If you are into affiliate marketing you must have heard about the Squidoo Policy changes by now, changes that I feel will make Squidoo a better place. As you know I have been “into” Squidoo ever since I got the One Week Marketing Plan a few months ago and so far my work of building squidoo lenses has proven to be very benificial.

I did run into problems a while back though when all of a sudden I couldn´t get into any of my lenses, which I wrote about while doing my squidoo study case, and the whole situation made me realize again just how important it is to keep control over your own content, especially if that content is created to make you money.

That little glitch a few months ago was actually a good thing even though I was pretty shocked and upset when it first happened and I couldn´t access my lenses, lenses that I had spent quite a bit of time on to create.

So I decided to create most of my content on my own domains so that no matter what happened I´d have the control over it, at the same time sticking with the One Week Marketing Plan to keep growing my business and building links to my own sites.

In come the Squidoo Policy Changes and to be honest, I am really glad that they are going to slap down the crappy content and spammy lenses. I am not too worried that a lot of my lenses being locked or deleted because when creating them I did put effort in the content, making sure it was totally unique and quality content, plus I have not been linking too much to products they now consider big no-no´s and I am pretty sure I am not linking out too much to the same domain, so that is gonna be fine too.

I will have to go over all of them before the 15th of July which is when they will turn on the “squidoo slapping machine” just to ensure my content is 100% ok, the linking is ok and my content will be protected. In order words this means making a back up of the content I have on Squidoo at present so that IF they decide something isn´t up to scratch, I can still use it somewhere else if I feel I should.

I am also not too worried about the squidoo slap because I started with the FirePow system 2 weeks ago in order to create more blogs of my own, on my own domains and just use squidoo for them as another way of building links.

My original thought was to use the FirePow system to create a whole load of blogs, put content on them and promote them through the nifty promotional tools FirePow offers and use OWM to give them another push up the rankings in combination with article marketing.

And now seeing the squidoo policy changes all I can say is that I am glad that I already started protecting the “eggs in my basket” by putting most of my content on my own pages already, and that I am looking forward to seeing Squidoo become a higher quality site again, taking care of all the spam practices that have been going on for too long!

What are your thoughts? Do you work with Squidoo? Are you scared to see your content be slapped and deleted?

I just wanted to give you a last update on my article marketing and One Week Marketing Plan challenge before I am off enjoying life offline for a bit.

As you could already have seen in the other updates, I didn´t get to work my regular schedule of setting up my promotional plan because of problems I have been experiencing with Squidoo. As it turns out, the problem is related to my internet access which is a really poor connection, seeing that I live out in the country side and have no landlines here to get a high speed connection.

Anyways I really do hope to get that sorted in the next few months or so, seeing that without a good connection, I am losing a lot of time as you might imagine.

At the start of the challenge I had set up 6 squidoo lenses and added content on them and then went on doing the steps in the One Week Marketing Plan. Now for any of you who is struggling to make money online, I really think it is worth to have a look at this program, it is not just great for beginners to get the idea of how to set up an online promotion, for those who have been working online and felt they were not getting good enough results, this program goes into a lot of detail and lays out a plan and working schedule. I know I got a lot out of it so far!

So, I had the lenses, went on to doing off site promotion and also set up a website of my own that would be supported by article marketing and the squidoo lenses, or at least that was the basic idea until I ran into my squidoo problems and wasn´t able to access my lenses to adapt them and link more.

That I gotta say, got me thinking big time about the use of free sites to promote a product. Now the basic idea behind the one week marketing is to use just sites that are free, so apart from investing some money into learning the ropes (investing in your own skills!) there is no other investment required because all the tools you use are free. However, and I think Jennifer, the author of this plan, is right when saying that as soon as you can, you should spend some money on buying your own website and use the free resources explained to promote that website, giving it more authority in Google because of the already set up pages on high PR sites.

Seeing that I could not fully use Squidoo for this project, I immediately set up a website on my own domain to make sure I could continue with my challenge and would use the squidoo lenses to back up that domain. Hope that makes sense to you all!

What I have seen so far

Keeping in mind that my project has only been “live” for a week now and a few article directories are still in the process of approving my articles that I submitted, and the initial problems I had with my squidoo lenses, I can only say that the project has been a success so far for a number of reasons:

• I was able to stick to my working schedule even though a lot of unforeseen things happened
• I am already seeing traffic coming in on my squidoo lenses and on my own site
• I am already getting hits on the product I am promoting
• And the best of all, I already got one sale!

Plus posting this challenge online has already done a few other things I wasn´t really thinking of when starting. I have gotten a few ideas for future posts that might be of interest for you, so if you haven´t signed up for my RSS you better do so now to make sure you don´t miss out on my future posts.

I have been doing quite a bit of article marketing over the past week and been playing around with different ways of distributing articles, how to write them to get more hits and what to do to increase views. So I think a post will be coming up soon, going more into depth on how to write articles for article submission, what to do and what not to do and things you need to understand when getting into article marketing.

Instead of just submitting to EzineArticles, I have been trying out different article directories, and another future post will be a more detailled post on different article directories, how to use them and what to look for. They are all different and offer different options when it comes to building links, so you better not miss those posts if you want to go into article marketing.

Another thing that has happened these last weeks is being invited as a guest writer on different blogs. Now I know I said a month or so ago that I wouldn´t be doing any promotion for this blog anymore, meaning I wasn´t going to be using any of the “social link building techniques” so widely promoted by everybody and their dog. It is still too early to tell what the impact will be for that decision, but for now I can share that my rss subscribers have gone up with 25 this last week, and google analytics is showing me an increase of 20% in visitors to my site.

I can only say that I am really happy with that and want to take this moment to give a thanks to all of you visitors, leaving interesting comments both here and in my mailbox, I highly appreciate any feedback and the support is wonderful.

Back to the invitation to do guest posts, I am still thinking of that and will probably send you an article if I find them good enough to post on another blogs, just know I am not forgetting about it

The last thing I saw actually made me chuckle, I was being called the “Buzz Killer” by Caleb because of my post on using massive traffic techniques and whether you should follow the hype or not. I would like to repeat here that if what you are doing right now is getting you the results you are after, by all means keep doing that.

If however you are not getting the wanted results by spending hours and hours of work and effort maybe it is time to think for yourself and analise those efforts in order to find a more productive way to work. I will be posting more of my own thoughts on that in the near future as well.

I will be keeping you guys updated of course on my little challenge project but for now I am going to prepare myself for a nice little break and enjoy life offline for a week or so. It will be my birthday this Sunday… time flies when you are having fun … and I am having my mom and a friend over for a week to celebrate and have a little holiday here on the sunny coast of Spain, so if you wonder why there aren´t any new posts for a while, it is because we are having a blast!

See you back next week!