Tips and Tricks After 650 Pages on Wizzley

It has always been the case that new writing platforms take time to gain in popularity.

In the beginning, attracting authors is one thing, finding enough readers to make it worth their while is quite another. As Wizzley enters its third year, it's taken those toddling steps out of new and untried into finding its place in the search results.

There's a point of critical mass when it all comes together, and we may well be at that moment.

Let's face it. In all honesty, writing for Wizzley has been a leap of faith for us all. Particularly those wandering in during the first months and never quite managing to leave again. We had it all - beautiful interface, congenial company, high standards of writing - but that key element of cash was lagging behind.

For some, that was the deal breaker. They'd rather take their chances as small fish in already established large writing pools, than forge a firm foothold in this pretty puddle.

But what about those who stayed?  We're the ones who wrote the articles now maturing. We got the jump on those only just now building their writing portfolios. Just as those joining now will have the jump on authors arriving a year from now.

We're all ahead of the game, and now it appears that the game just began in earnest.

People are flooding through the door.  Old authors are poking their heads back in, as their earnings begin to sky-rocket. And my own have shown a sharp up-turn too.

Please note that this graph charts only those earnings directly attributable to Wizzley. They don't take into account any of the peripheries, like commission on articles linked to via a Wizzley article; nor the takings on Zazzle products once created to monetize a page, now earning as entities in their own right. Nor does it include the royalties on the guide-book that I wrote for Wizzley.

It's a leap of faith which now displays all the hallmarks of paying off.

The downside being that this format is annoying as heck. Half of the time, you can't even see an introductory line to know where the thing has even started. You just have to randomly click things until you find the next page.

Which is fabulous for the author/website and their bounce-rate, but not so much for the reader.

I decided I wasn't going to do that. Even if Wizzley had let me, I wouldn't do that. Instead my serial pieces would ALL be extensive in their own right. Each one of them would be the equivalent of one normal sized chapter.  (In the event, they generally turned out to be much bigger than that.)

So what did I discover?  Yes! Readers did tend to get into the stories on offer, then click onto the next chapter. Bounce rate was thus reduced.

But better still, this kind of thing forced me to explore a subject in much more depth than I may have done otherwise. Writing platforms all over the net have people visiting a subject in the usual cursory manner, repeating the same (albeit interesting) facts over and over again. I dug further. I found more.  It led to some truly unique content, which may only be found on Wizzley.

That could only be good for my own portfolio, and for the website as a whole.

However, if I'm going that deeply into a subject, then why not turn it into an eBook?  That was the nagging doubt throughout. In fact, the Maelgwn Gwynedd articles turned out to be fascinating enough to prompt me into considering expanding even further.

It's a con wavering on the edge of becoming a pro, insofar as it allows you to delve into a subject deeply enough to discover whether you could go further still.

A second downside being that I was rather trapped into completing a series. On the whole, this was fine, as I was interested in the topics. But I could see how horrible that would be if I'd started big on a topic which turned out not to be so interesting.

I guess that I still will occasionally include a series on Wizzley, but not as a matter of course. Bounce rate can be reduced just as easily by writing relevant articles, and linking them from the sidebar or within the article itself.

It's something all too tempting to do as a writer. You create a page, then click onto the 'sidebar' tab over on the right hand side. Then you fill it with all that you've written before. It's great! You think, as you anticipate the hordes clicking onto everything you've ever said, reducing your bounce-rate as they empty their purses into your coffers.

No. It's just annoying.

When I'm reading about, say, sheep. I'm interested in the subject matter. I want to go on a voyage of discovery on all things ovine, not suddenly be diverted off into finding out what Game of Thrones jewelry I could buy.

In fact, when I see that link - by the same author - I don't think, 'Oooh! Game of Thrones jewelry! I wish I hadn't wasted my time reading about something I was interested in, when I could have been perusing these shiny, pretty things for sale.'  What I actually comprehend is the subtext, 'Stop looking at that article which isn't making me money. It was only written to entice you in. Click here and start giving me commission RIGHT NOW!'

Apologies if anyone actually has linked a Game of Thrones article from one on sheep. I did pick them both at random, with no wish to single anyone out. Though similar things are happening all over Wizzley by several authors.

Worse still is when the sidebar is so saturated with irrelevant articles, that no reader can easily find their way back to the category itself. It's like the writer is actually punishing them for NOT wanting to click on the random selection at the side.

It only took me a couple of times to be lost in such wildernesses, to ensure that my own articles now include at least one sidebar link to the main category at the very top. Even if I didn't write it. That latter is inducement enough to write a related article, which is the professional way to bring down your bounce rate.

You may be forgiven for wondering what sorcery you just witnessed, but it's quite simple once you know how. It merely involves glancing at the page source of your Wizzley article to find the unique module identification number. Every module on every page of Wizzley has one of those!

The link URL is always the same.  It's the page URL + /#module_*module number*. So what I just linked looks like this:

http://wizzley.com/blue-wedding-dresses/#module_265880

How you find the page source (thus the module identifier) depends upon your browser.  I use Firefox, so the steps look like this:

• Click the three lines icon on the right-hand side of your top toolbar.
• Select Developer.
• Select Page Source.
• Fear and panic at the resulting page of HTML code thus displayed, unless you're conversant with HTML, in which case just read it with interest.  If the former, stop fearing and panicking. It's really not that scary and you can't break anything.
• Scroll down (or use the Find function, under Edit in the top toolbar) until you locate the text in the module to which you're wishing to link.
• Find the module identification number directly above it, tagged as a div id.

• Copy the module identifier and attach it, with a hashtag, to the main page URL.
• Link using the URL you just created.

So you see, not sorcery at all. Merely a handy way to link directly to a module that you want to reference in another Wizzley article (or, indeed, anywhere).

However, on this occasion, our unsung hero Did Something that ultimately rendered the identification of broken links a little too keen.  So keen in fact, that it regularly asks us to check links which aren't broken at all.

So why doesn't he just return the code to how it looked before, and stop this tomfoolery in its digital tracks?

It's not quite that simple. As somebody who has coded her own fair share of websites, I have a great deal of sympathy for besieged webmaster Simon here. The issue is not undoing the changed code, it's finding what messed it up in the first place!

If what you alter has an immediate, highly visible effect, it's very easy to undo it if it's all gone wrong. But the broken links finder didn't have an immediate effect.  It's not like it's high-lighting every single article on a daily basis. Different Wizzley authors might have no more than one or two false positives every week - some less than that.

The first few times it happened, none of us reported it. It could have been a glitch, or a website closed for maintenance during the seconds that the software searched. No-one here reached for the immediate conclusion that the program itself was broken. It had always worked before.

Therefore, by the time it was realized that an endemic failure had taken place, Simon would have made many, many more changes to the Wizzley infrastructure. Tinkering here. Tatting there. Making things quietly wonderful over in that corner. Speeding up the load time with streamlined code in half a dozen quarters.

So which refinement precisely was it that nerfed the ability for Wizzley to find broken links? Simon would love to know! He's working flat out to find the issue, because it's his professional reputation on the line whenever any of us receive that e-mail and/or question their frequency on the forum.

Of course, we could help him out by answering all of those forum queries, whenever we spot them. If you want to link this module to do so, then please do feel free!

But while you're now on this page with the edit functions before you, take the time to give it a quick once over. 

1. Is everything looking as you hoped when you first penned and formatted it?
2. Are all of the monetization modules displaying items that are still for sale?
3. Is there any out of date information, which could now be updated?
4. Are all of the YouTube videos and/or hyper-linked images still there? (And it's much better to upload your own images, as hyper-linked ones do have a tendency to disappear.)
5. Are there any subsequently written relevant articles, which you forgot to link from this page?

All of that may take thirty seconds or half a day, depending upon how many repairs need to be made. But when you've finished, you now have a mature article which is working nicely for you again, and still valuable for your readers.

Plus I do believe that Google loves up-dated pages, which is why some writing sites (thankfully not Wizzley) demand endless tinkering on old articles from their authors.

Personally, I'm not entirely waiting to receive a false positive link e-mail, before I look at older Wizzles and give them the once-over.  I'm trying hard to check all of my older articles in any given category, whenever I submit a new one to the same.

Madness lies in mass editing of old Wizzles. Therefore I only do a handful at a time. One or two sub-categories, as they present themselves to do. With the date of checking entered onto a spreadsheet. But I covered this in the last Tips and Tricks, so I won't harp on about it here too.

Two things which I've noticed are missing headers and the weirdness of Amazon carousels.

Some time in the distant past, Simon must have tinkered in such a way that free-standing text modules - containing only the title and sub-title - disappeared. This only affected my oldest Wizzley pages, dating back to late 2011 and early 2012. Fortunately I didn't tend to format too many pages in that way, though its something I do regularly now!

I've used this exact formatting from above to demonstrate what I mean:

It's a bug which must have stopped its carnage sometime in early 2012, so it's nothing to worry about now. But those of us writing before then, who formatted in this way, should check those old Wizzles.  I've hopefully repaired all of mine thus affected now. Please do give me the heads up, if you find one that I've missed.

That said, it's not necessarily a bad thing to check Wizzley articles of such antiquity. They are the ones most likely to be out of date now!

Another item of concern for me were the Amazon carousels. These can be added in any Amazon module by selecting it from the pull-down menu. I loved them when I first began writing on Wizzley. I use them less often now, as a matter of personal taste.

But let me shove one in now, so you can see what I'm talking about.

Can you see anything there?  It should be before the last paragraph and this, complete with a header and sub-header. I'm not entirely convinced that it always is present and correct.

I surf the web with an AdBlocker switched firmly on. In short, I'm precisely the sort of person you don't want anywhere near your articles, if you're solely here to make money. But I do have it switched off for Wizzley.

Which is why it was so surprising that the carousels weren't showing for me.

I assumed that Simon had silently removed them sometime in the distant past. I made a note to tell you about it in my Tips and Tricks, then resolved to tell him off privately in a message. Hopefully that would prompt an actual forum announcement about it.

But first, I fixed my old pages. I turned all of the carousels into galleries instead.  Job done.

In the meantime, a friend came online, who asked me what I was doing. After I told her, she went to see if said carousels were showing for her. They were. Every one of them present and correct.

We've all been there. You've added a product to a Wizzley Amazon module, when you realize that something isn't quite right. Perhaps there's a typo in the title or description - and that matters because you want to display it as a list. Or you simply want to change the title to something of your choosing.

So you open the Amazon module, prepare to click the handy 'Edit' link and suddenly there's an ASIN/ISBN pop-up thwarting you.

For many Wizzley authors, this is their cue to close the module and start again. Opening and closing it several times, engaging in a race against time with the pop-up, in order to hit that edit before it becomes covered up.

There's a much easier way you know.

In this way, you will be able to select the edit link at your own pace without that pesky pop-up leaping in to cover it up. Then get on with your day without warring with Wizzley coding. Enjoy!

Since first arriving at Wizzley, I've gained a bit of a reputation for writing about what I want to write about. Veterans used to wring their hands in frustration, because I was never going to make money that way.

They were wrong. I did.

But not following the herd into the usual sales pieces did mean that I often had nothing with which to monetize my articles. So I made them.

I may not be the world's greatest artist, but frankly plain words on a postcard sell well on Zazzle. I was never writing those articles anyway with any hope of great riches ensuing. Though the glimmer of residual hope anyway proved to be quite shiny.

As you can see from the graph above, Zazzle has suddenly come into its own over the past couple of months. Items which I originally created to adorn the pages of Wizzley articles have begun to mature in the listings and sell. This is all above and beyond Wizzley itself. I'm talking about sales directly from the Zazzle market!

I recall Dustytoes - Wizzley's resident expert in all things Zazzle - once telling us how it took her a year or two to make decent money there. Her focus was on creating products, rather than writing about them here, so she had a slightly different strategy. In her first year, she made less than $50. Now she uses her proceeds to fund a mortgage on her house, pay the bills and put her kids through college.

When you see how sharply my Zazzle sales just rose, then you can understand how it worked for her too. I've frankly been astonished - and not a bit gleeful - to see my earnings suddenly begin to sky-rocket. Enough for me to have shifted a bit of focus this period to making many, many more products there.

Those products have naturally become the subject of more Wizzley articles, thus creating a lovely mutually fulfilling circle. For each of my own products sold via my Wizzles, I get BOTH the referral income and the royalties. Happy days!

And this week, I received an e-mail from Zazzle telling that my sales have topped $100. Therefore I too have reached Pro Zazzle Seller status, along with all the perks that entails. (Insofar as I've discovered, that's mostly a pretty badge for my profile; access to a hidden forum full of heightened, tried-and-tested tips; and a newsletter giving me a heads up on great and wonderful things.)

As I said early on, I'm always experimenting with something on Wizzley. And I already know how my next fifty articles will pan out.

At the time of writing, Wizzley's front page is graced by an article which I wrote as a guide for newcomers to our website. The last thing anyone can say about me is that I'm a newcomer on Wizzley, but I'm going to use it as my guide anyway.

The Wizzley Fifty Article Challenge was really a response to a question - asked in any number of variants on a theme - about what I'd do if I was starting here now. It was also the solution for those newcomers who declare that they have no idea what to write.

I've handed their first half a century of articles to them on a plate. They have the categories, inspiration and prompts to build a healthy portfolio here. By then, they'll know enough to continue unguided, or else decide that Wizzley isn't for them and go elsewhere.

But those fifty articles will still be here, each one designed to earn passive income. They'll be back, when said portfolio matures into hard cash.

If I'm doing this, then I also should help with the promotion of anyone joining me in the Challenge. I'm currently wracking my brain for ideas, but I'll think of something, or else I'm not the geek we all know me to be.

Who's up for the Challenge too?  Let's have a show of hands, which incidentally gives us all a handy link to your profiles.

I'm now regularly attracting over 1000 readers per day, often considerably more. 

What makes this truly remarkable is that I've been AWOL for much of May, June and July. I've been spending a lot of time in Zazzle, creating new stores and products to go in them, followed by two weeks in the West Country. Then I was ill for a week when I got back.

During this time - perhaps for the first time since being a Wizzley author - I haven't been boosting my internet traffic via Twitterfeed. No good reason for that, other than sheer laziness. I should be doing it. That I'm not means that we're seeing my Wizzley traffic in a very natural state.

In short, even without all of the promotion and a much slower pace of writing, I'm still attracting over 1000 readers a day.  Imagine how high those stats would be, if I was actually trying right now.

It is a little discouraging to see the short term graph falling, but frankly I only have myself to blame for that. The 7, 30 and 90 day statistics are always reliant upon me actually writing something. As I've slowed down somewhat during this period, then they've fallen accordingly.

But not very far. They are each higher than the same data collected at 550 articles, when I was most certainly still going at break-neck speed. In other words, I'm doing less, but finding more readers - no doubt because my older articles are gradually maturing and ripening in the search engine results.

Also they were always going to be lower than the figures collected at 600 articles, which included the boost of the Halloween to Christmas period. There's always increased traffic there. Not to mention that I was working flat out during it.

In conclusion, I'm more than happy, and very encouraged, by digging down into these stats. Onwards and upwards!