Whilst this may be a succesful method of increasing lensrank whilst you keep doing it, unless this can guarantee your lens getting in the top 2k with under an hours work a month, your 'payback' will mean you are earning less per hour than most shelfstackers in the western world.
Having a good lensrank is great for massaging the ego and does definitely have a great 'feel good factor', spending lots of time and effort chasing lensrank is surely just pure vanity in reality.

A good post to drop in my lens about 'Why Chasing Lensrank is Pointless' perhaps?

though congrats on getting a good lensrank thru these tactics, you do need to have a good lens to start with, and if you're very lucky it will maintain a high lensrank without much further work. It can be very disheartening for those who spend the time and effort to achieve a good lensrank to discover how much they actually earn for all the hours put in, and usually it will require constant work for it to keep a good lensrank if it's not achieving the primary objective of bringing in traffic from search engines and getting click-outs.

The_Book_Garden wrote:

Whilst this may be a succesful method of increasing lensrank whilst you keep doing it, unless this can guarantee your lens getting in the top 2k with under an hours work a month, your 'payback' will mean you are earning less per hour than most shelf stackers in the western world.
Having a good lensrank is great for massaging the ego and does definitely have a great 'feel good factor', spending lots of time and effort chasing lensrank is surely just pure vanity in reality. .

Although I respect your opinion, I disagree with your strategy. I am already an established Internet Marketer - so I am not in a hurry to make money. it's perfectly fine if i have to work for more hours and build my presense at squidoo without earning any money, because as I grow here - I will start to get more and more inside traffic from squidoo - I also believe that achieving good lens rank also brings in lots of traffic as the lens gets featured in the top 100 lists and lots of organic traffic flows in

I have worked hard on my lens and people have really appreciated it - so I believe that my content is not only of high quality but also very valuable to the readers (have a look if you want - in my signature).

Additionally with lens rank comes lots of attention from fellow lensmasters who visit ur lens and become ur fans if u have a highly ranked lens.

Monetization can come at a later stage.

The_Book_Garden wrote:

Having a good lensrank is great for massaging the ego and does definitely have a great 'feel good factor', spending lots of time and effort chasing lensrank is surely just pure vanity in reality.

Definitely a huge factor, but there are a couple of other factors as your interesting lens shows, that are more practical:

1) Higher Royalty Payout (Squidoo's Tiers Payout)
2) Brings More (Quality) Traffic (Squidoo is also a sort of directory, listing the best lenses, ranked overall and by category)

However, having said that, you can achieve the same thing by focusing on making high quality lenses:
How to Make Visitors Stay Longer in Your Lens

@Cinetech
                       I definitely didn't know about the 'higher royalty' factor. thx for the input .


@The_Bard
Hmmm. ...You guys are experienced lensmasters....so i'll take ur word for it and NOT run too mcuh after the ranking.....but little bit is ok rite?
And thank you very much for the input.

Cinetech wrote:

The_Book_Garden wrote:

Having a good lensrank is great for massaging the ego and does definitely have a great 'feel good factor', spending lots of time and effort chasing lensrank is surely just pure vanity in reality.

Definitely a huge factor, but there are a couple of other factors as your interesting lens shows, that are more practical:

1) Higher Royalty Payout (Squidoo's Tiers Payout)

Actually to me this is proving my point that it is not economic to 'chase lensrank' purely for the royalty and so many people still seem to justifythe many hours they put into tweeking and promoting a lens, to get a higher payout. Yet if they sat down and worked out how many hours they spent doing this in the hope it will gain a higher lensrank/payout and divided that by the $10 the lens could earn, they'd realise their babysitter would be insulted if offered that as an hourly rate. Also, even if all the boxes are ticked and all the work is done, doesn;t guarantee a top tier payout.

Cinetech wrote:

2) Brings More (Quality) Traffic (Squidoo is also a sort of directory, listing the best lenses, ranked overall and by category)

However, having said that, you can achieve the same thing by focusing on making high quality lenses

This appears to be the motivation of the OP and many others, but as you state the same can be done by focusing on quality and originality. Though a quick boost in visitors is always welcome in the beginning and lensrank does reflect the traffic, but most of the tactics listed could only be used once so once this initial boost is over the lens will have to stand on it's own merits, or require ever more promotion just to slow the slide in ranking.

Gimme visitors and click thru's over lensrank anyday!

If profit is your goal, Squidoo is a great source of traffic and authority links to your other sites. Make your profits from your own products or as an affiliate marketer.

Those that run lenses as affiliates can also do well monetarily - I have a couple of those types of lenses I play with. The direct return from Squidoo alone is small, but it can also be fun.

Find your own balance and enjoy yourself.

I personally don't chase lensrank either, however,  I would not want to be the type of person to rain on the parade of a new lensmaster's excitment.  Let's face it, we were all new at one time and had that wonderful feeling of seeing our lenses rise up the ranks.  I know I did.   And, you know what, it still feels great when a lens of mine shoots up the ranking ladder.   Am I being vain?  Maybe.  But, who cares.

That being said, nice job on the ranking OP.  With your attitude, you are destined to do well here.  Keep up the great work!

Hmmmm!
Just come back to this post to link to it from my lens about chasing lensrank and just wanted to add, that I did hope my first reply was 'constructive', it was not meant to 'rain on anyone's parade' or dampen the enthusiasm of a new lensmaster. Apologies to the OP if they felt I had done this!

I used to chase the lensrank, and then I realized it was mostly futile, and not quite worth the effort. I have lenses that are fine the way they are, and do not need to be constantly refreshed, which can be exhausting. I prefer to use the time to create more lenses that run along a theme, and then link them. I have found that those lenses gain rank and traffic much more quickly and are indexed by Google faster than the stand-alone lenses. While I do have a few lenses that need a bit of dusting off, and I ALWAYS visit the lenses of those who leave a comment on mine, I focus more on creating good quality lenses then constantly buffing the same old ones, because the quality should carry it without a lot of "babysitting". I do like to visit other people's lenses, because I like the creativity I see in some people, and I'm inspired by them at times. Okay, now I'm rambling...enough said.

I'm a n00b so take what I say with a grain of salt, but if your primary goal on Squidoo is more online reputation management for another site rather than trying to squeeze ever nickle out of the actual lens itself, I would say that a decent lens rank is worth chasing. If  you can get it into the top 100 for its category, or even better the top 100 overall its going to get a very nice pagerank boost from the link it gets from those pages. My first lens made it to the top 100 for business and was indexed literally the same day by Google. For my target key phrase it now comes up as the 11th result on Google (top of the second page). Not too shabby for a few hours of work.

Goals like that are great.

I think in the end, our time is better spend making new lenses and better lenses than continuing to fiddle with the old. Nonetheless, sometimes you learn new techniques or ways to improve existing lenses. I've started going through all my lenses and chopping the long ones into multiple lenses and/or adding a better navigation system to each lens, with an index up at the top and "back to top" links throughout. (I know there's the Table of Contents in the Discovery Tool, but I can do better).

I notice that a couple lenses I had below the second tier cutoff just popped up because i did that. No doubt it's largely the freshness boost all by itself, but I hope the improved usability actually helps in meaningful ways too.

For someone who works in full time job, what are the most important things to concentrate on to increasing traffic to your lenses?