Several weeks back, I was contacted by a future blogger Gayle with some questions for me on how I make time blogging since I have a full time job.

I thought that sharing our conversation would be helpful for others trying to find the time to create blog posts with a busy schedule like mines.

Good morning everyone!  I hope you all had a great weekend!  My weekend was pretty good, caught up on some much needed rest.

November was a ok month for me.  Earnings are down but that was to be expected due to it being in my slow months.  I put a lot of focus on ProductReviewMom.com, writing a new article on Squidoo due to their requirement to continue in their Giant Squid program, and updating the layout of this website.


Here are my November totals:

Hey Everyone!

I received one of the worst news through email from Squidoo yesterday evening saying my Top Lens was locked.  My heart just dropped reading that!  That lens is what helped me to earn a lot of money online with my affiliate programs.  The article was truthful, original, and people relied on it to make money online and get free products at home.

The lens that was locked was my Product Testing Lens which was in the Top 100 on Squidoo, PageRank 4 with Google, over 2,000 visitors a week through search engines, #1 with several high ranking keywords, and so on.

Since I'm a Giant Squid I was able to get an answer back from someone from the Squidoo Team explaining to me why my lens got locked which was because of a bad backlink (affiliate link had expired) and I linked back to my blog too much.  With that, I don't think my lens deserved to be locked, I should've gotten a warning first so I can get it fixed.

I remember on the forum WAHM.com, people were saying bad things about Squidoo saying it's not worth writing on there because any minute your lenses can get locked and I always defended it saying that Squidoo is trying to get rid of spam, cookie cutter lenses and other stuff and as long as you create good quality content, you'll be ok.  But I guess I was wrong.

Moral of the story is, rules changes on writer's platform websites and one day your article can be live and the next day can be locked.  Lesson learned, and now I just lost a lot of income.  I've already started damage control and rewritten my article on my product review blog last night and now my blog post is on the third and fourth page of Google search, so hopefully it'll move up to the first page within a couple of days or weeks.

I hate to leave Squidoo, I love the community, the writers and learned a lot about writing online thanks to the platform.  But it's just time to move on and work on my two blogs and grow it on my own.

I'm going to keep the remaining lenses on Squidoo unless they lock those too, but as for creating new lenses, I won't be doing it anymore. 

Have a great day everyone!

UPDATE 6/5/2013-  Squidoo just unlocked the lens this morning.  The lens had bad backlinks on it which means my links from the affiliate companies expired and also spammers had my link on their websites which tip off Squidoo's filters. 

Even though my lens has been unlocked,  I will not be creating new lenses on Squidoo.  Just too much policy changes going on with them.  I'm just going to attend to the lenses I already have on there.

If you like to write about the things you love and would like to make money doing it, joining a writer's platform online is the way to go.

A lot of you know that I like to write on Squidoo because it's a great place to express myself.  There are other platforms similar to Squidoo that you can join and earn money from your writing. 


Here is a list:

It's so great to know that I'm able to help someone financially and they come back to me and thank me for it.  That's the reason for this blog and articles I've written on Squidoo- is to help people find ways to supplement their current income without making any type of investments and to know I've made a difference in someone's life really puts a smile on my face.

This morning on Squidoo, a lensmaster left me a nice comment and it said:

"I just wanted to thank you for introducing me to SurveyHead through your lenses. In the last few months it has added about $100 to our "gas money" fund - a very necessary expense! So THANK YOU. Your information has made a real difference in my family's life! :o) I am ready to try some other things you suggest now, so I'm off to re-read your lenses."



Please make sure to show some love to Knitstriken who wrote this wonderful comment.  She has great lenses she's written on Squidoo.

Also, if you'd like to make money with SurveyHead, click here.

So the dreaded Google Panda is supposed to strike today or Monday and it has every webmaster on edge.  If you've experienced the algorithm changes last February 2012, you know what I'm talking about. 

Just sitting back waiting to see this take into affect is nerve wrecking, but we'll not know for sure of anything until Tuesday.  If I see that I'm losing traffic, then I know I've been hit and need to make some changes.

As you may all know that I'm a writer on Squidoo and make a bit of money on that website.  Squidoo now recently rolled out with new changes that is suppose to help the quality of the website.

Squidoo is soon start locking lenses that are spunned, lack enough content on sales lenses, full of affiliate links, canceled for a few weeks the ability to transfer lenses to other accounts, and you can only "like" up to 20 lenses a day.

It's about time that Squidoo Team jumped in and started taking some action.  So many spammers and cheaters has been taking over Squidoo which is now looking bad in Google's eyes.  There was even a time I found my own top article stolen by someone and published on there!

My main purpose for using Squidoo is for the back-links to this blog and  my Product Review blog but I also enjoy writing what I'm passionate about.  I have several articles on Squidoo that ranks high with Google and if Squidoo gets slapped with a penalty by Google, it hurts Squidoo as a whole!  Which means for me, lost traffic and lost income!  And this has happened to me before with Hubpages.

So I'm happy that Squidoo is finally stepping in to make some changes and it also reminds me that I need to start making some changes with this blog as well.

For now on going forward, if you'd like to become a guest blogger, I must see your previous guest postings.  Also I must see that your guest article you'd like to have published here will pass Copyscape.  I don't want any duplicate articles at all!!!

Also, if you send me a contact message without the words NOT SPAM on it....it'll not be answered.

I've been dealing with a lot of spam lately in my inbox and I'm about tired of it!

Thank you all for being loyal readers!

Happy Earnings!

-Louida