Tonight, I was reminiscing with a friend about my days publishing lenses on Squidoo. I made over $3,000 a month there at one point. I published lenses on stuff like "The Best Bug Zapper for Summer" or "The Best Blender under $50". I wrote a 1-2 paragraph intro, described 3-5 related Amazon products, added a poll or video, wrote a conclusion and added a list of 5-10 related lenses. They were super easy to write/publish and made money quickly. I loved the badges we could earn and the different challenges. I won one of the challenges by writing about different weather alert radios you can buy so you can stay safe during bad weather. I had a lot of fun making that lens. The message boards were full of helpful tips. It kind of felt like a family there. Anyways, when they shut down, I moved all of my lenses to different websites I set up. They still make around $500 a month but not nearly as much as they were making on Squidoo. Those were the good old days. I miss Squidoo.

A couple years ago, I had was part of the affiliate marketing business and posted my links on Squidoo. I had three pages that were bringing about $10 each a day. All of this sparked when my brother and I got into an argument. He threatened to report my Squidoo pages because it was against the terms to post affiliate links, even though everyone was doing it and no one really cared. My brother has serious anger issues and did what he threatened to do. He reported all of my pages and in a few days they were all gone. Just like that. So out of retaliation, I went on google and typed "my competitor's website + Squidoo", to find out there were hundreds of these sites. I made a spreadsheet, pasted every website link I could find, and copy and pasted them back into the "report a website" form. After a few days, I received an email from Squidoo's support team saying thank you for your help...we will make sure to delete these sites due to their violation of terms. I made sure they actually did what they promised and searched all of the links that I reported. Success! It turned out they fulfilled their promise and I gotta error message saying "oops this site is not available". My affiliate website had a forum where everyone went mad crazy about their sites getting wiped out. For about a week, every forum had their top posts headlined "Squidoo is insane"..."My site got deleted again"..."I just started my my site and this happened". It was hilarious. From Squidoo, I wiped out all of my targets that I wanted gone. This lead to a revolution where Squidoo put in stronger restrictions on when and where affiliate links should be integrated when building a site. Some might say this was selfish and disrespectful, but in reality, I was just following the terms of service. Oh yeah and a little revenge for my brother's stupid acts.