I see remarkably little written across the various blogs, forums and other sites that populate the Squidoo community about lens labels. I can only assume that not very many people use them in their accounts or they are not used very effectively.

This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

  1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
  2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
  3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
  4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
  5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.
Do any of you guys actively use the label system? If so, I’d love to hear in the comments what you find them most effective for!