It’s easy to get caught up in the hubbabaloo over Sarah Palin and miss what’s happening with the rest of my dashboard. So here’s a few random things I’m noticing.
- Of my 133 live lenses, only seven of them have had no traffic in the past week. Given that one’s my testing lens and five are events that are long past, that’s pretty good. Another nine have only had one visit, so that’s a little over one percent that are really struggling. I’m good with that.
- I’ve got two lenses that have dropped below the 200,000 mark. Both are still featured.
- My iCarly related lenses have apparently returned to favor with Google as the traffic is picking up again. Looking at the dates it’s been almost a month since any of them have been looked at though. Yikes!
- Halloween traffic is definitely starting. My Tinkerbell costumes lens is getting more than 500 hits a week now and my lens on the renaissance festival held here in the Dallas area (which has a few costumes on it) is getting almost 200 despite not being a true costume lens. People mostly like to look at the pictures, though.
- My lensography has suddenly taken off. While there has been a dribble of traffic from Sarah Palin, there hasn’t been any consistent reason I could see as to why. More traffic to my twitter and blog though as a result.
- First women in politics is getting some nice traffic. Unfortunately, haven’t touched it since June, which is probably why it’s not getting above the 10,000 mark. Missed opportunity there before the end of the month.
- Think I missed some opportunities with my green chile lens as well. Traffic just didn’t pick up there as I hoped, but I didn’t get on the promotion enough before the Hatch festival.
- Things I see that make a difference in lensrank - ratings, sales and clickouts. I’ll have two very similar lenses in terms of freshness, clickouts and traffic, but one can be ranked 30K higher just because it has stars. I quit announcing every time I had a new lens because that gets annoying after a while for others, but I’m beginning to wonder if I need to do a little more on that. Squidcasts on every new lens? If a star is the one element needed to bump something from third tier to second, that’s probably an effort that’s worth $1.35, right?
- My oldest WIP was started in December last year.
Actually, I have a WIP on my hubby’s account that’s over a year old. Guess what my new goals for the month are?
September 5th, 2008 at 8:52 am
I try to SquidCast every new lens, I think it’s not tooooo annoying because I think a lot of people don’t even check their “favorites” where it appears. Plus, some people will SquidCast 7 or 8 lenses a day so why would my 3 or 4 a week matter? Sometimes I get 0 visits from it; sometimes 10 or more.
September 5th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I have many many lenses below 200k. They’ve been like that for quite a number of months now and are still featured. I’m not sure when things decide to go unfeatured. I certainly hope it doesn’t happen right before I’m being considered for Giant status.
September 5th, 2008 at 9:00 am
There is a lot to think about…a lot to do…a lot to learn. Thanks for sharing your information and your thoughts. It is helpful to hear what is happening with other people’s lenses.
Brenda
September 6th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Isn’t it annoying that a lens can have around 100 visitors a week - consistently - and yet never rise above second tier because it doesn’t get any votes?
Personally I do squidcast a lot of my new lenses, but not the ones where I don’t think people will be interested. I mean - why bother them? I will also unfavorite people that squidcast in annoying ways - and if we all do that, the effect is still 0.
September 7th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I’m not getting emails anymore saying I have comments, so I’m sorry I haven’t responded before now!
@mulberry - I was creating in batches there for a while, so I didn’t want to be sending tons of casts at the same time. Then forgot to get back to it. Trying to find some good “news” angles now.
@mosaic - Maybe they’ve lowered the threshold for falling out of published status? Good luck on your Giant quest!
@Brenda - glad it’ll be useful for someone else. There was so much I felt was hidden from me when I got started and I didn’t know enough to even ask the right questions.
@spirituality - I’m with you on unfavoriting people who spam the casts. I miss the good stuff then from people I want to check out new stuff on.
Note on casts - I have mine in some RSS distribution deals, so they go out to more than just my Squidoo fans. So I try to make sure they’re relevant and timely and not just - I have a new lens. People from outside Squidoo are part of my audience there as well.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I don’t use the Squidcast feature very often. I see it as a way of letting people know something they might be interested in because they’re interested in the topci, not so much (as you say) “visit my new lens” or “I’ve updated a few words on this lens”.
I don’t even want to use Squidtop to promote my lenses on a make-a-lens basis because I don’t want to bore people. If a lens (mine or someone else’s) fits a topic I want to write about then great.