Squidoo’s New Terms of Service ~ What Do They Mean For You?

If you have a lens on Squidoo you got the email last night. If you missed it you need to check it out, so you can make sure your lenses fit into the new terms of service.

Here’s the basics:

1. No Spam.

This is not different. You should be building quality lenses, with helpful information. Of course you can send people to affiliate products ~ when they add value to the reader.Here are Squidoo’s new Terms of Service in regard to spam.

2.  No more X rated lenses.

This may or may not affect you, but it’s new. Appears it was a pretty difficult decision for the Squidoo folks. If you have X rated lenses check this out so you know what to do with your content.

3. No Junk Topics.

This goes right along with what I’ve been saying about branching out and finding new and interesting niches.  Some of the “junk” topics included in Squidoo’s list are “lose belly fat”, “free movie downloads” “forex” “acai berry” “Hoodia”. Here’s the whole list of the topics they’ve put on notice and added to the “junk topics” list.

4. No overly promotional lenses.

This is the one I’m getting a lot of questions about. What about my affiliate lenses? What will happen now? Well, probably nothing. If you take a look at the new rules you will see it says overly promotional, not just promotional. If you’ve been building lenses the way I teach in Squidoo for Beginners, or the way One Week Marketing and LearnItStepbyStep teach, you should have no problems.

9 links to one place is more than enough in one lens ~ If you create a quality lens of 7 or 8 modules, that comes out to 1 link per module, and one link in your bio area. That is exactly what we teach, and should work out well for you.

Go back, check your lenses ~ count your links. If you’ve added links to the same product in every poll answer you may need to take some of those out.

You have plenty of time to go back and check your lenses and see if you need to fix them up. Here’s squidoo’s side of the story on promotional lenses, and how long you have to make the changes.

5. Don’t Steal Content.

This should be a no brainer, but sometimes, people think that because it’s online, they can just use it. This is NOT the case. You need permission or consent to use anything you find online from the original creator. There’s a serious crack down happening for plagerized content.

What should you do now?

The people who run Squidoo are pretty level headed people, they’re giving you some time to get your lenses in shape and in compliance with the new terms of service. These changes don’t go into effect until mid July. So you have over a month to get your lenses in order.

Here are 4 things you can do right now to make sure none of your lenses get locked.

If these changes make you feel like you just don’t want to work on Squidoo anymore, you can export your content and take it with you to somewhere else to use.

I have no idea why these changes would make you want to do that though. These changes will only make the site better, higher quality, and have more authority as being a quality place to get information.

I personally think these are all really great changes!

What do you think?

Need some help getting started? Wherever you are I can probably help. Whether it's Squidoo, niche blogs, or an authority blog, one on one help is available!!

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