Sales Don't Know Your Lensrank

This is just a quick post today as I was looking at my dashboard and thought I would share some thoughts with you. Hopefully everyone is seeing lots of earnings on their dashboard as we hurtle towards Christmas.

It seems that every few months there's a discussion about improving lensrank and I always think to myself it doesn't matter if you optimise your lens you can make sales with any lensrank. Of course the ironic thing is that when you do make a sale this increases your lensrank!!

I have stated publically before with lensranks of lenses that still show income, but I thought I would bring it up again in case anyone was worrying about it. As of today these are my lensranks of over 100,000 that have sales on them -

lensrank 109,571 pending $2.71
lensrank 115,779 pending $2.20
lensrank 283,207 pending $1.12
lensrank 113,107 pending $0.86
lensrank 183,445 pending $0.71
lensrank 168,097 pending $0.54
lensrank 201,069 pending $0.29

So my little bit of advice today is to stop spending time stressing on lensrank or trying to do things that may improve it and concentrate on building backlinks, promotion and making sure that your lens is loved by google, rather than fellow lensmasters who won't be buying from you anyway. It's always nice to get both lensrank and sales, but there is only a limited amount of spaces in the tiers so if you're after an income you need to focus on increasing sales instead.

The trick with these lenses is that they rank on the first page of google for their keywords, except for one of them and that one gets all of it's traffic from a higher ranking lens that is on the front page of google and also has a lot of organic backlinks. The people who click through to this particular lens do not click to look at it, they click to buy!

Chitika and Squidoo - Yes or No?

What are your thoughts on the Chitika ads at the bottom of our lenses? I hadn't really looked at my old lenses to see how they looked, but recently I have been making a number of iphone case lenses. At the bottom of these lenses I felt that the Chitika ads were quite jarring, but do they work?

I have had some success from Chitika on other sites so I'm sure that they must be bringing in good income for Squidoo, however I'm not sure if I can't do better. What do I mean? Well I checked my stats from the last payment and my tier one payment for Chitika was only 42c. I'm not concerned that I turned the Chitika ad off of my iphone lenses now, 42c really isn't a huge amount in my opinion.

However......Chitika knows what they're doing so perhaps I should try a little experiment.

I have taken the Chitika ads off of Lou's Online Jewelry Store and have added a text module at the bottom of each page (it's a page break lens) and I have put a banner for one of my affiliates along the bottom. Now this lens doesn't get a lot of visits, but I had just been looking at that affiliate (seeing a few of Kate Middleton's engagement rings being sold thanks to one of my hubs on British Royal Engagement Rings) at the time that the idea came to me.

I am going to check out a few other lenses and put this idea to the test - anyone care to join me? It will be interesting to see if we can get clicks to our affiliates that payout more than a mere 42c for a tier one!