Alternatives to Deleting a Lens
July 2, 2008 – 11:27 pm
If you have a large collection of lenses, you probably have at least a few that aren’t doing much for you. They rarely get traffic, never earn money, never seem to rise in lensrank. Or maybe you have one of those lenses you made on a whim, and now you just aren’t interested in keeping up with it anymore.
So what do you do? Delete it? Unless it’s a throwaway WIP lens, I wouldn’t recommend it, especially if you put a lot of effort into it. That would be a waste indeed, especially when you have other options.
Here are some other things you could do instead:
Improve the lens. If it’s skimpy on content, flesh it out. Add some news, add a YouTube module, add some pictures, add some interactive features. If you make it shine, you’ll probably see a lensrank improvement.
Promote it. If it’s mostly suffering from a lack of traffic, you could work on getting more backlinks to it.
Make some related lenses. That might sound counterintuitive, but a series of related lenses will sometimes share traffic and help give each other a boost. However, you might not want to do this for a lens that covers an unpopular or esoteric topic.
Keep it. Unless you’re embarrassed to have your name associated with the lens, it might not be a bad idea to just hang onto it. It’s not like it’s going to hurt your Squidoo account, and it might even pull in a few extra cents for you.
Give it away. If you know someone already has lenses that are similar to your “deadweight” lens, odds are they’ll be pleased to take it off your hands… especially if it only needs a little polishing up. If you don’t know anyone who might want it, offer it up for grabs at SquidU.
Sell it. I know of a few lensmasters who successfully sold off lenses they no longer needed or wanted. You can try selling your lens at the SquidU marketplace, or you can list it on Sell My Lens. You could also try putting it up for sale at forums that allow listings like that, such as SitePoint.








If you glance at the SquidU forums much, you’ll often find someone asking questions like whether building one lens a day is a reasonable goal, or how often you should update your lenses, or how concerned you should be about lensrank. Usually there are a lot of responses. What’s interesting is that there often many different answers to the same question.