Day 16: Life after Tumblr

Nothing particularly surprising today from Ed and he basically went over what I thought he would as mentioned in my day 15 post. I have decided I am going to use a combination of EzineArticles and Squidoo to test my niche phrases from now on, so here is how I came to my decision.

EzineArticles are the premiere article directory on the internet and Google absolutely loves them. You probably noticed in the niche research phase that articles from EzineArticles quite often rank in the top ten and all content submitted is human reviewed to ensure good quality. This means that not only will any articles we submit have a good chance of ranking well but any back links we place beneath our article (called the resource box) will be very valuable in terms of helping other pages we own rank well.

The other thing I like about EzineArticles is the fact that all we need to do is write an article, submit it, social bookmark it and then forget it. If we decide to create our own info product for that particular niche and we end up with our own domain and web site, we can do back and edit the article adding a link to the resource box which will give our brand new site a big boost in Google’s eyes.

There was a bit of a Squidoo craze there for a while as people were building lenses (simply their name for a page) which were ranking extremely well even in considerably competitive markets up until recently that is. Not all that long ago Google penalized Squidoo due to a group of spammers who were using Squidoo in an unethical manner to rank well in Google and as the content was rubbish and Google is all about quality (or at least try to be) Google had to step in and take action.

The effect this had on Squidoo is debatable, some people reported a substantial loss in traffic, some reported no loss in traffic but at the end of the day Squidoo lenses still do rank well, perhaps not as well as they used to but in my opinion well enough. It is important to note that Squidoo have made a lot of effort since then to prevent spammers from doing this again so they could possibly regain their former status, who knows.

Squidoo vs HubPages - I have used both platforms and in my personal experience have had far better results with Squidoo. However in saying that others have reported they have ranked very well using HubPages. In my niche research I can’t say I have ever come across a HubPage in the top search results which doesn’t give me a lot of faith, Squidoo lenses on the other hand frequently appear on the first page of search results.

HubPages have been rather flexible in the content they allow however I think lately they are making a move to reduce spam also so could result in the whole Tumblr scenario all over again. On the other hand Squidoo does actually encourage affiliate marketing as long as it is done properly. In other words if you supply some decent, unique content and enough of it then sure you can provide links to affiliate products and/or services. If you provide duplicate, worthless, spammy content then your account will get deleted before you know it.

So thats my reasoning for my choice, I think a combination between EzineArticles and Squidoo is going to be an extremely powerful combination. In regards to the comments made in this post I am not proclaiming to be an expert in any way, shape or form I am simply going on my own personal experience. I am sure some people will use HubPages instead of Squidoo for the 30 day challenge and have great success, some may even use both.