Let me make
your day with the help of an online writer’s scenario.
You sit
down at your computer and glance out the window. The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful
day.
Despite the call to abandon
yourself to nature and head outdoors, you power up, log in, and sign on to your
account on the writing platform Squidoo.
Today,
however, is not a normal day on Squidoo.
Today you find yourself looking at a Squidoo Dashboard which states that
you’ve been issued a WARNING.
Squidoo is
no longer indexing one of your articles on the website, and when others try and access
it they’re receiving a notice that it is currently unavailable to read. Your article is in limbo-land.
What Can You Do?
The first
thing you’ll do is yell at the computer screen, I guarantee you. Most assuredly, you’ll be angry.
But now is
the time to be reasonable because you now have to decide just how much time you’re
going to devote to the problem.
The folks
at Squidoo Headquarters will tell you that you have 30 to 60 days to rework your
article, contact them for a human review of your revised work, and hopefully work things out and move
forward. This is true in theory, and you
can give it a try.
The reality
of the situation is really quite a bit different. Here’s what I mean.
First of
all, your WARNING will give you no clue to what’s wrong with your article. Squidoo will not detail why their algorithm
is unhappy with your article. You’re
going to just have to guess, and guess again, and again. Many, many, many writers never figure out how
to revise their stalled article enough to satisfy the platform again.
But you give it a try anyways. And you go down the list of suggestions Squidoo often writes about and you add more content, try another Amazon module, check links, and downgrade your marketing techniques.
You contact Squidoo after you rework your article.
Again, however, they won’t send a response or a notification to you to
tell you what they’re thinking. So you
can wait and wait, and never totally understand what the problem was with your
article in the first place.
Squidoo HQ states in their tutorial articles that they rarely go back on their WARNINGS. So even when you revise your work, it may not
be enough. And after 60 days of trying
to right a problem that you can’t identify, your article will be now be both unpublished and
deleted from the site.
In the end,
you have 2 choices. You can try and
fight the system because although rarely, every once and awhile they do reverse
an original decision. Or you can take your article off the site and put it
elsewhere.
We’re back
to the question I posed earlier. How
much time do you want to put into solving your Squidoo problem?
Let’s look into
moving on.
How to Export your Article
off Squidoo and onto Your Computer
The first
thing you’ll want to do to claim your work is to Save an XML copy of your
article to your computer. To do this, go
into Workshop and look for EXPORT
in the right hand sidebar. Click on EXPORT.
The XML Export contains all of your
text and your configuration settings that you have in your article.
Another
option for saving your work is to save using your browser. You do this by choosing your browser’s File
-> Save Webpage. This function will even
save your images to a directory.
After
saving and storing your content to your personal computer or to your storage,
you’ll want to DELETE
your article from the Squidoo platform. This
procedure is done from your Squidoo Dashboard. Just locate
the article on your Lens List, and click DELETE.
Once you’ve
exported your work you’ll have time to make a decision on what you want to do
with this former Squidoo content. You
may choose to rework it for another online writers platform. You might decide you’re ready to experience
writing on your own website. Or you may
decide that you will simply delete the material and call it a day.
Whatever
you decide with your work, try and give yourself a little time and space to make a good
decision. Don’t make the choice when you’re
angry or feeling rejected.
This is just one article, the others may be fine. Then again, the issue may help you decide to move in another direction. You may find you want to take control over the direction of your work and choose to move all your articles to another location at this one time. There's no one good answer.
Squidoo
changes their rules all the time and what was a good match for your talents at
one time may turn out to simply be a stepping stone towards something you find better or
more fun.
Enjoy
writing on Squidoo for as long as you can. Just know that at some point things may
change, your involvement with the website may end, and you may find yourself moving
on like many writers before you.
It’s fun
while it lasts.
