I'm afraid I do. It's silly, because lensrank means absolutely nothing beyond the walls of Squidoo! I don't get a buzz over frequent flier or shopping card "points," so why this? I'm all boppy right now because my entire first screen of lenses is an even spread from 50 to 5000, with half in the top  2000, and having achieved that shallow and fleeting victory, I want to stay and keep them there instead of doing other things I should be doing!

It is a very effective and simple psychological carrot. I've seen a lot of sites use a similar carrot with points, post count, credits, but Squidoo definitely has some good psyhological mojo going with lensrank.

I've noticed, though, that one can have 10 lenses in the top tier every day, but it's usually not the same lenses. I've got  about 4-6 lenses clustered on both sides of 2000 on any given day. They do a little jig back and forth across that line.  If each of them is in the Top 2000 only 40% of the time, they are treated as Tier 2 for payout purposes.

Tier chasing or lensrank chasing is a bit like a dog chasing cars -- there are better moving targets to focus one's energies on, and why does it matter?! But that car bumper is very shiny.

Last edited by Greekgeek (03/31/2009 10:16 am)

I hear it's best not to worry about lensrank and concentrate on your affiliate sales instead if you want to make money.

... I still do it all the time though

I want to add that you CAN make a decent payout for lensrank once you have built up a healthy number of good quality lenses! I usually have anywhere from 12-20 in top tier on any given day! That plus all the second tier lenses can lead to nice payday!

I agree, i get a buzz too definitely. Being fairly new to all of this, how difficult is it to maintain a good lens rank once you have one?
For example i have a lens about Guernsey (listed below) which is hovering around the 1100 mark and i dont think its going to go any higher than that so what do i need to do in order to keep it where it is at least?

How TRUE!

Greek wrote:

It is a very effective and simple psychological carrot

I still get a buzz looking at where my lenses fall in ranking......tho I'm getting much better, as I DO NOT check it every morning, (but that took me nearly 2 years to conquer).

It doesn't spur me on to make more lenses, it challenges the competitor in me to see if I can get the lenses I have higher in rank. My weird system is to quickly glance at the amount of visitors of each lens, then count how many are in tier 1 and tier 2. That in itself gives me a very good look at where I'm standing. I've only got around 75 active lenses, but I've had these puppies for a long time, so it becomes pretty easy to quickly glance at the same lenses stats.

I've also got to agree with Thomas:

Thomas wrote:

I want to add that you CAN make a decent payout for lensrank once you have built up a healthy number of good quality lenses!

My adsense money is something that I can 'watch' thru lensrank, knowing that I can expect at least $***.** each month to add to my affiliate sales (which are 4x larger than the adsense $, but hey, every dollar counts!)

Last edited by flowergardener (03/31/2009 9:39 pm)

What are the different tiers?

The current tiers are:
LR 1 to 1999 = tier 1
LR 2000 to 9999 = tier 2
LR 10,000 to I don't know = tier 3

It could be that they now let LR #2000 and LR #10,000 be in the higher pay, IE #2000 would be in tier 1 and 10,000 would be in tier 2, but I'm not sure, as I haven't had a lens land on those 2 exact numbers for quite a while to see which tier they gave it.

Last edited by flowergardener (04/01/2009 11:29 am)

You're very welcome
Now you may be able to see why getting a lens above 10,000 in rank is a substantial difference in $$
I'll not quote, as I used to post my monthly earnings on my Bio each month, but the range is somewhere near:
Tier 1 = $8-$11
Tier 2= $1-$2
Tier 3= $0.05-$0.08

It sits there every time I open my dashboard.............taunting me...........getting my competitive blood boiling..........to figure out how to get my lenses as high in LR as I can. Really now who wouldn't want to earn $8-$11 on a lens instead of $0.08, with a little work and research?.... Plus the biggest and best benefit..........The higher your lens rank is within squidoo, the more your lens will be prominant and turn up on search engines...............which means, if you're promoting affiliate products.........the more chances for commissions!

Last edited by flowergardener (04/01/2009 4:53 pm)

Greekgeek wrote:

I've gotten to where my main updating consists of tweaking lenses just below a tier cutoff.

I just stumbled across Pastiche's blog recently.  http://squidoo-geek-grannie.blogspot.com/
She's got at least 23 lenses in the Top 1000 this past week with 16 in the Top 500 and 5 in the Top 100.

I think this is an interesting way of looking at things.  Instead of looking at lenses on the cusp of the Top 2000, why not baby them when they're in the Top 1000.  I was focusing on tweaking lenses just below a tier cutoff but now I'm thinking maybe it's better to not let top tier lenses get to the point where they're straddling a tier cut off.  Maybe it's best to get them before a big slide.  And congratulations on that impressive dashboard. 

Graham
To answer your question about keeping lensrank up.  Check any of Greekgeek's lenses for awesome tips as well as any of Ellen's SquidU forum posts.  But tweaking your lenses, look at your stats for clues to keywords to search engine optimize, promote by posting in outside forums, Digg, write e-articles, tell friends, etc.  Good luck and congratulations with your top ranking.

Last edited by AdrienneJenkins (04/01/2009 5:38 pm)

My take is that the higher the lensrank the more chance your lens has of being seen in Squidoo, and therefore apart from the Tier 1 payout, you have a chance of increased exposure and traffic.    Of course if you can generate good affiliate sales, then the monthly payout doesn't count for so much, but not all of us have been able to achieve good sales, so a Tier 1 payout means a lot to us.    I agree with ThomasC's remarks about having lots of lenses giving you more chances to get lenses in the top tiers, but you still have to work to get the traffic to those lenses to get them there.

I do have a group of lenses that hover close to the 2,000 ranking, either just above or just below.  They too flit in and out as the month goes on, but usually it's only 5 or 6 lenses for me.  Wish it was 10-20 though!  Need to create more I suppose.

I almost jump up and down and clap if a lens goes up in rank. May I ask? When sales for affiliates is mentioned is that for ebay and amazon alone?
Or is there more to it with a little more work ,of course.
Thanks, Sherry

Wow i didn't know about those pay scale! Now you've all got me excited over lens rank!