5 Ways to Boost Lensrank

Now that Squidoo lensrank has been fixed and we’re getting stats for our lenses again, why not take a look at some of the things that help to improve lensrank?

According to “Lensrank Explained - Really” by spirituality, there are 8 main factors that go into the calculations, and determine how high, or low, your lens will stand in the rankings. Some of them are easy to achieve, while others take a lot of work, and even a little luck.

Here are five specific lensrank factors that you can affect on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

1. Star ratings

Most Squids are pretty generous when it comes to giving out stars to deserving lenses. Whenever someone from the Squidoo community stops by one of your masterpieces, chances are, they will let you know what they think of it by rating it from 1-5.

To get visits from logged in Squids, send out a catchy Squidcast.

Many lensmasters really underestimate the power of a good Squidcast. Don’t just blurt out a sentence about your new lens, or a new module you’ve added. If you want visits, you really have to sell it! Describe your lens, tell your fans why they should visit it, and don’t forget to add a hyperlink or two to some of your hottest modules.

To make sure everyone who scrolls through your lens leaves you a star or five, add thefluffanutta’s amazingly wonderful Love This Lens Widget.

2. Visits

The best kind of visit a lens can get is from outside of Squidoo. That means that you’ve written about a topic that people are interested in, or that you’ve been bookmarked, or that someone loves your page so much they know the URL by heart.

There are many, many ways to find the traffic you want, but they all require a little work from you. When promoting a lens, remember to:

Share it - on Twitter, Digg, Tagfoot, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
Link to it - in forum posts, signatures, and profiles.
Blog about it - but beware of sounding spammy!

3. Click Outs

Click outs are important for lensrank. They indicate that visitors are spending time on your lens, reading what you have to say, and visiting other sites that you recommend.

Aside from providing affiliate links, try to find websites or lenses that people reading your lens would be interested in, and link to them. You can use anchor text links, or link lists, or make buttons from pictures that you use on your lens.

Remember to include the code target=“_blank” to open links in a new window. You can also describe your links with this code: title=“Name of Link Destination”

4. Interaction

Like click outs, when visitors click on polls or other interactive modules, it shows that you’re drawing in readers and keeping them glued to your content. Try to add something for your guests to do in each lens, such as a poll module, duel or guestbook.

For several example of how polls can be used, check out “The History of Surveys”.

5. Sales

Depending on what your topic is, sales can be the hardest thing to improve on your lens. Even if you’re getting plenty of traffic, not everyone is going to rush over to eBay to buy what you’re selling.

To help improve your chances of affiliate success, try to recommend products that you have a personal knowledge of. Describe them to your readers, and tell them why you love it so much, and why they’ll love it, too.

In my opinion, with sales modules, less is more. You don’t need to list every single book on your topic ever published in a gigantic Amazon Plexo. One or two great books (with five star customer ratings) in Amazon Spotlight modules tells readers that you’re serious about providing them with the best advice possible.

The sooner you do these things, the better. Take advantage of the new lens boost that lenses receive after being published, and push it even further up the ranks with quality, interactive content and active promotion.

Never Too Late for a Seasonal Lens

Last week I was looking at the calendar and saw that Earth Hour was coming up. Out of nowhere, I realized that it would make a great topic for a Squidoo lens. I didn’t spend any time debating whether or not it would be worthwhile to create a lens for an event that was only a few weeks away. Instead, I got up extra early and got to work on putting my ideas together.

I was able to publish Top Ten Things to Do for Earth Hour the next day. Thanks to the Twitter Storm module, it was picked up by eco-savvy Squid a_willow, and has been receiving a pretty decent amount of traffic ever since.

Is it making me millions? No.

Has it won any awards? Nope.

But has been in my top three lenses since it became featured, and made it into the Top 10 in the Green category almost instantly. And that’s pretty darn good, if you ask me.

The moral of this story is that although seasonal lenses are best made a few months in advance, it is never too late to create a lens on any topic, no matter how short-lived interest might be. Any notch on your dashboard is a step forward, a lesson or two learned, and one more reason for readers to find you and your work.

And if you don’t get lucky with traffic this year, it might be a big money-maker next year!

By the way, what are you doing for Earth Hour?

5 Ways to Update a Stale Lens

Making sure that lenses are updated frequently with new content is a full time job. At the very least, a once monthly update is recommended to maintain a healthy lens rank. Not only does Squidoo appreciate your efforts to add new information, but your readers do, as well.

The trouble is, not every lens focuses on a topic that makes it into the news every month. Some lenses present a single concept, recipe or idea that leaves little room for written improvement. And there are only so many products on Amazon that any one subject can relate to.

So once you’ve eradicated every single typo, polished every bit of HTML, and added as many hyperlinks as you can think of, what is there to do?

Here are just 5 of the things I like to do when a lens needs it’s monthly brush up:

1. Change the lens photo.
It’s great to have a clear, relevant and interesting picture in the introduction module, and even better if your fans and readers recognize it when they see it.

Your profile picture should be like a familiar (and hopefully trusted) face, but lens photos don’t have to be. In fact, changing your lens photo once in awhile might encourage previous visitors to stop by and see what’s new.

2. Add a poll.
There are a million and one ways that polls can fit into all types of lenses. Polls allow your readers to compare products or ideas, answer questions, give feed back or rate a list of items. When I can’t think of anything else to do with a lens, I sometimes add a poll or a duel module.

3. Edit the lens bio.
You can add or change the greeting that is displayed in the bio area of your lens, or add some links to your lensography, blog or other places you’d like readers to go.

4. Optimize your pictures.
Are your lens pictures turning up in searches? If you’ve added the alt tag, then you’re probably already seeing Google traffic for your pics. If not, you need to check out Traffic from Image Searches.

5. Add a Lijit module.
Having a Lijit account is like having your own personal search engine. It includes only content that you make or recommend. When you add a Lijit module to a lens, you can create an account right in the workshop, and automatically add all of your published lenses to your network.

Lijit is a great way to let readers find other lenses, blog posts and content that you’ve created, and you can get keyword ideas and other stats with the traffic information that your account provides.

So, whenever you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare, you can do one of these things to your most stale lens and have it smelling fresh by the next rank update.

Proving Me Wrong and Stuff

A while back, I was in the mood to rant, and I listed My Top 5 Most Annoying Lensmaster Mistakes. I say my top five, and not the top five, because what is considered good behavior can vary from Squid to Squid. Anyone who spends a lot of time over at SquidU knows that there are all kinds of opinions on things such as adding guestbooks, leaving star ratings, and all of the things that Squids can choose to do during their day.

One of the things that bugs me most about hastily published lenses is the default module title. A close runner up is the only slightly different module title. As I've said before, the word "stuff" does not belong in a headline, or title.

Well, according to Susan52, that's exactly where it goes! Recently on I Squidoo, Do You? she explained that one of her lenses actually dropped in lensrank when she removed the word stuff from the title. This is a great example of why having a lens title that appeals to your target audience is ideal. If possible, it's probably a great idea to use the exact phrase that your reader would type into Google.

I think it might be time to go and have a look at some of my titles, and see if anything needs a good tweaking. And stuff.

It's Good To Be Bad

So, ironically, The Worst Lens Ever Made is actually one of my best lenses. For the last few days it has been sitting at #5 on my dashboard, just hovering under my holiday lenses. It's been ascending in the overall rankings, and even broke the top 100 Squidoo Tips lenses. Who knew?

I found it interesting how difficult it actually was to create a slapped together lens. I began simply enough, by selecting one of every keyword driven module I could find. But once I had thrown those keywords in, there was so much more to do.

I wanted to pinpoint not only the faults of using these modules carelessly, but also other issues that many of us have with rushed lenses, such as poor language, lack of module titles, and a zero layout planning. When writing each module description, I tried to get inside the head of your average spammer-type, and figure out what they hope to accomplish when they add each module. I wonder if I was close? Sadly, we may never know.

Some things proved more diffcult than others. The New Delicious Bookmarks kept coming up blank. Apparently not a lot of people are using the tag 'Squid". So I logged in to Delicious, Googled "squid", and saved a few bookmarks of my own. For the Twitter module, I decided that it would be better to use "Squidoo" as the keyword, so that all of the Tweets showing would point back to lensmasters.

Even though the entire purpose of the lens is to parody pages that have no effort, it still needs touching up now and then. But I guess that's what separates the good lensmasters from the not-so-good ones. We just can't stop improving.