Can I ask a question or two?

How much time and effort are you willing to put into a lens to get it in the top 1000? What, apart from peer approval, are you likely to gain from this?

If it is just the top tier payout you may need to think about how many hours obsessing over lensrank divided by the payout to get the hourly rate you are willing to work for. Though if you are hoping to earn  through people clicking on your affiliate links and earning you money, why are you worrying about lensrank, when you should be looking for quality traffic instead! Social Networking bookmarking may bring you some traffic, so may using stumbleupon, though do you just want a crown of people crashing through your lens wearing out the carpet following the 'buzz', or would you be happier with a few visitors who were interested in the subject and prepared to interact with the topic and even possibly buy something to earn you some money?

Just Build Quality Interesting Lenses - If the search engines don't pick up on it, it's likely their are either few people interested in the subject, or the net is swamped with other sites on the subject.

One of my  early lenses did really well the first few weeks, and I kept tweaking it, adding to it, rearranging it, just to see a small surge in lensrank followed by a slide. The amount of time I was putting into keeping it up and getting traffic to it was getting to be crazy. Then I earned my first affiliate sale from it and it was a flashbulb moment! Why am I chasing lensrank when I should be chasing traffic and potential customers?? I only update this lens every few months now, yet traffic to it varies between 50 & 200 visitors a week. It doesn't earn a lot of commission, but usually a  dollar or so every other month. Since creating it in July last year squidoo has paid me about $30 for it, and I have earned maybe the same from my own affiliate links. Not megabucks, but if I had 30 lenses like this that performed as consistently - I'd be pretty happy!