On Sunday Morning, squidoo lensranks (the ‘rank’ of a ‘lens’ is how well it is doing in comparison to other pages on squidoo’s site) changed a bit more than usual.

Now, in and of itself, this is not an unusual thing, as Lensrank usually shifts a bit more on Sundays due to some parts of the calculation only occurring once a week (Sunday). Apparently, there was also a slight bug in the algorithm that was factoring clickthroughs wrong that was corrected. Not too surprisingly, the SquidU forum went nuts.

There are a few things I want to stress here:

  • Chasing Lensrank is not the way to make a ton of money on squidoo. If you have a lens in the top 2,000 and all it’s earning is $8 a month, or if you are just shooting for that $8 a month as your primary revenue from Squidoo, then you are making things a lot harder than they need to be. Instead of creating good content in niche areas and monetizing it, you are now trying to get in a popularity contest with 600,000 other contestants..
  • Gil (From Squidoo HQ) said that there was a glitch and to give Lensrank a few days to settle down. Take a deep breath and build a lens.
  • Affiliate Programs and Money Making Modules can make your lens portfolio much less Lensrank dependent. I’ve got lenses that are in the 70k plus range LR wise but they’ll still make $15-$30 a month pretty consistently. (If you want an example of this, stick around and I’ll show you how to make a money making lens this week.)

It makes me kind of sad when an awesome lensmaster like Poddys gets frustrated to the point of quitting squidoo just because of one lensrank update.

Yes, I understand that there is some money associated with Lensrank.

Yes, I understand that many think the CTR rate on lenses doesn’t seem like a ‘fair’ metric, but the more that visitors interact with squidoo, the more money squidoo (and by extension, you!) make.

As of right now, that LR update probably cost me around $250 if that were the be-all end all of updates. Luckily, there’s another update in just a few hours :) .