How to Get a Lens to the Top 100 List
June 28, 2008 – 12:08 am
Making a lens that’s so good that it launches itself into the Top 100 list is a quest for many lensmasters. Unfortunately there’s a lot of competition, which means it’s not easy to get a lens ranked up there. It takes a fair amount of time, work, and sometimes a grand stroke of luck. I have well over 100 lenses, but only three of them have reached the Top 100 list so far. Here, have a look:
How to Prevent Lost Luggage was the first lens I ever made that ended up in the Top 100 list. Even though it’s one of my better lenses, the main reason it did so well was because it was made Lens of the Day. It got heaps of traffic and even some backlinks over the next several days, which pumped up its lensrank. It washed out of the Top 100 list after exactly two weeks.
Oh Rubber Ducky! is my most successful lens. It was just a silly thing I started around the 1st of January. Apart from submitting it to the SquidU forum for a critique, I didn’t go out of my way to promote it. However, I kept going back to tweak it, add new content, etc. Then to my surprise, it started getting traffic from Google. It continued rising in the ranks until it was in the Top 100 list in April. It took about four months for it to get there, but now it’s still bobbing along quite happily.
Common Newbie Squidoo Mistakes is my second-most successful lens. It got a little a help, though. A few months ago, it started showing up randomly on the Squidoo homepage. Nobody told me; I only found out about it after I started noticing an unusual spike in traffic. This lens was made in January, but it didn’t hit the Top 100 list until this month.
Luggage, duckies, and Squidoo. What do they all have in common? Well, for one thing, these are some of my better lenses in terms of content and effort. They had some help, certainly, but they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t lavished as much attention on them as I did.
The lesson here is to make the best lenses possible and keep making them even better. Focus on topics that you love to write about. Eventually, people are going to start taking notice. When that happens, it’s only a matter of time before some of your lenses start becoming contenders for the Top 100 List.
So how about you? Have you ever had a lens reach the Top 100 List? How long did it take, and what made it so successful?
