Boosting Lensrank: You Need Traffic, Too!
May 6, 2008 – 8:30 pm
So after writing about how important it is to update your lenses, I’m now going to say this: It’s important, but it’s not enough.
Since I’ve made a commitment to update a handful of lenses a day, I’ve been paying closer attention to lensrank. The kind of updates I’ve been doing range from fixing a typo, adding a new product, or writing more content. This is what I’ve observed over the last two weeks or so:
- The higher the lensrank, the smaller the boost for each update. My rubber ducky lens, for instance, is in the Top 100 list at rank 42 today. Although its lensrank has fluctuated since the 24th of April, it stays pretty solidly in the 40 - 50 range. It rises or falls only by a few points a day, at most. It gets some traffic and has been updated nearly every day.
- The lower the lensrank, the bigger the boost for each update. If you have a lens that’s languishing at rank 130,000, it will probably get something like a 60,000 lensrank boost. However, with no traffic or additional updates, it will drop again in a few days.
- The lenses with a decent lensrank get at least SOME traffic each week. My best ranking lenses are all at least in the double digits where weekly traffic is concerned.
Updating your lenses is important, but there has to be something more than that. Lenses need traffic to stay in good health.
Of course I’ve long known that it’s important to drive traffic to your lenses, but for some reason I’m just not very consistent about it. Partly I’m afraid of getting blacklisted on social bookmarking sites, and partly because doing article marketing or building websites/blogs to help promote the lenses takes more time away from Squidoo activities, writing articles for a client, and other things. But I just have to get over that and make lens promotion part of my daily goals.
