Hi Seth, I’ve decided to write you an open letter on my blog today. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that the Squidoo site is ending. There’s a deep, sad place in my heart this week. But more than that, there’s gratitude for the effort you put into making Squidoo a good experience for so many of us.
The Squidoo Logo
A light went on in my head.
You mean, you really can earn money on this site?
At the time I was working part time at the Pizza House in Happy Camp, California… a very small town in the far-northern mountains of California. I wasn’t earning much, so the money Squidoo sent was like an amazing gift.
I then went back to Squidoo and started making more pages. A good thing considering I lost my pizza making job in September that year, just as the recession was getting underway.
Because of tumultuous upheaval in my personal life, I haven’t been one of the top earners on Squidoo… and my page count rarely got over 200. However I continued on and struggled, so I was making a good income until 2013 when the bottom fell out of our Squidoo lives, due to changes with the Google search engine algorithm.
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Suddenly I saw people complaining about Squidoo! I was shocked, saddened, and distressed. They blamed everyone but themselves… but mostly they blamed you and the staff at Squidoo HQ.
I could not do that. I knew you were as distressed as we were, and that HQ staff were trying their best to redeem the good search engine standing of Squidoo. I trusted you, totally… and why not? After all, you started the site for charity, and not for personal enrichment. A huge portion of Squidoo earnings were going not only to charity but to all the money-hungry writers like me who needed to pay bills.
I thank you for everything you did to try to save the site. I thank you for starting Squidoo with such altruistic motivations. I thank you for ending the site with the transfer of our pages to HubPages so our work won’t be lost, and so our search engine traffic will follow us through redirects from Squidoo.
It has been a good run and Squidoo will always be a good memory… I loved the site and will miss the beautiful, colorful pages. The last page design update was outstanding and I’m sorry we won’t be there to make more use of it.
Seth, I’m happy I got a chance to work alongside you for as long as I did… I am so honored to have been able to write on your site and to know you almost-personally.
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you… that’s all I’m going to say.
Linda, this is a really lovely letter. It was great to have you and your writing as a part of our community. I’m sure you’ll continue to find new successes in whatever you take on.
Linda, I, too, will be grateful for the many opportunities and lessons Squidoo provided for me for the past eight years and grateful to those who made it such a remarkable community. Thank you for sharing your gratitude as well. They deserve it.
Linda; Thank you for sharing your faith in the internet writing platform and expressing so eloquently the appreciation owed to Squidoo and staff. Everyone has a choice of viewing anything that happens in one’s life either good or bad…I choose good and can see why I am of fan of yours since you do too. Cheers, it’s been a good run and here’s to friendships made along the way.
Without Squidoo, I would not have discovered CafePress and later Zazzle. I really feel that it made me a better and more confident writer. I enjoyed the community of people. For that I am grateful.
Thank you Linda. This means the world to me and to my team.
Your generous work and personal writing are a fabulous contribution to so many.
Thanks again and good luck in your next chapter…
Thanks for the kind letter Linda. Wishing you the best in your future endeavors. – Bonnie
I’m happy that I joined Squidoo and met some awesome and talented people along the way. I only wish that we would have had more notice than what we were given.
I would like to second this letter. Squidoo was a wonderful community that I will greatly miss. I never believed I could write until I discovered Squidoo. Thank you to Seth, HQ and all the other Squids who made the past 7 years such an amazing learning experience as well as a place to make money. Squidoo also taught me to adapt to change. I didn’t like it when we lost the Group lenses but I soon discovered the reason for it. I didn’t like it when we lost Squidu. But I was amazed when I discovered how much more we could get out of branching out into Ning and Facebook. Now we face a new change moving on to new sites. Thank you for making the move to Hubpages as easy as possible. Thank you Linda Martin for writing this letter. Our community is expanding and Squidoo was just the beginning.
I recently expresses some of these same sentiments, though not in letter form. The end was traumatic for me, but I realize how much worse it could have been. It was Squidoo that gave me my start in writing online and opened that world to me and helped me to grow as a writer before I ever knew that other sites existed. I, too, will miss that sense of building a visual masterpiece. I’ve saved every lens as a web page just because they are beautiful works of art I don’t want to lose. I appreciate HubPages, too, but it will never let me create what Squidoo did.
Thanks Linda for giving me this opportunity to thank Seth Godin for my Squidoo experience. I never made much money, but I would never have been the writer I am today without this chance and it never cost me a penny.
Sorry those days are over, I’m moving on and I can see you made a great choice of giving us the opportunity to move over to HubPages. I already feel it in my bones that I will enjoy it as I did Squidoo.
Thank you Seth.
You know Linda, without my Squidoo experience, I never would have made the money that I did. Squidoo taught me many things about requirements for online writing. Coming from a newspaper background, my writing was a bit stilted when I began, and I learned a lot on eHow, then Squidoo came along and I learned much more. I’m grateful for the time I spent there, and yes, I was hurt, sad, even angry for a time. But the only thing consistent in life is … change! Thank you for this letter of gratitude to Seth. Ditto from me.