet a better place and to give people providing good information (like you and me…Obviously) an equal opportunity. Let’s make the most of it.

You know what to do it your lens violates one of these policies?

It is absolutely simple. Just delete the lens or, better edit it. Editing will not take to much of your time, give the user-friendly interface of Squidoo.

Driving Traffic to your blog is a very difficult and tedious thing to do. I have seen quite often that most of the people stop blogging at this point because they are frustrated at the number of things that they have done after following advices from multiple quarters, yet they end up getting zero traffic to their blogs.

What is the one way to get traffic to your blogs?

If I am to answer frankly, then there is no one way. You have to follow multiple ways in order to generate traffic. But that does not mean that you do everything in the world. Pick about 4-5 strategies and follow them religiously and you would start to see results. What would be the best strategy, is something that you need to decide and would depend upon the time you are willing to spend and your patience.

When you have just started blogging, seldom does it happen that you get direct traffic to your blogs. Instead the visitors that come to your blog comes from “Diverted traffic”.

What is “Diverted Traffic”?

I call the first visitors to my blog as “diverted traffic” because they did not end up on my blog because they were searching for my blog. Rather they were sent to my blog from somewhere else. What this “somewhere else” is something that the blog owner needs to decide. These visitors were searching for something and reached some websites in this course. There they found a link to my blog and clicked on it to be taken to my blog. This meant that these visitors were diverted from some other website, webpage or, blog, to myblog. This is why I call them “Diverted Traffic”.

Squidoo – A Monster for Diverted Traffic:-

It is highly unlikely that you are not aware of what “Squidoo” is. Because there are multiple sites out there that would have a mention of Squidoo and you would have stumbled upon a few of them by the time your reached this post, if you have been searching around for ways of making money online.

Let me still take a minute to tell you all about what Squidoo is. Squidoo is a storehouse of thousands of millions of one-pager websites where you can create your own one-pager website at the click of a few buttons. Unlike designing and creating a normal website, at Squidoo you do not need any knowledge about HTML or, any of those complicated programming languages. If you know how to use you mouse and your keyboard you can have a webpage of your up and running in a matter of a few minutes.

This is just the beginning. The best part about Squidoo is that it can help you divert huge amount of traffic to your blogs and websites. Wondering how? Let me explain.

You head over to Squidoo and create a one pager website about your niche (the topic you are blogging on). Put all your creativity to use when your design the one-pager at Squidoo. Add content that is relevant and keyword rich (assuming you have done a bit of keyword research) to this webpage. Pick a few of these keywords and ad a link to your blog to them. You can also use modules (Squidoo’s term for a section in the webpage) like “Talk-Bubble” to highlight your blog by using a catchy punchline and add a link to it, pointing to your blog. Keep making small changes to this webpage everyday and in about 10-12 days you would see traffic coming to your blog from Squidoo. Surprised?

I am sure you might be thinking that I have gone crazy. It is indeed crazy. Google lover Squidoo very much and Google’s spiders spends quite some time crawling Squidoo for good content. So regularly updated, fresh Squidoo pages (called as Lenses) with rich content and keywords, get ranked in Google very quickly. Internet users searching for specific terms related to your niche are sure to see your lens when it starts featuring on the first page of Google. They click on this link and reach Squidoo, read your content there. They then click on one of the link you have put out there to further read on the topic and come to your blog. Isn’t that crazy?

You would surprised to see the amout of traffic coming to your websites and blogs from Squidoo, if you do it correctly and judiciously.

For all those who are still wondering how all this works, I would be posting a video on “How to create a lens at Squidoo and get traffic?” in another weeks time. Till then head on straight to Squidoo and create and account and start fiddling with the tools available there.

Squidoo is available at http://www.squidoo.com.

A few of my lenses are available at:-

1. http://www.squidoo.com/keyword-elite-exposed
2. http://www.squidoo.com/GhostRecon-AdvancedWarfighter2
3. http://www.squidoo.com/hidden_objects_games_online
4. http://www.squidoo.com/earth4energyfacts

Photograph courtesy rbrwr, used on a Creative Commons License