Tips and Tricks After 550 Pages on Wizzley

We've all been there. Sitting writing away with our monetisation columns showing fat rows of nothing, wondering if we're wasting our time. That's when we look for reassurance.

That's when long-time Wizzley writers like me get in-boxes bursting with messages, asking things like 'am I good enough for Wizzley?', 'am I doing something wrong?' or the perennial 'is Wizzley really a good place in which to invest so much time?'

The answer to the latter will require Marty McFly to loan us his DeLorean, but all indicators are pointing in the right direction. I wouldn't be here, two years and 550 articles in, if I didn't believe that.

ChefKeem and the rest of the Wizzley team are hot on quality control. If your article has been published, and remains live, then it's good enough for Wizzley.  YOU are good enough for Wizzley.

As for doing 'something wrong', that generally pertains to making money. So many things factor in there, but top of the pile is time. I've had articles which didn't make me a penny for eighteen months, then suddenly BAM! It's one of my top earners.

So how about that biggie at the end?  You might be the world's greatest writer, but if Wizzley slinks into the shadows, who's ever going to know about you?  Let me show you something on the subject of Wizzley doing well.

You will recognize the above as the statistics for a single page on Wizzley. I've chosen it because it tells a tale well, but it's by no means the only one to follow this pattern.

I published my review of a movie called The Conjuring. As usual, I alerted the world via social networking that it was live. That accounts for the sudden burst of traffic at the very beginning. That fell away until the article hit a page rank of 100%. Now it's on the front page of Wizzley and you can see the result.

Around December 16th, it left the front page of Wizzley. My readership fell accordingly, quite steeply in fact!

That should have been the end of it, but then a comment on it caused the article to appear on Wizzley's Buzzing page.  The traffic rose again, higher than before, as this was a new place. By now, it was also featured at the top of Wizzley's horror movie category.  All brilliant in terms of new readers finding it.

One site which attracts undue interest, from those writers seeking to evaluate Wizzley, is Alexa.

It's only to be expected that this is so, as this is the closest that any of us can get to assessing the site as a whole.

It can be a source of great cheer, if all the graphs indicate an upward surge. It can prompt great depression and concern, if those spikes head downwards instead.

The huge trouble with Alexa is that it's only as good as the data fed into it. It's monitoring only the traffic produced by people with an Alexa toolbar. Only those readers will reveal how they arrived at Wizzley, how many articles they read and how long they were on-site. Have you got an Alexa toolbar?  Did the database receive information from you?  How about your friends and family? Does Alexa know anything about their habits on Wizzley, or any other site?

Right now the indicators are brilliant. Apparently people with an Alexa toolbar are coming to Wizzley in ever increasing numbers. They're reading an average of 8.90 articles, and spending nearly thirteen minutes doing so.

But they only account for a tiny fraction of the whole. Plus they can be terribly manipulated.

Who are the kind of people who download Alexa toolbars?  They are you and I. Those interested in SEO and website data. Individuals who make it a point of their livelihood to know whether Hubpages, Squidoo, Bubblews or whichever are doing best right now. In short they are us.

Do you want Wizzley to do better on Alexa?  Download the toolbar. Have it running while you're about your normal business on our website. Then look in amazement as the spikes head upwards.

I strongly suspect that such positive data will also lure people from other writing sites onto Wizzley too. They will be seeing a website surging in popularity, so will be coming to find out why. Enjoy!

Of course, Alexa isn't the only website ranking site out there. It's merely the most popular. I was having a peep at the information about Wizzley given out on WooRank.com, which revealed something worrying.

That wasn't our ranking. It's fabulous. Wizzley is fabulous everywhere. It was more to do with the room for improvement that was suggested.

It seems that Wizzley writers, en masse, aren't adding tags to our images. This is unhelpful on many different levels.

From a SEO point of view, those tags act as yet another hook for the search engines to find. Hence we'll want to insert them for very selfish reasons.

Personally I've got a bigger reason too. In a previous life, I worked on a government initiative, which sought to level the playing field for people entering into higher education. Part of that was ensuring that media was optimized for those with sensory impairment. In short, adding tags to images helps those with blindness or partial sight navigate our articles too.

Programs read out the content to those internet users. They linger upon the pictures and either replicate the tag, or say that there's nothing to report.

Adding an image tag is such a simple thing on Wizzley. You just plonk it into the 'Image Description' area, as you upload your pictures to use.

I always prefix it with the word 'image:', though 'picture:' or any other variation would do as well. It tells search engine spiders and accessibility programs alike that this text refers to a picture. Not to mention lessening our 'room for improvement' on WooRank!

Few of us are here for our health. Though, fortunately, Wizzley is friendly enough that it can seem like we are hanging out here for that too! What most of us are looking for is a livelihood. We're writing for the cents, not the sense.

I've written the most articles on Wizzley, and I've been here since nearly the beginning. Therefore it's hardly surprising that one of the most common questions that I'm asked is whether it's financially worth it.

It's getting there. Let me show you what I'm looking at, so you know why I'm still here.

The majority of the Suite101 earnings occurred during my first few months of writing online. They were given a sudden boost of $100 in October 2013, which was my reward for an achievement there. It's not going to be repeated, as that was a one off payment.

Most of my Wizzley earnings happened during my second year here. For months, I earned nothing at all, then the trickle began. As time goes by, that trickle is becoming quite a substantial income stream. It's getting faster, and arriving in larger amounts. It's coming from articles months, maybe even years, old. That's why I'm still here.

My earnings taking off. New writers pouring through the door in ever-increasing numbers. Loyal Wizzley readers turning up in their thousands. Yep, this is why I plan to stick around for the foreseeable future on purely business terms. But then I was staying anyway for the community!

No, Ralph Bending amuses us with his descriptions. He makes us want to read, even if we didn't think we were in the market for his product. There are lessons there to learn. I discerned them well and applied them to my Wizzley 'sales' articles. It's worked.

Just before Christmas, I had a friend hail me with laughter over my Wizzley article about Zombie Garden Gnomes. This was surprising. Why would he have read that? He didn't have a garden. He didn't even have a computer upon which to peruse the article, nor to receive a link via social networking.

What he did have was our mutual friend, who'd been so amused by said article that he'd shown it to him on his mobile phone.

By taking the Ralph Bending approach to selling things - crafting amusing or surreal stories instead of harping on about the product itself - I'd written a Wizzle interesting enough for people to share. My readership had grown accordingly.

Moreover, such 'sales' articles are much more interesting to write. I had as much fun writing the two above, as people apparently did reading them.

For those who care about such things, the latest intelligence coming from Google is that they rank down articles which add nothing of value. This includes 'sales' articles which merely copy and/or expand upon the information already listed in places like Amazon. 

Don't be afraid to be creative. That's the zeitgeist these days!

I was feeling pretty gleeful as Christmas approached. I'd written thirty-six festive articles the previous year, which were all now matured nicely for this one.

After all, if we're always writing for this time next year, then it's nice to arrive at that point in the following year.

But there was a problem. When I came to check those articles, it seemed that many of the products were no longer on sale. Effectively, I had a lot of pretty text about items which no-one could any longer buy.

It took me about a week to repair the damage. That involved either looking for replacement listings for the same products, rewriting the text or, on one occasion, creating the items for sale myself.

It was highly dispiriting, but taught me a few hard learned lessons. I also realized that I'd dodged a bullet, which would otherwise have made the articles irreparable.  My tips therefore are:

• Periodically check 'sales' articles to ensure that the products are still available.
• Never include a specific product in your URL. You can re-purpose the article for a similar one, if you keep it more generic.
• Let the product modules speak for themselves. You'll have to rewrite way too much, if your text is merely describing the item.
• Choose products that have been around for a while, thus are stable enough on the market not to suddenly disappear.

'Sales' articles might be great for injecting more cash into your commission stream, but not if they aren't evergreen. Take care to ensure that if they're not, then the article can at least be rewritten to safeguard the maturing of your URL.

Here's just a few examples of the issues that I found, and what I did about redeeming the URL for use this year:

I've always been fairly wary of 'sales' articles, and this experience hasn't done a great deal to make me love them. At least 'information' articles tend to be evergreen anyway. As the focus isn't actually on the product, then it's easier to replace those that you have monetizing your Wizzle.

Plus, in my experience, they can be just as (if not more) lucrative than those articles solely there to sell stuff.

Taking the long view of internet traffic, you can practically see the moment when the long, hot summer days gave way to people huddling inside buying Halloween decorations and Christmas presents. Just watch the readership grow, as the temperatures drop!

By the end of December, there was a distinct spike caused by a Facebook group discovering one of my years old articles about the Irish Genocide. I naturally wrote another to fuel such interest, which accounts for the smaller spike two days later.

This is a great example of how old Wizzley articles can suddenly come to life, and how you should always be ready to add something more to the discussion if that is the case. Not to mention the fact that monitoring your statistics will highlight such events.

There seems to me to have been a massive surge in people reading my articles just recently. This is borne out on the figures showing increased revenue too.

Ok, it's taken me longer to write the last fifty pages than usual, which might unnaturally boost the difference, but there are still comparable figures there. Looking at, for example, the statistics for 250 pages versus those at 350 cover roughly the same time-scale and relative months. There's certainly been a massive overall leap in unique readers there.

While the reach is ever upwards, then I'll certainly be hanging around to see what happens next. It's all good.