I’m sitting here waiting for the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony to begin, so I’m using the time to update my Olympic lenses and group to try and make the most of the little burst of Olympic traffic while it lasts! I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do with the Olympic countdown lens… It’s going to be pretty obsolete in less than an hour! 
I just checked the top 100 groups list and the Beijing Olympics 2008 Group is number 4! Wow! That was completely unexpected! I thought when it reached number 9 that it had reached an all time high, but it looks like it still had a little bit of climbing to do! 
A week or so ago I noticed that a lot of the traffic for the group was from people searching variations of ‘which countries will be competing at the Beijing Olympics?’. It was good to be getting traffic to the group, but it was a bit unfortunate that when they got to the lens the information they were looking for wasn’t there!
So as an experiment I made a lens that was basically a list of the countries competing, with a random selection of other Beijing Olympic things thrown in for a bit of ‘colour and movement’. Within the first week it had nearly 200 visits, mostly from the group lens. Of course now it’s decreased, and (as I pretty much expected) no-one has bought anything! (They’re just looking for a list of countries after all! And my sales abilities aren’t quite at the level where I can convince people to buy stuff they’re not looking for! 
) I hope people found the information they were looking for. I’m sure I could have set it out a lot better, and done quite a bit more with it if I’d thought of it earlier when I wasn’t so busy!
Ah well, it was an interesting exercise, and hopefully I’ve learnt a few things from it… About key words, and getting people to go from one of my lenses to another. It’d be nice if the lensrank would be cooperative and stay in the top 10,000 for a little while… I think the timing of the games isn’t quite right for it to last right through to the end of the month for me! Oh well
Phew. You know I may actually be relieved when the Olympics are over! There’s so much stuff I want to do with these lenses and so little time in the day! 
Ooh, and my second payday ever was much better than expected (after the approx $1.50 from the first one), with $24.82 total, of which $9.45 went to charity! How cool!
August 8th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Sounds like a good learning experience for how to get traffic. I’m excited for the Olympics to start but have to admit we record and watch later to avoid the endless commercials. Congrats on your payday achievement, that’s a really nice sum for your second payday!
August 8th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Cool - I hope the games go well.
Not sure when anything is - I’m probably going to be too occupied to watch anything.
I just hope the political overtones don’t dampen the enthusiasm for the games themselves, which after all are the reason for the event - co-operation and friendship - it’s not a political event.
August 8th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I would record and watch it later but we’ve got too many things plugged into the tv so there’s no room for the vcr! I need a dvd recorder or something… hmmm…
So now I just have to put what I’ve learned into play for more ‘permanent’ lenses… and hope for more ‘happy accidents’
Thanks for the comments!