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Recently reading the Captain’s latest post, I was then directed to this post by mac33.

The discussion in hand is how lensrank decays over time, and how traffic affects lensrank decay. While we all know that there is a mysterious algorithm in place that affects lensrank on Squidoo, we also know what some of the factors affecting lensrank are, and to no surprise, traffic is one of them.

Traffic is an important factor on any site because the more focused or quality traffic you get, the more clicks you get on ads, products or any other income producing item. (See Seth’s newest post Everyone gets paid on commission for more on this.) Empty traffic is worthless because it doesn’t produce income which is why the algorithm doesn’t rely on traffic alone.

I believe it makes sense that a lens needs to dynamically increase in traffic for the traffic to have a continued upwards affect on lensrank, because again, it is the traffic that produces income for the page that is the key factor, not just any traffic.

Mac’s analysis of his particular lens just points that out, and that it pays to update your lens periodically for changes and broken links. For those of you who haven’t found it yet, there is a “Need to be edited” link on the left side of your Squidoo dashboard, that shows you any lens that hasn’t been updated in two months or more.

I think that all of us realize that if we get traffic from people already searching on our focused topic (that is what making a lens is all about) that those people are much more likely to buy now or return and buy items from our page or click links on our page. This is the behavior that will pay you or Squidoo or both.

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I just finished reading a very short blog post by Captain Squid called aptly “Learn, Learn, Learn”. In very few words, our venerable Captain Squid is making an excellent point. After creating hundreds of lenses, (I think at last count, he said he had about 600) he has had many failures. BUT, and this is a very big but, each failure has taught him something.

It really is not important that some of your projects, ideas, and lenses fail to produce what you want them to. Why not? Because they are just stepping stones to success.

In order to succeed on Squidoo (or anywhere else for that matter) you need to learn what works, and what doesn’t. And that may be different for you than for me, dependent on what we are promoting, who is our target market, and what our style is. But when you understand what doesn’t work, it just takes you closer to understanding what does.

Squidoo gives you more than one chance with each lens to do this. Because we have the ability to rewrite, amend, and change our lenses, we can take what we have learned and either totally rewrite or improve a poorly performing lens so that it will perform better.

Every day I learn more about what works online in general, and on Squidoo specifically. Why some things work on some lenses and not on others or on some sites and not Squidoo will always be a mystery. But that is not really very important. It is the effort of creating lenses, improving them, and finding what works that is important.

Until you just get out there and do it, like Captain Squid says, you will never know.

As he says “But if you don’t start out by doing SOMETHING, there’s not a lot of advice I have to give.”

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We are told often enough to write about a niche, and we will do better on a site like Squidoo. I am not sure that that isn’t true about anywhere we write. Most writers do stick to just a few niches and concentrate their writing there because that is what they are good at, or that is what sells.

Think about your favorite mystery writer or fiction author, possibly a poet or essayist. It all goes back to creating a body of work all in an area that will attract your fans over and over.

Hubpages has come out with a program to reward this type of writing because they recognize that this is the way to grow their site exponentially and grab their best writers’ attention. It will also increase their quality hubs by leaps and bounds instead of one by one.

Glen has posted about this briefly in The HubPages Capstone Initiative on Lensroll.com and while this is an initiative on Hubpages, it is no different than what the lensmasters on Squidoo are told to do over and over again. The only difference is that this is an organized initiative to get the articles written in a unified group with a unifying hub as the spearpoint to send people to the other hubs.

On Squidoo, we would call this “capstone hub” a lensography with an introduction to the rest of the lenses. Captain Squid has called this idea a lens cloud, and I think of it as a lens cluster. But the imagery that Hubpages has used is very good for those who think visually like I do, so I thought that I’d include it here.

Hubpages requires a different kind of writing than Squidoo, in that it is more of a straight content site. But I would recommend checking out Glen’s first Capstone project, The Roman Empire, if for no other reason than to see how he put it together. It is worth your time to see his organization.

This is an idea that can easily be applied to any article writing site but does take quite a bit of work to complete. However, Glen has now established himself as an expert on The Roman Empire and he can continue to do so on other sites with articles pointing back to this group of hubs.

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Glen’s Lensroll.com blog has a terrific interview with the Captain (Loyalis) that I recommend you read. I read it over once, and I am going to go over it again with a fine tooth comb, because I always learn stuff when I talk to or read what the Captain is doing. I am light years behind him in SEO and marketing techniques.

One thing to keep in mind is that that the Captain is all about earning money from Squidoo, so that his focus is on finding better and better ways to do just that.

Here are some highlights:

“Glen: What is the process you choose to decide on a keyphrase(s) for a lens?

Loyalis: Lately, I’ve been focusing on this step more and more with a lot of success. I actually do it a little backwards from starting with a keyword. I’ll sit around and think up of a genre, topic, or entire segment of information that may be under-represented on the web or have a lot of information but it is scattered across many sources. From there, I’ll do some keyword analysis using GTrends or Aaron Wall’s excellent SEO for Firefox plugin on google searches. If it looks promising, I’ll lay out the framework to create a giant pile of lenses, a lot of which will share similar keywords. In a nutshell, I try to find a group of 20-30 lenses that can fit under a single primary tag and still be unique.”

“Glen: What are you doing to generate traffic to your lenses?

Loyalis: Choosing niches that have minimal competition with a moderate amount of searches; Using Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Blog search submit, Jumptags.com, and Propeller to get lenses crawled initially; Using proper tag management to keep the internal backlink profile of the lens fresh, relevant, and passing as much juice as possible; Creating a giant pile of lenses and then a ‘directory lens’ for that topic, leaving all the lenses interconnected and me to build external links to the ‘directory lens’; Waving my magic pirate hook in the air and jumping up and down.”

These are only two highlights from a lengthy interview. I highly recommend that you read it all.

Lensroll.com is also a great site for promoting your lenses. The site is just beginning to tweet out interesting lenses daily on http://twitter.com/squidcasts. Loyalis also tweets out his blog posts at http://twitter.com/loyalis.

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When you think of Squidoo lensmasters, which ones come to mind first? I’ll guess that it’s the ones who give back to the community. One such lensmaster is Loyalis, author of The Best Squidoo Blog Ever | Captain Squid. Lots of free, sound advice (from having built 506 lenses to date) offered there — and look at these other places where he can be found:

• Squidtop – A squidoo blog platform where lensmasters can create blogs about Squidoo or whatever else they want.
• Squidpedia - A squidoo directory with a point-based ranking system
• Isle of Squid - Another great Squidoo Link directory with traffic based ranking systems
• Sell My Lens – A Squidoo auction house to buy and sell squidoo lenses.
• Widget Squid - A site full of Squidoo friendly widgets that you can use on your lenses
• Squidoo Chat Room - Chat and get or give Squid tips.

Yes, the Captain is one giving Squid! The more you look around his Squid empire, the more you’ll find.

Loyalis Quote Historical Adsense Payouts, Buying and Selling lenses, Affiliate payouts and more make up the mountain of ways you can make a few bucks using squidoo. Here is the history of these things and how they evolve through the life of Squidoo. —Squidconomy – The Economics of Squidoo

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