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!

Google Alerts - Keeping Up To Date

Do you use Google Alerts? This is a handy, free tool from Google. I use it on my username - lou16. It's handy to see if anyone blogs about you or links to any of your sites. I've found blogs that I think are interesting and they have linked to one of my lenses so I've tweeted them. I used to digg or stumble articles that linked to me (provided they were good and not cut and paste with a link that is), but as I don't really digg or stumble any more they just get either tweeted or a reciprocal link from one of my articles, lenses or hubs.

You can also use Google Alerts if you have a niche and use the alert for your primary keyword.

The Google Alert I mainly use though is my lou16 one and it was interesting to see which directories showed up first when I submitted a lens in my experiment last week - squidom showed up on an alert within hours!

How Do I Set Up A Google Alert?

It couldn't be easier, first go to Google Alerts
Next add your search terms and I leave it on everything, but you can choose to just be notified about blogs, news, videos etc. Decide how long you want your email to be and enter your email address.
Now you just wait for the alerts to appear in your mailbox.

On a personal note I'm back overseas next weekend, I'm hoping to have time to still post to this blog, but if I don't respond to questions it's just because I'm not at home and I will get back to you when I can.