A Very Frustrating Day Indeed
Well I woke up this morning all gung-ho, waiting eagerly for the lensrank to update, and then my whole day came crashing down, as every single lens dropped by hundreds if not thousands. My top lens dropped from 79 overall to 354 - yet traffic is the same as it has been all week. Even lenses that have been getting more traffic in the last few days plummetted.
I haven’t felt up to looking at the ranking changes yet, but I bet that every one of my top 25 lenses went down by hundreds of places at least.
So today, an important day, one day when I was going to work on several lenses, also to work on a new lens, just went out of the window.
Instead of doing this, I flipped between feeling tired because I was depressed, and posting in the Lounge, my initial thread turning into 3 or more, the initial one having close to 100 responses the last time I looked, and the only - yes ONLY consolation I have is that I am not alone. So many of my good friends and hard working lensmasters are also in the same boat - their lenses plummeted as well.
It seems that we now have to have a lot of clickouts to get a good lensrank. Well frankly my lenses are written as I was told they should be, to focus on the subject matter of the lens. That means apart from other related web sites, there isn’t always a lot to click on. So if I can’t get my visitors to click on qall the links on a lens, does that now mean it’s not going to rank anywhere?
To be perfectly honest, I have put so much of my time and life into creating lenses the past 6 months, spending pretty much 2 1/2 weeks doing nothing else but work, create lenses and sleep in order to become a Giant Squid, and for what? If I can’t now get any lenses into the Top 2,000 (I had 8 yesterday, now I have 3 - barely!) then my chances of earning any money are severely limited, so is it really worth it?
Then along with a few others I start looking at top lenses, and find spam up there. One lensmaster with 2 lenses in the top 2,000 that are nothing but spam, and the comments from other lensmasters are obviously written by the same person. All the lenses by these other lensmasters point to the same list of links as well.
If these spammers are going to now get a share of the hard earned money that US hard working lensmasters worked hard for, I’m very disappointed.
I really like it here, I have made a lot of friends, I enjoy making my lenses, but it’s an awful lot of hard work, and with my girlfriend coming over from England in a few weeks, I’m looking for a way for us to make money so that I can support her for the next year. If it’s just going to take a lot of time and then the meager base earnings get taken away anyhow, I wonder whether it’s even worth trying.
If I have to create crappy spammy lenses myself in order to make money, can I live with myself in doing that? I am a perfectionist and pride myself on quality (I don’t always achieve my goals though), so to undermine my own style won’t do for me…
So nothing got done today, I just feel tired and frustrated - and it’s almost monthend.  Should I even care now… I will be lucky to make $20 at this rate - not going to stretch the shopping bill too far…
Tags: anger, despair, disbelief, dissappointment, frustrastration, lensrank, plummetting, rankings, Squidoo
July 27th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I am so sorry that you are feeling this way. You have always been upbeat and make my day with your posts! Breathe…be joyful of your gal coming to be with you…keep Squidooing because you do it sooo well!
July 28th, 2008 at 12:15 am
I imagine anyone who has done this long has probably had similar feelings. I know I have. Sometimes I just have to take a break for a day or two. Wish I had some answers for you. I know when I did my first lenses a few people kept telling me to monetize my lenses more, suggesting products etc. I can say that has certainly helped. Humorous gifts, T-Shirts, calendars,cards etc. directed toward the genre of jokes on a given lens for instance???
I remember reading early on that the people who succeed online are the ones who learn how to do things efficiently and I can certainly say that the biggest barrier I feel is that I don’t have the time to do all the stuff I need to do to “succeed”. I also think support is important to keep you going. Maybe your GF can help support you and you can get “excited” together about building this business?
Meanwhile, I am hoping that Squidoo eventually adjusts the tiers as the number of lenses we compete with grows. Getting a top tier lens will continue to become more difficult. Top 1,999 isn’t so hard with only 200,000 lenses out there, but now it’s over 500,000 and soon may be over 750,000 and so forth.
You obviously have made a lot of friends online and I wouldn’t give up just yet. Overtime, I have to think the success that many people experience is due to the number of others who support them, follow them, blog about them etc.
You’re an outstanding lensmaster and eventually I think that will pay off.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:47 am
[...] makes me kind of sad when an awesome lensmaster like Poddys gets frustrated to the point of quitting squidoo just because of one lensrank [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 5:02 am
Thanks for the lovely comments all of you.
No I’m not about to quit, but you know there are some of us who are here to try and make money, some of us struggling still to find the answers, and to think that your efforts could be made almost worthless just - well you know…
Like so many others here, I have a full time job, don’t have nearly as much time as I would like to work on my lenses, I enjoy what I do, I enjoy making friends and seeing the other wonderful lenses that people have created, but although I do enjoy it, I have to try and focus my efforts on areas that will make me money, and to think that things might be changing here just dragged me down yesterday.
I guess we will have to wait and see what happens with lensrank today.
Having had my top 26 lenses plummet by a minimum of 350 places, 3 of them by more than 20,000 places, it’s just very disheartening. I don’t see right now how any adjustments to the algorithm can bring things back in line before the monthend.
And then the spammers - finding that there are a number of spam lenses in the top 2,000 and even more in the top 10,000, are they going to take our income?
Well I guess I need to cool back down and wait…
Hoping my daily lensrank Excel shows some green (upward moving) lenses today. Yesterdays showed 26 lenses in red.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:39 am
You’re keeping a daily excell spreadsheet??? Wow - isn’t that just a tad bit obsessive?
Other than that: I feel your pain.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Actually, it helps me to see if my lenses are going up or down - I can see the trend better.
I have a list of my top lenses in the first column, the next column is for today’s rankings, the next for the day before etc. Each day I insert a new column in front of the previous day’s.
The ranking for each lens is color coded, green if it went up, red if it went down.
I also added columns at the end to compare yesterday with Saturday and today with Saturday to see the net effect of the change in the algorithm.
And the whole thing is filtered, so I can sort any column by lensrank.
Very easy to maintain, but it was intended to help me see trends. If a lens is dropping, then I need to see why, maybe tweak it or promote it.
But when they drop by so much, there’s really not much I can do…
It doesn’t sound as if you would be interested, but if you or anyone else is, I would be happy to send a copy of the spreadsheet. It’s not rocket science or that pretty - well not yet! It just helps me see things a little better.
Maybe at some point I will consider adding graphs of the trends if I think it worthwhile. It’s a good learning exercise in Excel if nothing else.
July 28th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Keep Smiling! You have helped so many people, myself included, and you have 177 fans who love you!
I would love to see your spreadsheet, I’ll send you my e-mail address. My family gets a chuckle out of my spreadsheet — it just tracks number of visits to each of my lenses but it is better than the scrap I was using at first.
Brenda
July 29th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Sure Brenda, just drop me a line via my email address and I will be pleassed to send a copy of my spreadsheet.
It’s not very sophisticated, but it does what I need right now. It’s always useful to see how the lens rankings go up and down. Makes it easier to see what you need to work on.