How to Achieve Higher Squidoo Rank

Squidoo lenses are given a cut of the ad revenue from the site, based on each lens's average rank in any given month.

Tier 1 is for lenses with an overall lensrank of 1 up to 2,000.
Tier 2 is for lenses with an overall LR of 2,001 up to and including 10,000.
Tier 3 is for lenses with a LR of 10,001 up to 85,000.

(The Tier levels are estimates; Squidoo doesn't currently release this information. However, several people have come up with similar ranks based on their observation, so this is close. Info from Squidoo Payday)

Payouts vary since ad revenue varies, but Tier 1 lenses seem to average about $25.00 these days. Tier 2 lenses are $5.00-$6.00. Tier 3 lenses are running about 28 cents. There is sometimes a Tier 4; In April, I had two lenses which earned 5-6 cents each.

You can see, from those payouts, why it's better to have high-ranking lenses.

Traffic and "Likes" have a great influence on your ranking, but freshness (i.e. how long it's been since you edited the lens) also has a noticeable impact. I believe the number of modules and/or variety of modules in anygiven lens also affects its ranking.

While you can't control the amount of traffic and "Likes" that you receive (although you can help push it up--more on that later), you CAN freshen up your lenses. But sometimes that's easier said than done. Here are some suggestions.

A lensography is like a bibliography or card catalog, where you list all of your lenses. Make categories/subjects to make it easier for people to search for topics of interest. Then, whenever you talk about what you do on Squidoo, you can link to this one lens.

You can (and should!) also put a link to it on all of your Squidoo lenses to encourage people to frequent your other lenses. You can think of it as a home page, which serves as a jumping-off point to all of your content. This encourages people to look at more of your lenses, increasing your traffic.

And don't forget: every time you make a lens, make sure you add it to your lensography. (New lenses do not always go live immediately, so you may have to wait until the next day to be able to update your lensography.)

This is a lovely new module--which you should have on all of your lenses--which allows you to quickly link to other lenses-including your own! Besides linking to your lensography, make sure you link to any of your other lenses which are a part of the series, or are on a related topic.

If you want, you can have one module linking to your lenses and a separate module linking to other people's lenses which you recommend.

And as you add new lenses, you can go back and add them to the Featured Lenses module on older lenses.

Do you have a picture in all of your text modules? If you need to find pics, try WikiCommons for photos and art work and MS Office for clip art. In both cases, the images are copyright- and royalty-free, so you don't have to worry about paying for them or infringing on a copyright. I also like medieval illuminations for my medieval pages (art published/displayed prior to 1923 is in the public domain, so go wild with old pics).

It used to be that the space for pics on Squidoo was pretty small. They've since made the space larger, but on older lenses you have to reload the picture in order for it to be resized.

Spend a few minutes with Google and see if you can find any websites or blogs which are related to your topic. Also make sure that any links which you currently have are still functioning. While you can put links in a text module (and, in some cases, it makes sense to do so), it's best to have a link module. The more modules, the better for your lens!

Squidoo makes it easy to recommend products on Amazon (Orbitz! also has a module which generates commissions), but you can also sign up with Commission Junction or similar sites and recommend products via links in your text and link modules.

Even if you don't want to bother with Commission Junction, et al, the Amazon module is easy to use and you can almost always find some product which is related to your topic to advertise. Even on my most academic of lenses, I have an Amazon module recommending the books I used to research the article, and others which are related. I've not made fistfuls of cash, but I have made some money just from the Amazon module.

Find something related to your topic and advertise it. When you are looking to freshen your lens, find something new to recommend.

I'm probably the world's worst about making really long lenses. But if you break a long lens up into two or more lenses, and link them, you can get two or more times the traffic.

For instance, one lens with 100 hits a week might have you ranking in the second tier. But if you took that lens and made it into two, you're likely to have 100 hits on the one lens and about the same on its sister lens. Now you have two lenses in the second tier; double your money!

If you don't do it routinely already, copy your text and put it into a word processing program to search for spelling errors. Also, re-read your content to check the grammar and see if there is anything else you would like to add.

Lenses which are still in the draft stage, and just-published lenses, are listed in red at the bottom of your dashboard. But you may have noticed lenses which have been published for a long time suddenly end up at the bottom in red too.

These lenses still exist (and can be accessed by direct link), but they will not show up in Squidoo searches (they will still show up in Google searches, as far as I know). The main (only?) cause of these lenses falling into the red is 1) a lack of content in the intro module (Squidoo now warns you, when you make a lens, if you have too few words in your intro; aim for two paragraphs), and 2) a lens that hasn't been updated in a long time. The obvious fix is to write a little more for your intro module and update the lens.

Squidoo now makes it easy to share your newest publication (whether new or newly-updated) on Twitter and Facebook. Your friends can be an excellent source of traffic.

I use a Sticky Note on all of my lenses to remind people to "Like" me.