Tips and Tricks After 50 Pages on Wizzley

Write often, write well.

That is the golden rule for anyone trying to build a reputation or revenue with on-line articles. Beyond SEO and page lay-out, it remains the key to it all.

But for those just beginning on Wizzley or anywhere else, it feels like there should be so much more.

Hours get lost in the half-formed panic of reading endless articles offering advice on how to make it big. Like this one, in fact. But the rest is refinement. The underlying principle never changes, no matter how the story is told. Write often, write well.

This was the philosophy with which I entered Wizzley.  I'm fairly new to this game. Nearly 130 articles on Suite101 helped me learn how to write on-line, but every site is different. Wizzley and Suite101 appear to me like chalk and cheese, but it didn't take long to realize that, beneath their differences, the same advice held true. Write often, write well.

I started writing for Wizzley on December 16th 2011. For three weeks, I struggled to get my daily hits above double figures. The chart trickled along, telling me that people were reading, but not really that many. Not enough for it to register in the monetization.

The wise souls talk of giving it time. But hours of research and writing are exhausting. Ploughing on with no guarantee of success takes a serious amount of will-power.  Then you hit a mental brick wall. 

Writing often and writing well is all good in theory, until you actually have to do it. How do you find the motivation to go on investing the time and talent?

Another thing that an inveterate, old gamer like me has picked up from the pixel world is to inspect your area.

If you don't, then you could be working away forever without having noticed that the secret lever is just behind that boulder; or that a fire-breathing dragon is about to own you from behind.

(For the record, I've searched the entire of Wizzley and there wasn't a single boss monster lurking. Stay calm and carry on writing.)

Understanding how Wizzley works can help you from day one in crafting successful articles. This is, in no small measure, because the whole site has been set up by veteran writers. All the little tricks and tweaks are designed to give pointers to readers and writers alike on the best pages out there.

Take the front page. There are three sets of top seven articles on the site. Visitors get their value here, because they can tell instantly what's brilliant, up-to-date and worth reading. You want to be in that list!  Publicity is good!

So how do you get there? 

• Editor's Choice. The first top seven are those latest articles to be awarded an accolade by the Wizzley team. The only way to be there is to write often and write well. If that fails, then you're doing something wrong, so go and study those that did make the grade. Work out why they're so good, then nick every tip and trick that caught your eye.
• Popular. These are the individual articles that have most recently ranked 100% across the site. To be on here, you'll have to work on boosting your article's ranking. We'll come back to this.
• Buzzing. These seven articles have got people talking. If you want to be on this list, then you need to start persuading visitors to leave comments on your page. Invite them to do so by asking their opinion or the answer to a certain question. If readers are returning to Facebook or a forum to discuss it, wade on in there and shepherd them all back onto your Wizzley page.

Just trying to achieve a listing, in any of those three, will mean that you're on the right lines to being a great writer. It practically forces you to be brilliant, to write fantastic content, promote it and answer any comments that come your way. All best practice stuff!

If your article ranking is starting to fall, then that's your signal to promote it again.

Be careful though. No-one in your social networks will love you, if you spam them every day with the same thing.

Better still write something else on a similar topic. You can add a 'more articles like this' kind of link back to the one that's falling, as long as it's relevant. That might generate some more publicity, which will bring visitors to boost your ranking with hits, clicks and comments.

Obviously, this isn't suitable for all things. That clever percentage appears to keep things up-to-date by calculating how recently all the activity occurred on your article. If everyone liked it at Christmas, then it'll be slipping into the 90s by February. That's about right, if your subject matter is Santa Claus. No-one wants to be reading about him come summer.

If your page rank never crept too high to begin with, then a revamp might be in order. Take a good, long look at your content and work out why it's not very popular. Does it answer all that you set out to address? It is aesthetically pretty? Have you got lots of lovely keywords, but not over-stuffed it?

If you can't find anything wrong, then Wizzley has a whole forum category for article feedback. It's there for you to bring in the experts and let them point out the room for improvement. That might not even be a complete rewrite. Some solutions are surprisingly simple.

I had a page which was inspiringly called Studying History as a Timeline. It wavered around the 60% mark, then tottered and began falling.

I co-opted a couple of friends to read it and tell me why it was so bad. They aren't people to refrain from calling me on my rubbish, so when they informed me it was fine, I believed them. The only negative feedback they could muster concerned the extremely boring title.

All I did was rename it. The rank immediately began to climb all the way up to 100%, where it's stayed ever since.

Wizzley is a relatively new platform in which to select your topics. So many categories, or sub-categories at least, are completely empty of content. Write for it and you're guaranteed a niche front page for a little while to come.

In a similar vein, the opposite can be over-subscribed. When there exists a plethora of excellent articles discussing a certain subject, it is difficult to make your own stand out.

Recently half of Wizzley were writing about love and romance, as Valentine's Day is fast approaching. While the articles came thick and fast, I noticed that only one aspect remained untouched. The Anti-Valentine's Day category was almost empty!

I went against the grain in writing a couple of articles for it. They are now both in my current top five most popular pages. I stepped away from the madding crowd and it was noticed. There is also a reason why I wrote two.

I've started to think in terms of 'support' articles, based on a snippet of information that I've carried with me since high school. That's when my music teacher finally got the class's attention by explaining how the Top 40 worked.

(A note for younger readers. Back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, we bought vinyl singles from the shops. The most sales led to a ranking in the Top 40 on Radio One. It was the most important thing ever, when I was a teenager.)

Mr Smallwood explained that bands always released their next single, while the first was starting to fall down the charts. That way fans got the publicity in waves and the rock-stars remained famous.

If it's good enough for the Beatles and Duran Duran, it's good enough for Wizzley writers. I tend to look at which of my articles the front page has listed, then write a second article on the same subject. When people finish reading the one with all of the publicity, they might check out others in the same category and get to my brand new entry in at number 47!

With this in mind, I'm trying out a cycle of subjects, with the same ones recurring. You can catch me at it, if you look to see what articles of mine are currently on the Wizzley front page. Visit my profile and it's highly likely that my latest page will be on the same topic.

I've also taken the advice of fellow Wizzley writers, in order to understand and improve my writing as I've gone along. This includes Jimmie's encouragement to write a blog series. I have several on the go, which are all in there in my writing cycle. I co-ordinate the backgrounds on them, so you can tell you're in the same set!

I can't claim to know it all after less than two months on Wizzley. I haven't even scratched the tip of the iceberg with all of the possibilities that lie beneath.

However, those fifty pages have given me the opportunity to learn about the platform, and experiment with some fledgling strategies. It appears to be working well enough so far.

On the day I started, forty-six people read my only article. Fifty-two days later, 458 unique visitors were recorded; and that was when I added my 50th Wizzley article. Nearly 11,000 people have been to peruse my content here.

The monetization channels are starting to notice too. The clicks are registering and the zeros are starting to turn into odd pennies. It's not enough to take off on a world cruise nor buy a Ferrari. It's not even going to get me a cup of tea in a greasy cafe; but it's a start. It tells me that I'm on the right track.

For now, the future is simple. Keep on learning, experimenting and refining my writing strategies, but most of all, write often and write well.