Tips and Tricks After 500 Pages on Wizzley

Those first fifty pages on any site are hard work.  I began my journey reeling from the shock of how much effort it took to achieve such a portfolio.

The hard work never does stop, but it does become easier. You get into a kind of groove and gain a sense of what does and doesn't work. It becomes fun.

I also introduced the motto, 'write often, write well'.  It appears that was a great place to begin. Nearly two years and 500 articles on, I'd still stand by those four words.

Staying motivated became an aspect of optimum importance. This was the beginning of me implementing a whole series of little challenges and games, in order to keep myself writing. I still do that. It still works.

In fact, my 500th article gift to Wizzley is going to be all about motivation. But more on that in a bit.

Back in February 2012, I moved on to discuss how to boost your page rank and author rank. I described the differences between the three Wizzley home pages, headed by Editor's Choice, Popular and Buzzing. 

Nothing here has fundamentally changed. Those methods still very much work. They are all second nature to me now!

The same can be said about my writing strategy, which was the basic rule of interlinking your articles. Here I was talking about how you can attract more visitors to your own Wizzles that way. 

All that I would add now is to take care that the reader is always paramount in your mind.  People aren't stupid. They know when you're writing to squeeze every last buck out of them. The trick is to create articles wherein making money seems almost incidental.  You gain the trust of your readership, so they come back for more.

Link articles which are relevant, regardless of whether you wrote them. That's what your readers need.  If this sticks in your business oriented mind, then write another relevant article.  Simple as that.

The final thing that I'd note is how low my statistics were then, compared to now.  For the first month, I struggled to get anywhere close to 100 readers per day.  It was usually closer to fifty or less. 

Do right by your readers and they will come.

After 100 pages here, I'd finally got my head around the fact that nothing much happens at first. I wrote 'time is a factor', like it was some great, new revelation.

Having written five times that number, and counting my tenancy here in years, I would like to go back and high-light that sentiment in bold, underlined and in twenty feet tall font.  YES, TIME IS A FACTOR!

I'm just now earning steadily on articles which I was writing back then.  Occasionally, I'll get one which adds to the coffers straight off the mark, but on the whole, you really do need to wait for your Wizzle to mature. 

To continue the analogy that I made sixteen months ago, it really is like planting a sapling in the ground. There's no use in returning next day and demanding that your twig is now a fully grown oak. Give it time.

Reading between the lines, I also recall how I felt back then. It was the sneaking suspicion that I was somehow being conned. I was writing all of this, working so hard, for some vague promise of jam tomorrow.  What if people were just telling me that, so they could gain something for themselves? Something which I couldn't quite grasp, because I was so new and naive.

I'm here to reassure, as veteran writers reassured me back then.  Time really does do wonders. Plant your sapling articles, they'll grow in their own good time.

I then moved on to pushing the importance of getting involved in the Wizzley forum. I'd just come from there, where Humagaia was telling us that we should be working together.  Wizzley was such a young writing platform, that it was our job to get the message out.

All of these things are as true now, as they were then.  Wizzley passed its second birthday in May 2013. Comparing it to, say Squidoo or Hubpages, is like taking a toddler and judging it disapprovingly, because it's not as big as a seven year old.

It's that old 'time is a factor' thing again, but this time applied to the whole shebang!

I went on to talk about passing over article ideas to those best suited to write them.  Wizzley is enhanced by informed writing.  A strong Wizzley is good for us all.  This is long-term thinking, not short-term knee jerk reactions to wanting your bank balance higher.  Strengthen the ship, before you start sailing in it.

My 500th article present to Wizzley will be all about community.  As you will soon discover.

However, do take care. With all the great advice flying, through your participation in the Wizzley community, it's tempting to reach for perfection in every single article. Becoming a workaholic is a fast track to burn-out. 

I learned the hard way to not spend hours tatting with old articles, trying to make them absolutely fabulous.  Pick your tips and tricks, understand them, then apply from this moment forward. You'll grow as a writer, without losing your mind in the process.  This is still very much true.

Then came the controversial part.  So many people were telling me what I should and shouldn't write about. Their suggestions bored me rigid!  I wanted to write about things which inflamed me. I wanted my work to be interesting!  I wanted to be passionate about my subjects!

I didn't think I could be all that passionate about endless articles about pots and pans, selling stuff just because of the commission. It was all a little dispiriting, so I ended up being quite rebellious.

I wrote my articles.  I wrote about stuff I wanted to write about. I got excited by the topics and that spilled out into my words.

And thank every passing deity that I did!  Months on, I have best-sellers (in an affiliate kind of way), which were deemed 'unlikely to make money at the time'.  I have one Wizzle, which is my second highest earning, which was specifically pointed at in 2012 as a non-starter.

It's passion that sells.  Not beautifully placed Amazon products.  Though the latter, relevantly placed, do help.

There's a sense, reading my 150 pages report, that I was finally caving in over the whole issue of 'sales' articles.

The thing to remember is that I didn't know then that my general articles were definitely going to make money. My rebellion should be read more as a tantrum, than anything truly inspired.

I now know that they will make money, but it will take a long time to do so. When they do, they have the potential to make much more money than a short-lived 'sales' article. (And really EVERY Wizzle is a sales article. We all put sales modules in them, even if the main point is more widely informative.)

I did eventually write Wizzles which were formed around selling products. They did (and continue to) make me money. There are no right and wrong about this.  However, I also found that such articles didn't attract as much traffic as the 'information' ones, and could be hit and miss or seasonal.

The sensible thing is really to have a good mixture of the two.

I have nothing really else to add to this Tips and Tricks. The rest of the tutorial is still current and nothing could be added here, which isn't already written there.

As befits the summer months, there was a tremendous sense of productivity about August 2012. Yet the harvest still had not come.

Wizzley was a new site.  I was a new writer.  I'd begun in December, the greatest earning month of any such venture. It was all downhill from there, until the next autumn.

All these things added up into a great leap of faith. It paid off.

I began this tutorial talking about the bizarre way in which people would make a connection, then break it. In the post-Panda panic of those times, it was a piece of foolishness, which was supposed to boost a writer's standing with Google. It didn't.

However, I've not seen that again from that day to this. Whether its mention shone an unwanted spotlight upon the practice on Wizzley, or it simply fell out of fashion, I don't know. It's certainly not something which occurs now.  Hurrah!

I moved onto social networking as a promotional tool.  We all know about getting our own links into the wider world, but passing the karma around to our fellow authors can also be beneficial.

With that in mind, I would like to thank two people on Wizzley.  They both deserve much more recognition than they may currently enjoy.  They both promote EVERYONE'S articles with a beautiful generosity of spirit.

These are just two of the people, who go above and beyond the call of duty on behalf of Wizzley authors.  I still stand by my musings back then about how this is good, not only for the site, but for us too.

After all, Elias and Treathyl just received a little extra personal publicity for their efforts, along with our thanks.

I do hope that you'll both join in my 500th article venture for Wizzley.

I followed up such discussions with the advice to check older articles, in order to keep them up to date.  This is not the insanity-inducing rewriting, which I mentioned in the 100 pages Tips and Tricks. This is making sure that they are still doing their job.

In early August 2013, I went through all of my Halloween articles on Wizzley. I knew that within the next couple of months, they would be in the spotlight again. To my chagrin, I discovered that a depressing number of costumes featured were no longer on sale.

I went hunting for replacements, only to learn that they were all there, but they had been listed again under different Amazon codes.  I went through and replaced all of the 'dead' ones. Those articles will now make money for me again come late September and October. Happy days!

Another thing that I noted then was the notion that some internet traffic is better than others. You can have tens of thousands reading your articles, but if none of those readers buy anything, you've made no income.

This lesson has been repeated several times since. 

July-September 2013 has seen some of my lowest levels of internet traffic since I began.  It's also seen a massive upsurge in revenue. August 2013 ended up being my biggest earning month since I began writing online. 

In short, we can panic too much about plunging readership figures. The bottom line is whether they went away satisfied and whether we earned anything.

The great news from this installment was that I was finally starting to make some money.

My Wizzley articles had been generating odd pennies all along, but my biggest earners were still those on the failing Suite101.

It was only in September 2012, when Wizzley began to overtake it. My income could be measured in dollars, rather than cents.

For those of you still thinking that online writing is the route to fast riches overnight, then look very long and hard at the timescale here.  It took me nine months of hard slog to get to that point. Reviewing this from the vantage point of nineteen months, it's still not a livelihood.  But it's getting there!

There are also factors which really needed to be taken firmly into account:

• I have no Adsense income. My topmost ads are generated by Chitika.  I've been told repeatedly by experienced writers that no-one can earn online without Adsense. They're wrong, of course. But Google undoubtedly make a lot of money for a lot of people, hence the internet wide ethos of bending over backwards to appease that particular corporation.
• I write many 'information' type articles.  These are the ones for which products complement the writing, they are not the main focus. 'Sales' articles do have more potential for faster earnings.  'Information' articles have a greater potential for more internet traffic, and long-term steady earnings.
• Most of those 250 articles were written during the spring and summer months, when the takings traditionally drop. Unless you're writing about weddings and camping etc.  I wasn't.
• Wizzley is still a VERY young site.
• I'm still a relatively new writer.

With that in mind, let's look at precisely what I did, and am, making.

Now can you all see why I rushed onto the Wizzley forum, with such vigor, in July and August this year?  (Bear in mind that September 2013 was less than half done, when that chart was snapped.)

It's not a livelihood yet.  By any stretch of the imagination, it's little more than coverage for a bill or two, but it's all most definitely going in the right direction. Comparing August 2012 with August 2013, my commission leapt by 609%! 

Not bad in anyone's book.  Nor would it have had time to occur had I listened to people in September 2012.

During this period, I was targeted by a fair amount of nay-sayers.  Some of them may have genuinely been trying to help me.  Others were, without question, trying to chase me out of Wizzley.

Things I've been told:

• Wizzley will never make anyone money. The conversion rate is too weak and slow.  No, it's not.  In fact, the months following brought several people (those who understood the question) stating that Wizzley has a higher than average conversion rate.
• I will never make money without Adsense.  Yes, I do.  I make it through the full array of affiliate links. When the Google crisis happened on Wizzley, in January 2013, my income was not affected.
• I will never make money writing about things like Bigfoot.  Yes, I will.  Bigfoot sells.  All year round, Bigfoot sells.  I'm going to give you this one, but my Sasquatch articles are some of my biggest earners.  Why do you think I went so all out on vampires?  If one legendary creature is this lucrative, why not another?
• Why are you still writing at Wizzley?  Even the owners have given up on that site! They haven't updated Facebook since May 2013; they're hardly ever on the forum; they've stopped doing competitions; and if there's one Editor's Choice Award a month, we're lucky.  Because I have 500 articles here, and it's not all down to the owners to create a buzz.  Plus I'm not convinced they've given up on it. Wizzley Weddings is still being up-dated, and Chef Keem, Anne and Simon are regularly seen on the forum. Not to mention hints given about a facelift for Wizzley. If this is the criteria by which a site is judged, take it up with them, not me.
• Don't make your articles too intelligent.  Most readers are stupid.  No, they are not. The Alexa statistics tell us that the vast majority of Wizzley's readers are college educated. Stop dumbing them down.
• Don't write a thing without properly keyword researching it!  Ok, this possibly has credence, but it's really boring.

There was pretty much a Gamers' Edition of the Tips and Tricks towards the end there. I do hope you'll like my 500th article game.

As for the rest of the 250 pages tutorial, there's nothing else to add.  There were plenty of tips to boost your internet and Wizzley presence alike.  These still hold true, therefore there's nothing to update.

I began my 300th article tutorial with a nod towards all of the 'advice' that I was being given. I think that the list above will give you a measure of some of it.

However, that was just the negative. The vast majority of the tips I've been given were very positive and very sound.

Amongst those was the one with which I began the 300th Wizzle tutorial. Jerricho had told me that we are all writing our articles for this time next year, not right now.  Seeing as I'm now nearly a year on, I can very much confirm the truth of that statement!

The thing which has really astounded me, in the interim, concerns that propensity for really old articles to suddenly wake up. Wizzles which I wrote in spring 2012 - and which did little in the meantime - are now some of my best earners. It's downright weird, but testimony again that time is a massive factor in this game.

As best as I can ascertain, it takes roughly six months to a year for your monthly income to reach double figures.  Then another year to push those into triple.  All people are different though. You might be one of the lucky ones, who make it fast; or an unlucky one, for whom it takes longer.

You soon learn, as a writer, that stamina, determination and patience count amongst your most important personal attributes.  But don't over-do it.

As I was writing my 300th article, I was already feeling the pressure.  I asked for help in alleviating it, then promptly upped it to unprecedented levels.  November 2012 turned out to be my month of massive output.  I wrote 56 Wizzley articles from scratch during it.

By early 2013, I was so frazzled.  Though it wasn't obvious at the time, I came very close to walking. I couldn't handle it anymore.  Those in the know basically caught me and sorted my head out. It was sheer exhaustion and stress.

So while you're keeping at it, remember to be gentle with yourself. It is hard work and you need breaks to maintain the pace. Make like a marathon runner. Sprinting for months on end will do you no good at all.

My 500th article present should help insert a bit of much needed fun back into the proceedings.

Around the time I reached 350 articles on Wizzley, I was going to write a book about Guy Fawkes.

More specifically, it would have explored what would have happened if Guy Fawkes had succeeded. I did all of the research, then turned those into yet more Wizzles.

I do recall this.  I wrote about eight chapters of it, over the New Year break. 

But I was under the impression that little Charles Stuart wasn't in Westminster that day. I thought he was at home in Whitehall, with Elizabeth Carey.  Wrong!  I checked with Prof Ronald Hutton, and Charles was in Parliament with his parents and elder brother.  That immediately rendered my eight chapters historically inaccurate.

I do hate rewriting things.  I just quietly retired the chapters and never went back.  Wizzley got to keep what amounted to my research notes though!

This was also the month when I realized that my 'information' articles were going to pay off.  My top two earners then were of that ilk.  That situation has continued over the next year.  I'm still very impressed by that.

As this tutorial came so fast after the previous one, I didn't have too much to say.  Therefore I haven't much else to update here.

Was it really back in January, when HollieT gave me that great tip?  We shouldn't compare our income with the previous month, but with the corresponding month from the year before.

That's been a massive part of my motivation throughout this year.  I've already shown you the bar chart, which helps me keep track. 

I'm always in competition with my former selves. Can I earn more this September than I did in September 2011 and 2012?  So far, I've managed to do that every month. This more than anything tells us about our progress.  It keeps us real.

Then I went on to bemoan the fact that December is a high earning point in the year. That January was the beginning of a slump which would last until September at least. More like October.  I was wrong.  In fact, May proved to be the moment when the uplift began again.

If I'd written more articles relevant to summer, I'd possibly eradicate that.  People like Dustytoes have told me that their biggest earning months are in spring. She creates wedding invitations on Zazzle, that's why.

The trick is to work out where you are weakest, in terms of articles to cover the year's natural troughs.  I was apparently successful in filling in about five months this year.  I'll be looking to hammer home the spring articles for next year.

I doubt that anything will ever raise January to the heights of December, but never assume that your year is now over until the Christmas trade picks up again. Anything can and will happen. 

I went on to give a lot of tips, which are still right now.  Amongst them was the advice to make sure that your thumbnail pictures are a) added and b) beautiful. 

Images are so important on Wizzley. Our front pages make a feature of them, even if Pinterest considerations are not your thing.

Between then and now, I've spotted an author who raises the bar for all of us here.  May I direct you to WriterArtist's profile please?  The wonderfully talented Shraddha Naik really takes her time over her thumbnails, and it shows. 

She caught my eye.  She will catch the eyes of Wizzley's readers too.  Well done on a job brilliantly done.

I have nothing else to add to what was said in the 400th article, other than the fact that the Suite101 people all quickly settled in.  Some of Wizzley's biggest names originally came from that influx.  They're more Wizzley than ex-Suite now.

I know that a week on the internet is a long time, but even so, I'm struggling to update anything that I wrote only three months ago!

I've read through it and everything is still current.  I still haven't found any massive benefit from having written so many vampire-related articles.  I'm still not convinced about niche writing.

Instead, I'll bring you up to date on the past three months. I finally had my breaks (voluntarily and involuntarily).  I've hardly been here!  Which will also explain how it took me quite so long to write fifty Wizzles...

In June, I had visitors from the USA for two weeks.  In July, I was at a friend's birthday celebrations in Merseyside for another week.  In August, I was off-line for two weeks, because of a cock-up over switching ISPs; then it was my birthday, so I went away to Wales with a friend.

Back in May, I had friends very carefully suggesting that a holiday was in order.  None of them are doing that now.  I'm patently much more relaxed about things. 

That interim also showed that I don't have to be here 24/7 in order for money to be made.  July and August were really high earning months.  The traffic and hits may have gone down, but the revenue was up.  Happy days!

This is the first time in a year that I've been able to read my Wizzley stats, without having to zoom in because of Reddit spikes!

In some ways, it's quite depressing reading, because I'm getting much less internet traffic than usual. This time last year, I was averaging between 600-800 visitors per day.  Now it's more like 400-700, but with twice the number of articles.

Then Paul pointed out to me that I was posting 2-3 articles a day back then.  Plus I had my Twitterfeed going like mad. 

Now I've just come out of a period wherein I've hardly been online.  I wrote just 14 articles during the whole of August.  That would have been a week's output last August. 

New articles provide spikes in readership, as they are spread around the social networking sites.  Mature articles take time to grow. 

It's still depressing reading, but explicable.

I think that the upshot is I need to get out of holiday mode and start writing more.  Break the old Twitterfeed out too and see if I can't boost those stats again.

Work to do!  Fortunately, I have just the thing to motivate me..

I can't take any credit for the idea.  That was Sam, after I wrote an article about Chore Wars. 

Why not one for Wizzley?  Perhaps for my 500th article, I told her, while thinking that it would take way too long to set up.  Nor was I wrong in that estimation. The more I contemplated it, the more complicated I realized it would be to code.

Some market research was patently in order.  So I wrote a Wizzle entitled Connecting with the Wizzley Community.  I never once asked outright whether anyone wanted a Wizzley Chore Wars, but it was certainly in my mind.

I even set up a duel module, which would monitor potential interest in this along with the main question.  I figured there was enough there to risk going for it.

And so that's why this Tips and Tricks article was delayed for a day.  I spent Saturday creating a challenge for us all.  The goals are both attainable and give information along the way. Hopefully it'll be both the motivational force that people were wanting, as well as highlighting all of the different parts of Wizzley.

Everything that is done there will benefit the individual AND the community as a whole.

Much thanks to Calanon and Jethraw, who took time out to beta-test the game.  They did find bugs, which I fixed before bringing it to you.  Ladies and gentlemen, may I invite you to the launch of Wizzley Writers Do Chore Wars!

Instructions:

• Click this link
• Create an avatar for yourself
• Click this link again, if you haven't automatically been invited to the party
• Start claiming your Wizzley achievements

You have 500 points maximum each day.  There's no major benefit to being a Wizzley veteran versus a newcomer. We're counting these from now.  Can you beat off the competition from other Wizzley authors?

Let the challenge begin!