Often goals for writers might involve producing a certain number of words or articles in a given time frame. My goals for September involve a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that writers do.
Editing – As soon as my web pages from Squidoo transfer to their new home at Hubpages, I’ll do a damage assessment. I’m hearing that certain modules won’t transfer into Hubpages’ capsules. The worst pages I’ll just have to unpublish until I have time to do remedial work on them. In some cases, they may not suit Hubpages and later I’ll repurpose them to my blogs or other sites.
Finding New Markets – I mentioned this above, that some of my Squidoo topics won’t stay at Hubpages. Some friends are starting new sites, so I may join in with them. It is past time for me to set up a commercial web page of my own and stop counting on space at sites like Squidoo and eHow.
Saving – Two other sites have considerable content that’s crucial for my future writing. One is the MyFamily site which Ancestry.com is closing at the end of September. There’s considerable urgency for me to salvage our family photos and memories stored there. The other site, Our Echo, seems stable, but I need to preserve my mother’s writing and my own from there as well.
Researching – I need to ramp up my research on the Civil War and on my Tower family genealogy. The book about my great-great grandfather depends on thorough work here.
I Was Wrong
In a previous post, I shared some upward trending stats on a Squidoo lens. Grasping at straws, I suggested that maybe it was a sign of traffic starting to rebound on the site. I was WRONG.
Here’s the end of Squidoo and in another week, the pages lovingly crafted there disappear. Hopefully people took the lifeline of moving their pages to Hubpages or scrambled to repurpose them for their own web site or blog.
I’ve deleted manually 37 pages that need not go to Hubpages. Hubpages wouldn’t want my lensographies, Squidoo tips and some personal pages created for quests. Compulsively, I saved even those to my cloud storage with Evernote. Perhaps I can glean a few paragraphs from them to use in blogs. The rest are saved and transfer to Hubpages where I’ll deal with them later.
I feel sad, I feel sorry for anyone depending on the income they’d developed on Squidoo and for all those beautiful personal pages and family history pages that may fall by the wayside. I feel angry that Squidoo tortured all of us for a year and a half before finally setting us free.
If you took your content and escaped last year, consider yourself fortunate. Unfortunately, this is not a new story on the Internet. I survived the debacle on eHow when they killed their Writer’s Compensation Program. We learn a lot for each site and take those skills with us wherever we go online. At least on eHow, they offered a buy-out. I do appreciate the 5 figure check they sent me.
Now, it is onward and upward. There are new opportunities opening for us and new skills to learn. My fingers have been pried away from clutching the rail of the sinking ship. It is sink or swim. For many of us, Hubpages provides a life raft. That gives some of us a little more time to take some swimming lessons if we need those.
Virginia Allain 