I’ve been watching traffic to one of my lenses on Squidoo the last couple of days with amazement as the number of visits suddenly started skyrocketing. All this traffic was suddenly coming from search engines, both yahoo & google! Never before have I experienced such loving from both search engines at the same time, and such good loving too! This lens has experienced a dramatic rise which I can’t really explain, suddenly receiving hundreds of hits a day! It was first published back in Feb ‘08 and has had some moderate success with steady visits and some regular commission, but no real spikes in traffic in all that time!
I knew nothing about the subject and can’t really recall the inspiration that lead me to create the lens to begin with. I knew I was aiming for, was very much a niche, on a topic I knew nothing about! The creation and setting up a few ebay feeds I recall was the work of one evening, probably 3 or 4 hours research, writing, creating ebay RSS Feeds (so I get 100% of the commission 
), and adding a few books from amazon (sharing the commission with squidoo on these cos they do provide a great site! 
).
I published it the same evening, and submitted it to a few of the usual places, such as Lensroll, The Isle of Squid, Squoogle. I then sat back and watched it get, what I consider to be, moderate traffic, for what I had thought to be quite an extreme niche, and the occasional sale, both from amazon and ebay.
This sudden rise in visits into the 100’s a day has stunned me, it has had more visits in the last 72 hours than in has seen in the last 6months!
Sometimes I can only think that karma smiles on you and the search engines are one way of receiving good karma!
What was the lens? It’s quite an odd one, and some may even be disturbed by the subject, if they’ve never come across these before. Have you ever seen a doll so lifelike it could pass for being a real human baby or infant? They are called Reborn Babies and you should have a look at how lifelike they are, how popular they are and how much they sell for! I’m still a little stunned, and slightly disturbed that this lens is showing as my number one on my profile as I’m not at all sure it’s suited to any of my other lenses at all, perhaps I should try and sell it whilst the traffic is so good! Anyone want to offer me a couple of hundred dollars for it?
I’m already seeing a very nice proportion of click-outs to ebay and amazon so am expecting the lens to earn very well and start showing results on ebay and amazon within the next few days. And if you look below you’ll see the squidoo royalty payout hasn’t been the best, though I feel it stands a good chance of staying in the top tier for this month!
| Date |
Type |
Amount |
| 9/8/2008 |
Cash |
$1.76 |
| 8/7/2008 |
Cash |
$5.45 |
| 7/10/2008 |
Cash |
$0.07 |
| 6/4/2008 |
Cash |
$0.07 |
| 5/7/2008 |
Cash |
$1.42 |
| 4/8/2008 |
Cash |
$1.53 |
| Total |
$10.30 |
So, here’s to those unusual niches! 
Today was a great day for my lenses! When they refreshed I had 4 in the top 1000, and one in the top 100!! Yesterday only 1 of these was in the top 1000, and 2 of them in the top 2000. Though going to see whether others were reporting such a shakeup of rankings on squidu, I found most people reporting slides the other way. Gil jumped in the thread to state - “…in the middle of some optimizations to minimize the effect that lensrank recalculation has on site performance every morning. It looks like there are a few minor bugs and I’m working to sort them out now.” So we expect things to return to normality tomorrow. Though it wasn’t surprising to see so many people up in arms about their lensrank falling, I guess people are just in the habit of chasing lensrank!
