Balancing Sales and Informational Pages?

The whole Google +1 profile has me contemplating this. If my authority crosses across all platforms (since I've linked them all), will it be bad for me to make a ton of sales pages here? Won't that dilute my authority? In general, Google does not think highly of affiliate marketers. 

I'm wondering about creating a balance of sales and informational pages so that I maintain the reputation I've built while still gaining that added income stream. Thoughts? What kind of proportion do you think would be reasonable? 

I know that many writers here don't concern themselves with this kind of thing since 80-100% of their articles are sales. And I believe that they are doing very well. Am I overthinking it?

One of the reasons I say this is because after Hubpages shifted to individual domains, my traffic went UP. I also linked my Google + profile to HP around the same time. I am making an assumption (maybe an arrogant one?)  that I was the factor that caused improvement in my hubs. 

Great discussion points, Jimmie. Let's see how we all together can figure this out.

My thought is: your "sales" pages are high-quality articles with lots of valuable info and personal recommendations. They create fabulous user experiences. Google sez they love that kind of stuff. And homeschooling moms are supposed to share valuable info, no? 

Thanks for being open to the discussion. 

chefkeem: 28. Nov 2011, 19:26

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My thought is: your "sales" pages are high-quality articles with lots of valuable info and personal recommendations. They create fabulous user experiences. Google sez they love that kind of stuff. 

Really? Google loves it? Well, that makes me feel better. 

You've seen the post-Panda Google quality requirements, Jimmie. It's all about user experience and trust.

If you create valuable pages, I don't see why you can't become an authority in several fields, e.g. homeschooling AND cellulite workout pants.   

Oh, boy do I need to become an authority on THAT. I just made a batch of gingerbread men. Heavenly! And I skipped Zumba to do it! BAd, Jimmie!

My approach is that I pretty much trust that google is trying to help people find stuff that is useful to them. Google will get things wrong for individual pages and at points in time, but over time I think it will try to correct for that. 

So what I worry about is whether I'm creating pages that are useful to people (and that of course includes them being able to find the pages in the first place.) 

Until recently I worked full-time outside the home, with two small kids. Finding a great sales page that saved me time was extremely useful to me. 

At this time of year I'm making a lot of sales pages. But I'll be making more info pages too if I think they'll be useful. 

Terri,

I appreciate your feedback here. I have learned a lot from analyzing your sales pages. You keep it ultra focused and simple. I see now that your bottom line is USEFUL. Yes, it makes sense. If I want to buy a particular thing, I want someone to show me exactly where it is, give me some detail on it, and leave me alone.  Your pages do that.

I will keep the USEFUL idea in mind. For products that I've actually bought, my useful part comes in with my own personal review. For products that I've not used, I hope to outline the different factors in choosing a type of product -- pros and cons, for example. Different products fit different people.

I think that Terri is right about usefulness.  When I look for something online, I want it to answer the questions that I am searching for, not give me a lot of extraneous stuff.  Frankly as long as the page is readable, and it answers my questions, then I am pleased.  Don't have a lot of time for more than that.

...and what quite a few authors don't seem understand: ON-PAGE usefulness.

They may produce a fairly well-written (teaser) text with 2 backlinks to their website, but they don't include any images or ads. Clearly, they want the sales happen on their website, so they keep their wizzle to a bare minimum.

I consider that "freeloading". Don't like it one bit.

Not only do they use Wizzley only for their own agenda without contributing much, they also create a bad user experience by making the visitors click AGAIN before they get the desired sales info.

They want to get all the benefits of a revenue-sharing site without sharing their revenue.

Yes, Wizzley is great for backlinks. But that's not why we created Wizzley.

First and foremost, Wizzley is great for making money with useful, unique, freestanding content. Then you may insert some backlinks for additional info.

I think Paula sums it up nicely for me and that is what I try to address with my pages here and elsewhere.

Chef that does surprise me.  Wizzley is of course a great place to achieve backlinks but to simply use it as you suggest some of is both shortsighted and disrespectful of the site

Paul - most of those articles you will never see, because I mark them for correction of lock them for good, if they fail to make improvements. My guess is, I spend about 15 hours per week dealing only with that type of submitted material.

^^As this site gets more popular you are going to get more and more of that kind of stuff - worse, you'll get the auto-submitted stuff, where the submission is done by software, and even having captchas won't defend you, as they have decaptcha software.

The only way to defend yourself from auto-submission stuff is the checkbox defence. When the person hits publish, you bring up a small form with two check boxes. One says "check to confirm if you are not a spammer", and the second says "check to confirm you are a spammer", and the order these check boxes are in is randomised.

A human making the submission will easily see which box to check - the bot won't know - because the order will be randomized, if they pick one, there is a 50% chance of picking wrong and if they pick both they automatically fail. 

It is something your software people need to be thinking about now. Part of the reason hubpages was overwhelmed - and is still overwhelmed, is because they don't have a defence against auto-submissions. 

You are doing a great job manually checking ChefKeem, but at some point it will get too much for one person, and hiring people to do it will overwhelm your business model. It's best to build auto-traps.

Thanks for your tips and your concern, Rose.   

Unfortunately, a 50% chance means great odds for the spam bots. They'd bombard us with hundreds of submissions within 5 minutes...even at a 50% success rate - a lot of work for us! The bots have gotten very smart, lately. They even solve math problems better than some people. 

Our current automatic spam detection system works actually pretty well. Once we get bigger, or when we get attacked more often, we have a whole 'nuther bag of tricks up our sleeves (that's why we appear to be so well-built...think Arnold S.). We don't want to apply all of them at this point, though, because it means more scripts and thus longer page loading times.

So, rest assured - we do have sophisticated auto-traps in place, already. It's a whole palette of secret applications that instantly identify a spammer.

Another interesting aspect is our 24-hour alert system. We share admin duties with our German mother site, pagewizz.com. When we're asleep in America, they watch out for us, and vice-versa. There were times when I was working on Wizzley at 10 p.m., and someone dropped tons of spam comments onto Pagewizz (5 a.m. in Germany). Boy do I love killing those bastards right away! But then we adjusted our anti-spam flak, and it's been pretty quiet on the spammer front, lately.

So far, so good, Rose.   And when things get more difficult to handle, we have an amazing developer team--Simon and Hans---to see us through the storms.

Glad you are on top of everything ChefKeem!  If you crack the spam problem you deserve to be multi-millionaires.

Hubpages, even with all the venture capital funds behind them and a team of about 20 are struggling - their site is a big old mess. I think part of their problem is that they turned a blind eye to the spam at the start, because they made some money from it, and now it's turned into a monster. At least you are starting out right.

lakeerieartists: 29. Nov 2011, 14:30

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I think that Terri is right about usefulness.  When I look for something online, I want it to answer the questions that I am searching for, not give me a lot of extraneous stuff.  Frankly as long as the page is readable, and it answers my questions, then I am pleased.  Don't have a lot of time for more than that.

Thanks, Paula. You are another writer who comes to mind when I think about utilitarian, no-fluff pages. (Not to say that they are not beautiful. You are an artist! But they get to the point.) I will try to learn from you, Paul, and Terri and purge the fluff.