Avoiding Problems With Squidoo

As of March 2013, Squidoo started cracking down on affiliates that are taking advantage of the network and not providing what the site is really looking for with their lenses.

I wanted to be sure to include a few notes about this in a separate chapter for easy reference because failure to follow this advice can result in the permanent removal of your lenses and potentially even your Squidoo account.

First of all, refer back to the first Squidoo chapter to see the notice displayed when you create an account. This summarizes the Squidoo mission statement, so be sure to adhere to it by creating unique content on their lenses.

Next, be sure not to overuse affiliate links - either your own links or even the ones that Squidoo provides. Ultimately, there is no point in loading a lens with Amazon links because it isn't going to be well received by Squidoo or your lens visitors, which completely defeats the purpose of building it.

Think about the things that I recommend with the creation of your own site. To be more specific, I'm talking about creating a useful site that doesn't depend on your advertising to exist. This same thing should be done with your lens. It shouldn't require Amazon ads to make sense.

To go a step beyond that, I also recommend to keep that same train of thought when it comes to creating outgoing links on your Squidoo lenses. They will actually limit you to 10 outgoing links to one site from one lens, but you should honestly not be using that many.

I am often looking to have a link on all of my lenses pointing back to my main Amazon site. However,

I don't want Squidoo to think that the lens was only created for this purpose. This will definitely flag your lens and remove it for this reason alone, so be sure to be careful with this.

Just use a single link or possibly two on the lens back to your own site. Another tactic you can use is to link out to another website (preferably one that doesn't have advertising, like Wikipedia is one I like to use). Linking to another site and your own makes it less apparent that the lens just exists for a link to your site.

Remember, focus on content quality above all else, with your site, Squidoo, and even other sites for that matter, and all of the success you seek to find will follow. Getting greedy and overeager is the most common mistake you can make once you have the right knowledge that you need to actually do this type of work properly, so just keep calm and remain patient (things in the internet world don't always happen overnight, especially search rankings).

Next Azon Master Class

In the final Azon Master Class, I'm going to show you how you can proceed to selling your Amazon site (if you want) once you have it completed, receiving traffic and receiving sales.