How Spam Hurts Everyone and What You Can Do About It
May 9, 2008 – 7:46 pm
Squidoo still has a bad reputation in some online circles. Thanks to the spammers who flooded into Squidoo and made a bunch of junk lenses a year ago, links to Squidoo pages are banned from places like Digg, Propeller and Wikipedia. Even promoting Squidoo lenses on your blog is risky, at least if you’re having it hosted on a free network like Blogger or WordPress.com.
None of this means you can’t get great traffic to your Squidoo lens (Google still loves Squidoo), but it does mean that the more obvious options for promoting Squidoo lenses are limited. And if you’re not careful, someone will bite your head off for promoting “spam”–even if your finely crafted, very informative Squidoo lens is anything BUT spam. Some folks just won’t look past the Squidoo logo and see the content for what it is.
The only thing we can do about it is continue to build great lenses. Filling Squidoo with excellent content, reporting spam, and pushing junk down to the bottom where it belongs.
The other thing we can do is “behave” ourselves when we join other online communities. Don’t join forums or social networks like Twitter for the sole purpose of promoting your lenses. Become part of the community: Learn what is and isn’t acceptable, ask questions, join conversations, and generally be a contributing member. Once the community accepts you, people will be less likely to jump down your throat for dropping an occasional link to one of your Squidoo lenses.
Even if you only have one or two Squidoo lenses, you have a kind of power. Someone who has never heard of Squidoo before might see your lens first. Make it count.
Tags: spam
