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?

Like I already mentioned in my last post Using Massive Traffic Techniques – a Long Shot or Big Money Maker? I was going to do a personal case study relating to OWM and article marketing. Because of my planning and things I had been working on, I have scheduled this case study for next week, starting the 29th of March.

As you might know, I started the OWM a while back and have now created several different lens projects, enough to see that it is working like a charm, but not enough to be moving to that wonderful farmhouse with plenty of land for my horses and dogs just yet.

I do see great potential in this though and I am convinced that if I just stay focused on following the plan as it is so conveniently laid out, and keep pounding away at it, I will be making a lot more money in the near future. Country Home here we come!

By the way, just as I started writing this post, another clickbank sale came through LOL, and the way I know that is because I have a neat little add-on installed on my FireFox browser, which tells me the instant a sale is made by showing up at the bottom of my browser.

If you are promoting Clickbank products you might want to install that too.

In order to understand fully what my challenge is going to be about, I need to give you some basic information on what the OWM plan is about so here it goes:

The plan consists of detailed steps you need to do every day for a week to set up a small promotional project. Most of the guess work is taken out so you just follow the daily steps that are explained in the plan and at the end of the week you will have 5 lenses set up around one affiliate product that you feel is worth promoting, free blogs and articles to promote those links and a few other promotional steps like submitting the RSS feeds and pinging all your work.

The more weeks you complete, the more mini-projects you will have, the more traffic you will be getting and the more sales will come in. It is no rocket science but it does involve work, writing articles, doing the promotion per project and keep an eye on your growing project portfolio in order to improve the ones that are working.

Knowing myself and realizing that I was always jumping around from one thing to the next, going back and forth without a lot of focus, I am actually seeing changes in the way I work, and becoming more productive as a result of that.

So after having built several of these mini-projects I have come across a product that I think is worth a little bit more attention and heavier promotion, which is why I am going to do the personal challenge next week.

What is my OWM Personal Challenge going to look like you might wonder, so here is the layout:

On the first day of the challenge I am going to make sure to have double the amount of lenses set up and working, so instead of 5 lenses I will make 10. To be fair, I have already been doing the keyword research and some prep work to set those lenses up fairly quick so that I will be able to stay on track with the work schedule.
The following 4 days will consist of the normal promotional steps given in the OWM plan (I can’t give you all the details here as you might understand, you have to get the guides yourself for that) PLUS I want to promote the hell out of those lenses so I will be submitting at least 10 articles to article directories or publish them on different free blogs set up for that purpose.

Over the course of next week I will also publish one small post on this blog to chart my progress and additional thoughts that I might have, so if you want to follow this challenge, you better sign up for my RSS hint hint. In the weeks to come I will keep you updated on how this special challenge is making sales….

Yes, you will get full disclosure on the results, whether they are good or bad, something that makes me a bit nervous to be honest, but I want this blog to be an honest account of my learning curves and maybe in the process help you to build a business online too.

One more thing I would like to add that might interest you, I have made my own sheets to make my keyword research easier, both when starting to pick the keywords that I initially focus on and to keep track of keywords that might be interesting to focus on once the project is starting to get organic traffic (visitors coming from search engines).

They are just simple sheets to write everything down and again, it is not rocket science or the best invention of the world, but they have helped me to finally get things on paper and tracked as well as understanding the importance of keywords and the effect they can have on the traffic you want to target.

If you decide to get the One Week Marketing Plan yourself I would like to point out two offers:

If you are looking for a discount, you can go to Alex, he is offering a $20 discount once the clickbank guarantee has worn off, so you’d get that 60 days after you buy it through his link.

However, if you buy it through my link, I will not only email you the keyword research sheet that I am using myself plus explanations on which keywords to pick, but I will also give you some of my personal time to help you set up your first project, meaning that you can either contact me through email with your questions or get my personal help through messenger to guide you through the process.

Just contact me after purchase and give me your payment details (no, I don’t need your credit card or anything like that, just proof that you have bought the product through my link) and we are good to go!

Also, I would like to remind you of the Free Squidoo Guide if you just want to get starting building squidoo lenses one your own.