Squidoo Policy Changes And Attraction Marketers. Worried?

Recently, Squidoo announced changes to its Terms of Service and policy changes.  What are those changes and how do they affect you, the attraction marketer?

First of all, if you are a true attraction marketer, nothing has really changed.  As an attraction marketer, your aim is to provide valuable content to position yourself as an expert and build a following.  If you are providing valuable, unique lenses, like you should, these changes will not affect you at all, except to improve the Squidoo landscape.

Why the changes?

What Squidoo is trying to do with these rule changes is to rid Squidoo of lenses that are basically spam or just don’t add value.  While Google won’t rank these pages, Squidoo wants to get rid of these types of pages.  These pages take up space and they dilute the value of Squidoo as a community and a source of great content.

So what are these changes?

1. No Spam.  Squidoo has never tolerated spam and has made its rules regarding spam even more strict.  Spamming of Squidoo lenses includes spam by email, blog comments, Twitter, by bait and switch tactics with lens content, etc.  If Squidoo catches you doing that, they will lock your account.  As in your normal email spam, Squidoo spam does not fit into the attraction marketing model – it does not provide value.
2. No more X-rated or Porn lenses.  From Squidoo’s point of view, X-rated content doesn’t fit into their model.  It attracts spam, has low, no, or negative-value content, wastes bandwidth and space and increases overhead costs.  As an attraction social marketer, this shouldn’t affect you at all.
3. No topics from Squidoo’s SquidDon’t list.  Squidoo calls these spambait lenses as they are junk and lead to spam.  You can get the list at Squidoo but what’s included are topics such as pharmaceuticals, diet pills, acai berry reviews, gambling, credit card debt, currency trading, mortgages, etc.  Notice how these topics match the spam you get in your email inbox?  That’s a good way of figuring out what spambait is.
4. New limits on overly promotional lenses.  In social marketing, less is more.  And Squidoo agrees.  Its OK to promote or recommend something at Squidoo, but if you have a huge number of links going to the same exact domain, you’re going to be in trouble.  Squidoo now has a limits to 9 the number of outbound links going to the same domain from a lens.

That wasn’t so bad was it?  As I said at the outset, if you follow social marketing best practices, you will not run into these rules.  Squidoo is forcing those who would spam and create junk sites either to change their modus operandi or leave.  And that will make Squidoo a better place for the true attraction marketer.

If your goal is to get into article marketing or video marketing to help your business online, a great training ground is Renegade University. Mike Klingler's FREE membership site offers step-by-step, click-by-click, video tutorials on article marketing for network marketing.

About C Doug Mah

Doug is part of the “Super Guides” team with Renegade University and Renegade Professional, guiding and coaching in the area of internet attraction marketing.

Doug’s background is in finance and accounting in the corporate world. In the past 13 years, as a senior finance executive, he has helped grow and position 3 high-tech companies for acquisition. Having gone through the cycle of finding a new job, building a company, selling a company, integratng the company with the new company, and back to finding a job, and seeing what is happening in corporate America with the recent financial crisis and its fallout, Doug sees that future does not lie in corporate America. Developing your own business, You Inc., is the way to build your own economy of the future and secure you and your family financially.

For more tips and training on Squidoo see Doug at http://RenegadeTrainerOnline.com/blog  

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