Hello, I'm Jerrico, and I'm a write-a-holic (passes candle)....
I'm one day new here and absolutely love what you've done with the place.
I simply must have the recipe, and any other cliché' phrases I can borrow :)
I've been an avid writer on various social writing platforms including:
- Squidoo (250 articles)
- Ezinearticles (187 articles)
- My own sites (48 @ 400 articles total, all converted into "hubs" recently less 200 I hadn’t yet)
- Hubpages (845 articles)
Note: (in the interest of full disclosure)
I've been banned from HP for making one little mistake that cost me my account without so much as any communication- nadda- zilch, just bam everything was "unpublished" and I couldn't even defend myself...
My mistake was posting too many articles too fast (and I didn't check my grammar, I wrote them years ago and assumed they were tip top- I won't make that assumption again!) .
Since they were posted on the same day (moving from a site to hubs rather quickly with no extensive formatting) this quick succession of posts became a knife in my back.
Had I slowed down and posted one at a time, checked my grammar (which Lissie can attest to was horrible years ago- I should have known better), I’d still be there writing hubs or converting sites into hub series…
But I’d not of known about or signed up for- this site (Wizzley) so I consider this horror of treatment of a prolific, dedicated, and loyal hubber a blessing in disguise as it seems my destiny was to push forth and pave new paths.
Apparently HP doesn't give second chances even if you were there for 4 years and never had an issue with any of your articles after over 800 articles published (and highly trafficked) - but bygones- the post ban days were a bit rough- I had spent a great deal of time and a lot of my day on the site interacting with the community and enjoyed watching the money grow in my stats…
One hub I wrote 4 years ago and never promoted became a 200-300.00 a month earner (just from impressions alone and adsense, much more on eBay/amazon started brewing)…
I lost all that notoriety and I’m sure 2500 people a day (the traffic it got for unique visitors and the 900 comments) will be wondering where the hell the site went… I started my quest for a new home for my work- gun-shy like a mo- I decided to build my own blog and was about to purchase a program that creates drag drop builds of Wordpress themes…
I knew I’d miss the format, the capsules, the tools and one thing the other sites didn’t seem to have is eBay, I was never a fan of Squidoo as they FORCE you to format your work one way, if you dare use less than 3 capsules or don't keep updating them every so often they stop promoting them, they sit there only available to direct links- (it's like they aren't even on the site), that's crap!
I just needed that Hubpages like format- fix- and wizzley not only has the same "tools" theirs don't include the limitations and there are MANY more tools here- Wizzley will do my work justice where HP limited how much "Artistic expression" I could use! ) SQ limited my ability to publish the way I wanted to i.e one capsule for small articles and IB I never really went there.
I emailed the owner after hearing they were responsive, asking for a reply and they ignored my email- so they lost my 1k articles- so many people shooting themselves in the foot... including myself lol.
Ask any of the "hubbers" who've come here, who know me, I got a raw deal. Of all the platforms I wrote for and interacted with (which is good SEO for the site), HP was my passion turned nightmare… nothing is more frustrating than to be banned with no notice or ability to fix it, it’s down right inhumane.
I will be moving ALL my articles from all over the web (luckily I already consolidated them when I was at HP, I was down to 200 more to convert into "hubs" to reach 1,000 articles when the guillotine came down on me) to this site and I know I’ll match my previous success here and then some.
HP actually did me a favor as I was about to go back over my previous 500 (original articles I wrote there) and update them, fix grammar, etc… they didn’t really check back then and I was green, but I knew they needed some updating…
Now I can do that here on the fly and no time lost (imagine if I’d of done that and THEN lost the account!). They weren’t badly written other than about 20, but I never formatted them or I over formatted them (pulled a Myspace with the glitter), cut out redundancies and so on.
It's their loss, WZ gain... (Don’t worry Wizzley staff; I will not post anything without thoroughly checking it for grammar, punctuation, formatting it perfectly and so on... I wasn't banned for being a bad guy; I was banned for making one mistake in posting 20 articles too fast!)... I don’t like “how” they did this but I understand their policy- they are afterall a business and must protect that even at their writer base’s expense- a wise person told me afterward (Mark), but to cut a good author off at the knees, is just not right.
I started out writing on Psychology (jealousy, love decoded and many subsets of that, to how to write articles that make money, to fascinating topics like why Steve Jobs never had a license plate on his car and how he got away with it legally, to topics like how a guy printed an entire car from a 3D printer (one part at a time, engine, shell, steering wheel and all but the rubber on the tires and oil in the engine), to eye bling, people getting shards of metal shaped like hearts and stars put in their eyeball- yes, the white part- eek!
Towards the latter part of 2009 I stopped writing as nothing I wrote seemed to earn me a dime- turns out my work just needed some "time" and "simmering", after the HP switch over to subdomained accounts (yourname.hp.com format) and they introduced their ad program, money started to land in my paypal monthly hand over fist - oh and maybe actually adding some monetization capsules would helped LOL. I was solely depending on the adsense ads! BIG mistake. I won’t make that here!
On the advice of my fellow hubsters and the HP staff tipping me on how to make money writing vs. just writing on topics that don't earn like "community help files" of which about 50 existed later to become a 175 page book I really can't sell because whose going to buy a book about hubpages from someone banned from hubpages, regardless of why, I started down a new path called "product related/review" articles.
This wasn't the spammy type reviews or bs reviews but real informative articles about anything from kitchen cabinets to house siding how to sell your corolla like a boss!
Ironically I had these articles already on my 48 sites (adsense sites) and they were earning pretty well until Panda. I decided to move them over since each page was both part of a larger review of a niche topic (kitchen cabinets i.e. wood, plastic, marble, different types, styles, etc...) and self sufficient to that particular type of wood/style of cabinet to how to install, how to find them, how to build one and so on.
I added these and monetized them with eBay and Amazon "capsules"/modules and practically overnight they started to generate sales. Money was flowing like a stream and comments from hubbers and non hubbers (public) were coming in about how useful this information was... (whew)
I came to realize this was the balance between my psychology hubs, my off the wall topics (fun stuff) hubs, and product hubs created an eco system of various concepts that appealed to most of my visitors. (a balance was born)
It had the hubs that earned, the hubs that intrigued but didn't earn, and the hubs that bounced between the two- I was paying my rent with just my earnings at HP (and then some) - the money was flowing and life was good...
I'm now sitting on 1,000 articles all that were consolidated and became popular at HP, and since I put my eggs in one basket- I came to realize when you drop that basket, well, the eggs got dizzy- as I still have them and can still monetize them here (and share all my insights over the years too). I was worried about putting them on a new site as they may not let me keep them if I ever decided to leave.
So I'm starting from scratch but not really- It's more like copy paste, format better, update, and post- much easier than writing from scratch and it will give me time to learn the tools and turn what was ok into something great (see my next post about writing psychology and formatting psychology). It also gives me the opportunity to re-read ALL of my hubs, as to be honest I hadn’t seen most of them for years!
In a nutshell I'm getting a chance to take all I've learned, all I've written, all I've experienced and starting anew. That's not always a bad thing. In fact I consider it a fresh start with polish.
Possibly my destiny was to come here and become a major contributor to the site, starting with content, quality original articles and my own flavor of personality and writing style.
This time I'll do it better, more efficiently, and success will be mine. I know that some of my hubs could have been cut into several hubs (focus on one topic wasn’t my strong suit)…
I hope to help the community out, anyone who needs it, and I plan to be a major contributor here in content, help, and insight where I can. Losing HP and coming here feels like I've died and gone to heaven...
