#6 Lensrank: Janet21

Janet21 has a great lens on the top 100, #6 today! Her 50 Kids Birthday Party Themes: Cake & Cupcake Ideas and Supplies is a very hot seasonal topic!

This is a lens that she can continue to work with, and even alter the title and contents to observe which is the most successful and productive for her in any season.

She has an incredible collection, with all the great names to use as keywords, if you are interested in kids stuff. She has Spongebob Squarepants, Winnie the Pooh, Batman, Barbie, and a huge list of other popular and fun cakes and supplies.

She seems to be very successful at drawing oodles of traffic this way.

She also has two lenses in the top Most Profitable line up.

We know that Janet is starting to earn some income on Squidoo! How about you?

New! Live Dashboard Traffic Stats!

Wow, thanks to Gil, today he announced in the squidu lounge that the traffic stats on our dashboards are LIVE! Now when you sit starting at your dashboard, you may have something to see!

It seems the upgrades were an enormous project, perhaps that tiny staff bit off more than it could chew for a little while! However, it seems that they've gotten a handle on all of that and provided us a new surprise. Well done, Gil!

He reports that there are three people per second looking at a Squidoo page, which is awesome, and that there are some new dashboard design plans in the works.

Stats 2.0 is STILL ON THE WAY.

Read it for yourself. We have a lot to look forward to.

New Layout, New Lensroll!

It is a very important layout change of our maxed pages at Squidoo!

The lensroll is now much more visible to your visitors, and is much more important. While we don't know all the details about the new lensroll feature, the longest lensroll I have, on Michelangelo's David, shows 7 items in its lensroll.

The lensroll is meant to be a 'tour-guide' around Squidoo, of your personally recommended lenses. Up until now there hasn't been a limit on how many other lenses you could put in your lensroll. Now, it will require some thought when selecting other lenses.

First, to keep the look of your page as attractive as possible, try to choose lenses that have pictures uploaded into the introduction module. Without that, the lensroll shows an ugly orange placeholder with a question mark. (If you are wondering why your lens doesn't featured in the Mall group, this is most likely the reason).

If you don't have a lensroll, Squidoo chooses the lenses for you. They could be according to topic or tags. These may not be the best selection for your lensroll.

With the many duplicate product offerings, for example, coach handbags, you could end up with all of your competitors in your lensroll.

It is time for all the lensmasters in the Mall on Squidoo group to begin considering how to best use their lensroll. The clutter of the new layout means that anything that will help you keep the visitor's focus on what you want them to see, and what will most benefit them and you, will be much more important as the time goes on.

Next I will discuss various strategies about lensrolling and how you can best use it.

Pressing Right Along...

The anger that the information provided by magicality provoked, at least with the forum moderator, is quite a surprise to me. The positive reactions to that information from all but one lensmaster seems to me that nearly everyone is interested in the statistics.

Fortunately Gil has promised stats 2.0 which will probably clear up everything.

So, I think I'll bow out of the discussions around lensrank for the long term, just press right along with my pages and groups, my website and my business, and let headquarters do whatever it is going to do without comment from me. I can't seem to get on the right side of those discussions no matter what.

I have no interest in 'doing battle' with people I like and admire so much, or with the concept of Squidoo altogether, with which there can be no reasonable dispute.

The new phase of the mall is coming up, and the form of it will depend on the headquarter's final decision on the stumble and how it will work.

What we will do next, here at the Mall blog, is take a look at some performing lenses and see what is so good about them.

This will be FUN!

Participating in Squidoo- Squid U Conversation

Here is a comment I posted in response to complaints about spam lenses in the forum:

RK, yes, it is a VERY TOUGH act to balance for Squid Staff. They MUST show an incredible rise in numbers and interest with as few staffers as possible. They must also prove that Squidoo has Google juice which keeps many of my lenses on the first, second and third page! It is an amazing achievement.

On the other hand, if all kinds of 'squid-crap' also gets high Google rankings, it will REALLY damage the real prize Squidoo offers and it will get terrible labels from people outside of squidoo.

Staff has to find a way to both grow at light-speed and to keep the squid-crap from flooding and damaging search engine results on Google, or that 'juice' will dry up FAST.

Lensmasters are the content providers that make Squidoo really good. They can earn money for the content but aren't 'paid providers.' In the same way, certain lensmasters are the advertising providers for Squidoo, earning money for doing it but aren't 'paid providers.'

Squidoo knew what was coming, so they went out of their way to get some 'heavy hitters' in the content arena before the oncoming flood. They got National Geographic, Martha Stewart, Rolling Stone Magazine, Jane Goodall.

So, Squidoo has these as a 'foundation'.

Next thing to do is to get the really committed lensmasters to organize the provided content, which is the future of Squidoo, so they started groups.

The groups use committed people like KCStargazer, Relache, Damon and Me to police and judge content for certain purposes so that all the good content won't be washed away in the endlessly repeating floods. Good lensmasters work hard to get their groups and the content in them to rate high in Google.

It is a masterful strategy and it is working so well. As a result, using lensrank as a purely motivational tool for newbies means that the inbound streams of new lenses will continue at about 1 lens per minute, +-, and the work of sorting it out is done by the groupmasters.

If ever accusations are made that Squidoo is little more than a haven for splenses, it is very easy to show off these great groups- who could then say there is no content here?

As the groups build up with time, as they are, they will rise taller over the flood of crap lenses. The duplicates, the get rich quick stuff, the affiliate only stuff, the intro only lenses will eventually sink to the bottom, and all the congo lines of people who brought their competition in with them will all find their low level.

The good content will stand out through groups.

Participating in Squidoo- Groups

AS IT IS AT THE TOP, SO IT SHALL BE AT THE BOTTOM!

Be Outstanding or Be Washed Away!

The sea of Squidoo lenses is, like MySpace, filling fast.

How is it you will stand out in a crowd? How will your lens, your one little lens, will show up amongst hundreds of thousands or even millions?

It will be groups that make your little lenses stand out, stand up, be counted, be FOUND.

Affiliate Lenses & the Long Tail Market

Squidoo is quite unique in that it offers many different possibilities for adding affiliate modules to your lens.

One way of approach to this is to add affiliate modules that support the content of your lenses. For example, a lens about a young girl's stuffed animal collection is FULL of content about the specific characters she loves. The affiliate modules that she selected enabled her to offer some of those characters for sale, so if a person became interested and involved in her hobby, they too could own some of those animals. This is a SUPPORT module.

The second approach is to create a lens that is ONLY affiliate modules. One chooses a topic, say garden rakes, slaps up several affiliate modules, looking for every possible garden rake offered by all the Squidoo affiliates, add the tags, and a bio that says 'hello world, this is my bio, I can edit it later' or 'I hope you buy your garden rakes from me.'

The long tail means, among other things, that there are A LOT OF ENTRY POINTS into the market, just as your squidoo lens is. It means if you could easily build a lens on garden rakes, because traffic looking for garden rakes is X per month, adsense ads get X per month, and you expect a residual income of X per month; so could many other people. They can all sit at their computer and in a few minutes have a lens just as compelling and with just as great a selection as yours. The potential for sucess becomes more and more diluted.

Go out of your way to know your products, know what you like and don't like about them, build some credibility with your audience. I expect that Diddl will be a very successful lens as it finds its audience and market, and the audience and market find that lens.

Attention Please! By Invitation ONLY

I have a new group on Squidoo, called "By Invitation Only." All of us in this group are on the prowl to find the VERY BEST LENSES ON SQUIDOO. We LOVE great lenses! The results will be secret until we're ready to publish our listing. Awesome things are going to happen....

Rankings, stars and other games mean NOTHING to this group, so even if you're a newbie, if you have built a lens you're proud of, submit it to the companion lens here: By Invitation Only

There is a plexo for non-commerce lenses and one for commerce lenses.

So, what could possibly mean something to this group, if stars, rankings and paid-for slick blurbs do not?

Hint: intelligence is a GOOD THING.

Hint: creativity is a GOOD THING.

Hint: commenting is a GOOD THING.

Hint: participation is a GOOD THING.

Hint: good biographical lenses are a GOOD THING.

This group is going to do something awesome! Its already in the planning stages.

There are plenty of bright stars in the Mall group, and so, I think you're the only group who has been notified. This is the only public announcement that will ever be made about this. Good luck!