December, 2010:

I cut short that Tier 3 Lens Marathon abruptly because of real life ickiness hitting the fan right after I signed off. I alluded to it in a Tweet and won't rehash, but suffice it to say I was in no mood to work on Squidoo for a few days, and when I came back, I had other things to work on.

So the question is, did 20-30 minutes of work on my bottom-dwelling lenses lift them up enough that they would at least earn pennies a month, which isn't much but adds up long-term?

That was...let's see, 15 lenses:

1. moved from rank 224,041 to 97259. NO.
2. moved from lensrank 223,022 to 115,816. NO.
3. moved from LR 223,021 to 86,437. MAYBE.
4. moved from LR 223,020 to 176,095. NO.
5. moved from LR 210,838 to 113,621. NO.
6. moved from 202,803 to 176,092. NO.
7. moved from LR 184,469 to 96,551. NO.
8. moved from LR 180,666 to 91,101. MAYBE.
9. moved from LR 178,986 to 173,659. NO.
10. moved from LR 161,985 to 115,814. NO.
11. moved from LR 161,336 to 142,165. NO.
12. moved from LR 160,519 to 101,840. NO.
13. moved from LR 158,377 to 126,461. NO.
14. moved from LR 126,461 to 90,548. MAYBE.
15. moved from LR 123,718 to 71,414. YES - BY PAGE BREAK.

Conclusion: it's not worth updating lenses below tier 3 hoping they'll get to tier 3, unless you've really got some new material.

However, I did learn one thing! With #15, I took two related lenses that were getting tiny bits of traffic, but both were in the LR 100K range. I deleted lens B and copied its contents into a Page Break page for Lens A. That combined the amount of traffic, clicks, etc that two lenses were getting enough to create a single tier 3 lens.

NOTE: Frequent updates can continue to lift lensrank a little more each time. I know some lensmasters improve their chances by republishing all their lenses frequently. But that is time-consuming for the amount of return you're getting. I was looking for simple ways to improve lenses so they would earn at least a few pennies AND maintain themselves.

I think it is better to sink most of one's time onto more successful lenses. I was simply willing to try to sink a day into least-successful lenses, if it meant that long-term, they'd pay more. It looks like they don't.

It might be worth doing this not on the bottommost lenses in your dashboard, but on the lenses that over in the 70,000-90,000 range. It's possible that with minimal improvements,they could consistently pull in a tier 3 payment (all of a quarter).I may try that as an experiment at some point.

In a SquidU post, Timewarp asks if Tier Three lenses, with their piddling 20 cents a month income, are really worth it. My short answer is that (a) yes, they're worth it, because if ten Squidoo lenses are earning you $2 a month, you're $12 wealthier at years' end, and (b) yes, it would be better if tier one was capped at $25 (or $20) and the excess distributed to lensrank tiers two and three.

However, that got me to thinking. If tier three lenses really are worth something -- and they are to me, since my 100 tier three lenses are earning me over $200 a year -- then I should kick those lenses below tier three into tier 3!

To my dismay, I discovered that out of 159 lenses in my main account, I now have OVER FORTY LENSES below Tier Three. Inconceivable! Intolerable!

Some lenses are duds. They just aren't going to earn payouts. Our time is better spent improving our GOOD lenses, the ones that are successful, rather than wasting time on duds. But still. I look at my dashboard and see many lenses with less than 10 visitors a week, no sales, and few clickouts in tier 3. Surely I can get half of those 40 dud lenses up to tier 3 with one day of improvements. At least, I'm going to try. So here's what I'm doing to improve each lens.

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