How to make a top 100 Squidoo Lens

Was I doing something wrong? Absolutely not, I was writing about the things that interested me, as I am now, I'm writing about Squidoo and making a Lens.

Should I even worry about rank? No again. I'm not here to be a millionaire, I'm here to make a couple of bucks and share some information and have fun.

Are all the good ideas gone? No, because the best idea is the one you are willing to spend a few hours writing about and self promote. If you are not willing to email people about your lens, why create it?

To help you understand some of the ways lensranks on Squidoo works, I'm going to track the progress of this lens. Each week I will choose an action and see how it affects my rank.

November 22 - Submitted Lens
November 23 - 118,467 - Initial Rank.

November 29 - 128,991 - 1 visit this week. No ratings. No comments. Today I am submitting to five relevant groups.

December 6 - 85,210 - 1 visit this week. No ratings. No comments. Accepted in four of the five groups. Today I am submitting to Lensroll.

December 13 - 136,984 - 0 visits this week. No ratings. No comments. Today I am getting the Squidoo community involved with my lens by responding to a SquidU post on a question of mine, and asking the SquidU community to critique this lens in the Critique Me Forum.

December 20 - 14,190 - 18 visits this week (17 from Squidu, 1 from Squidoo). One 5-star rating. 2 comments. Be ready for some real honest information on Squidu...check out my submission to the Critique Me forum. Critique of this page. I found most of the comments fairly accurate, and have updated the lens with the suggestions. I've stopped responding to this chain as an attempt to not affect future week results. This week I have updated my tags and submitted the lens to Isle of Squid

December 27 - 10,049 - 5 visits this week (all referals from Squidoo). One 5-star rating, 2 comments. This week, I have decided to modify my introduction. One thing that can't be overlooked is the first two sentences of your introduction as those are the ones Squidoo will show when your lens shows up on searches and when placed in other lenses. I haven't changed any content, I've just moved some content from lower in the introduction to the top to hopefully drive more traffic and make it more compelling. The 2nd thing I am doing this week is submitting my lens to Squoogle. This will be the fourth lens I've submitted to Squoogle. I have found that it takes at least a month for an approval for a free submission.

January 3 - 29,563 - 6 visits this week (all referrals from Squidoo). One five-star rating. 2 comments. This week I am adding this lens to my profile on SquidU.

January 10 - 25,975 - 6 visits this week (4 from Squidoo, 1 from Squidu, 1 from Google). Two five-star ratings. 3 comments. Yesterday I received an Angel blessing from ThomasC (see comments below). This is my first blessing I have received as a lensmaster, so I am going to use that as my update this week. To rank high within Squidoo, one of the best things you can do is become involved within the community by leaving comments, joining fanclubs, ranking lenses, and participating on Squidu. This week, you will notice, I received my 1st Google hit for this lens. It has been my experience that it takes 4-6 weeks for a lens to show up in Google. This one was probably a little slower as I did each of the above items over many weeks instead of submitting them all during the 1st week after publishing.

January 17 - 17,502 - 6 visits this week (5 from Squidoo, 1 from Squidu) - 4 five-star ratings - Traffic is a driver of lens rank. I created a lens two days ago around fantasy golf, and posted it on the fantasy league blog. In two days I have generated twenty hits, and the lens rank is below 30k. Finding a relevant blog, particularly one that your frequent can drive traffic to your lens and subsequently affect your lens rank.

January 24 - 10,331 - 8 visits this week (6 from Squidoo, 2 from Google) - 5 five-star ratings - Sometimes people just find the lens on their own. I have a Cub Scout Skits lens that all of a sudden received 60 hits this week, mostly from Google. Its lensrank cam close to 5,000. If its a topic people like or are interested in, traffic will come.

January 31 - 17,707 - 12 visits this week (7 from Squidoo, 3 direct, 2 from Google) - 5 five-star ratings - For traffic reasons, being within the first 20 rankings on Google gives you good traffic. Google is finicky though. My Cub Scout Skits lens mentioned above all of a sudden fell off. As I was getting good traffic to the lens, I added an eBay and Amazon module, and now it isn't ranked so high on Google.

February 5 - 30,272 - 2 visits this week (1 from Squoogle, 1 from Squidoo) - 5 five-star ratings - Two updates this week. This lens has been accepted on Squoogle this week, after being submitted on December 27. I've seen some posts on SquidU about Squoogle and it looks like the site is getting some help on keeping it updated. I have an update about my Cub Scout Skits lens. As mentioned last week, I removed some of the Ebay and Amazon modules I had added and left one in the bottom, and as of today, it is ranked in the top 20. The point here is content is king. I've started adjusting some of my lenses to ensure I don't have an Amazon or Ebay module within the first 6 modules and leaving most of the advertising to the bottom. This also lets the content load before the user gets to this section of the lens.

I've been tracking this lens for two months, and this will be my last entry (Although, as I learn more, I will continue to add content). Thanks for visiting and I hope you have learned how to help yourself rank high within Squidoo. I find I learn something new every week. Good luck on your adventure and don't be afraid to join in on the many conversations happening around Squidoo.

April 8 - 81,033 - I am going to update this lens, and see if I get a bounce just from the update.
April 10 - 45,803 - It took a couple of days, but there was a significant bounce.

Yes, anyone can make a top 100 lens, but you probably have to write about one topic in particular. Yep, you have to write about Squidoo. And I will either prove or disprove my theory with this very lens.

If you haven't looked at the top 100 lenses yet, go take a look now (click on top 100 lenses at the top of the page). As Squidoo becomes more and more popular and more and more diverse, more users will be looking for lenses to make their own page, thus the top 100 will almost always contain lenses about Squidoo.

Yes, there are other topics in the top 100, usually whatever is in season. In December, Christmas lenses are pretty popular, last November, political lenses, and I expect in January 2009, Obama and inaugural lenses will be the rage.

But now that you have a topic, can you get it into the top 100?

Whatever your topic, be passionate about it. When you are passionate about something it really comes through in the lenses you create. Not only that, people will recognize the passion and respond to it.

And don't just write about it, point them to other places where they can find more information. Passion shows up in your knowledge of a subject, the depth you take that knowledge, and how you apply your knowledge in your everyday life.

I've been asked, how can I create a lens claiming to get you into the top 100, without ever having one there yet. I am passionate about lensmaking, and I choose to show it with my writing. Others choose to show it with fancy fonts and graphics. We all choose are own way to explore our passions, and how we express those passions in the lenses that we create.

What is your passion?

On April 20, my parent association lens, Successfully Running a PTA or PTO, became LOTD. Le's take a look and see what happened to its lensrank.

April 14, 2009 - 202,760 - Lens doesn't get much traffic
April 16, 2009 - 78,998 - Lens received its first star rating a couple days before.
April 19, 2009 - 30,806 - Updated lens on 4/17
April 20, 2009 - 8,351 - LOTD Today
April 21, 2009 - 2,172 - Received traffic and stars
April 22, 2009 - 919 - More traffice and more stars
April 23, 2009 - 783 - Up to 29 star ratings
April 30, 2009 - 371 - Still rising after Lensrank update challenge, up to 43 ratings and 25 favorites.
May 2, 2009 - 288 - Still going up, just a little more slowly as the traffic dies down. 46 ratings.
May 16, 2009 - 1956 - The lens is no longer LOTD, so we are now in the downward spiral.

Reading information on SquidU about LOTD, you do get more hits if you end up on the LOTD blog, it doesn't look like my PTA lens will make it there though. I expect as the lens starts to receive less traffic that it will drop back into obscurity, but the ride was fun.

If you want to learn about Lens of the Day, check out the following lens by Megan Casey: The Secret Life of Lens of the Day