Tips and Tricks After 700 Pages on Wizzley

My last fifty Wizzley articles have all been part of the Challenge, as promised during the Tips and Tricks for 650 pages.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this was also the period when my Wizzley earnings took off into the stratosphere.

I've been sitting here with my jaw constantly dropping, as each new commission record was consistently smashed. The speed of it truly took my breath away.

Ok, it's been many months coming - years in fact - but other factors have played into those circumstances.

But when it went, it seriously went. Just as the veteran writers always told me it would.

Right from the beginning, those who've been at this game for a long time assured me that this moment would come. When critical mass, time, article and site maturity etc. all come together at a tipping point. Then the slow trickle, trickle of income becomes a fast flowing river and a livelihood is just around the corner.

I heard that so often that I had faith. Yet a part of me still held back judgment until I could see it for myself. I've seen it now. By all the Gods, I've seen it now.

That steeply climbing upward rise in affiliate commission on Wizzley shows no sign of abating any time soon. Along with the cash in my bank account, it's also raising the value of each Wizzle at an astronomical velocity.

Nineteen days ago, I posted to the Wizzley forum that the average value of a Wizzley article had just drawn level with that of Bubblews. Both were cruising at $2.50. 

Wizzley is already at $2.78. For months, I've been watching it settling at around $1.50-$1.60. But these past few weeks have been it visibly shooting upwards. Just over a fortnight added that 28c.  I'll try to remember to include this figure each Tips and Tricks, so you can chart the on-going climb for yourselves.

Incidentally, Bubblews is still at $2.50 at the time of writing.

• I do not have Google Adsense. Those with it are making considerably more than me. I was told, when Google took my account during the first month (I blogged about riots happening outside my door; Google thought to shut me up), that no-one can survive as an online writer without Google's approval. I do NOT give up at Google's say-so, and I will make a livelihood. THAT company can go run.
• Wizzley was a new site when I began. It takes a year at least for articles to mature, and that's on established websites.  More properly, it takes two or more years. Therefore it's 2014 before we could even begin to cite Wizzley as gaining momentum in the SERPs. In addition, the writing platform leaked writers during 2012. Once Hubpages steadied, all of those authors who'd previously ranted about that site quietly disappeared back into it.
• I was a new writer when I began.  I only started this lark in August 2011. I've been here learning my craft, making my mistakes and applying my lessons. You know this, as you've watched it happen via the Tips and Tricks articles. You're seeing me become established as much as Wizzley.

In short, do not look at my chart and assume it will take you that long to hit the upward momentum moment. It will probably occur much sooner for you.

Of course, we can't truly know until it happens. There are too few figures to calculate a yearly growth average, thus the projection is only the 3rd year percentage rise repeated onto the 4th and 5th years. It could be a whole lot more; it could be less.

Won't it be exciting finding out?

The Fifty Article Challenge on Wizzley was launched under the header One Way to Become a Successful Wizzley Writer. It was conceived to answer a perennial query - how do you make money on Wizzley?

Additionally it addressed an issue which was current in the Wizzley forum at the time (and had long since been popping up in private messages to me). That was new writers on Wizzley staring at blank pages, too overwhelmed to fill their portfolios here. They had no idea what kind of things to write, but they did want to earn a livelihood here.

That's where the Challenge came in. It handed fifty topic prompts on a plate. Everything from the subject matter to the order in which each article came was designed to maximize earning potential here. Job done.

So why would I do it?  Because madness, and the fact that the Wizzley forum at the time was abuzz with people signing up for it. I got carried away in all of the excitement and offered to do it too. After all, I'd written it. It seemed only fair.

Plus I thought it would be fun, doing it with so many other people. Friendly competition, mutual support, propping up those flagging and all that.

Naturally I did the whole thing alone. No-one else made it past the starting gate.  It's been restrictive and very hard work. There were times in the middle when I wanted to give up too. There were days when I couldn't even bear to log onto Wizzley, because it was lurking there like a big, dark cloud penning me in.

I had friends in the background, cheering me on, promising day-trips and whisky the second this was over. I had my commission earnings taking off with ever increasing velocity.

Then it was over.

And amongst those fifty articles are my best earners yet. It fulfilled its promise without waiting a whole year to get there. I'm glad I did it. Not least for the flooded inbox of well wishing friends, a fabulous day out to Llangollen, and whisky mead guzzled with aplomb.

It's all too easy to concentrate our monetization on Amazon, Zazzle, AllPosters and eBay alone. The modules are right there.

But these are the online stores which every other Wizzley writer is plundering too. You are going to end up lost in the competition.

Far more hassle to contemplate are the millions of choices opening up when you head into the VigLink market for monetization possibilities.

You have to jump from store to store in order to find applicable products. Then copy the images and upload them yourself. It's always seemed too much to do, when I'm rushing around trying to find something just to shove into an article to make it financially worth the writing.

There's a lot more sense in this than is immediately apparent too. If Amazon or Zazzle went down tomorrow - or you lost your access to their catalogs - how well would your Wizzley monetization avenues hold up? 

VigLink allows us to hedge our bets.

Finally I did something about it. Inspired by Digby's forum posts, I wrote two of my Pagan wedding articles having first hunted through the VigLink stores after relevant handfasting gowns. I did eventually add Amazon ones in too, but not until I'd fully exploited the potential from elsewhere.

Encouraged by such great finds, I recently went through VigLink marketplaces in order to uncover products to add to my established Christmas articles on Wizzley. It took a few hours (I have A LOT of seasonal pages...), but many of them swelled quite beautifully with much greater choices for my readers. That can only be a good thing.

It's been mentioned before in my Tips and Tricks articles that it's worth your time to create thumbnails which catch the eye. Nor am I the only Wizzley author to highlight this fact. There are plenty of articles here about it.

This is the internet age of Pinterest, so pictures are all.

It's also Wizzley, where images dominate the front page and every single category. If your thumbnail has just been thrown together, then it's likely to be lost in the pretty pictures occurring all around it.

But there is a problem. Pinterest doesn't pick up those carefully crafted thumbnails as a viable image for display up its boards. The picture is too small. Which is a shame, because these are the images which probably describe your article best of all. They should certainly be the ones most deserved of your time to get right.

Hence a little tweaking is in order.

If you scroll up to the top of this Wizzley page, you'll find that I've included my thumbnail as the illustration for my first bit of text. That will ensure that there's a version large enough for Pinterest promotional purposes.

However, sometimes there isn't any room in the main body of the page for your thumbnail image. That was the case with the Halloween kids' ghost costume one up above. Nevertheless, look here.  I have a full sized version of the thumbnail gracing a Pinterest board. How?

Quite easily.

I just added it as an image at the bottom of the page. Pinned it. Then returned to Wizzley and removed said image. Job done.  The link remains attached to that pinned picture, even when the image itself has gone from the page.

Sneaky, but it works.

We're all writers, which means that very few of us are artists too.  We shouldn't beat ourselves up because we haven't an artist's instinct on what images will work, but we can watch out when we have the results to hand.

The thumbnail above is all wrong. It's way too busy, so looked terrible in my profile gallery.

Nor is it immediately obvious what's going on here. Our thumbnails are supposed to represent the writing inside. They're pictorial pointers towards the content.

Beware being too clever in GIMP, if the result is something like that shown above. Simple is probably best, as long as it's eye-catching.

Fixing the Undefined Error in Wizzley

This happens after you've uploaded a thumbnail. You get a pop up blazing the words 'undefined error' and no image apparent in the thumbnail box.  Just refresh the page. It'll remove the error and your picture will mysteriously be present.

I haven't seen this one for a while, so Simon (Wizzley's Tech bloke) may have permanently consigned it to the archives of past Wizzley glitches. 

Receiving False Positive Email Reports of Broken Links

If this seriously bugs you, then click on your name on the top toolbar. Then select 'settings' from the pull-down menu. Scroll right to the end.  Untick the box alongside 'Report invalid links'.

Please note that this won't stop the mechanism automatically discovering invalid links (false positives or not). So you will have to check your page tab for articles removed from the SERPs for containing them.

They'll be right at the end of your listed pages.

Wizzley Articles Not Accepting Valid Links

Another one driving Simon insane with trying to fix it.  In the meantime, we can hack our links in an attempt to brute force them into place.

Instead of http:// at the beginning of your URL, try https:// instead. If that fails, some authors have reported success by inserting the mobile URL instead, though that is obviously not ideal.

I had someone all signed up and ready to go on Wizzley. They'd even knocked out their first Wizzle and I waited with bated breath to see what would follow. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Eventually I asked if everything was alright. Were they stuck on anything?

Nope, came the response, it was just that they'd had time to look around. They'd been struck by the perceived age of Wizzley writers, which - from their youthful perspective - was at the decrepit end of things. "Is it the sort of site where young people write?"

Yes, it is. But perhaps they'd be more visible, if we encouraged more of them to write for Wizzley. You got any youth hanging around your 'hood doing nothing?  Let's get them onto our front page, where other late-teens/early-20s people can see them!

My stats on Wizzley just recently have been settling in around the 1600-2000 mark. Often higher, rarely lower. Which means that I've completely dodged a bullet.

I've been too busy with the Challenge, and other websites, to really promote any of this stuff.

That's a real oversight, and nothing that I'd recommend to anyone else, but - give or take the initial burst of social networking when I first publish each page - it does show my internet traffic in pretty much a natural state.

Which is apparently best summed up as 'rising'. Imagine what would be happening if I was properly running Twitterfeed too!

Well, they went up again. Surprisingly so, given my lack of promotion of late; less surprisingly so, when you factor in that it's taken me four months to do this, and we're into the holiday period. But we were that around the 550 mark too.

Looking at my page stats, I can see a couple of articles each pulling in tens of thousands of readers. Others are in the mere thousands, then down the ranks into hundreds, dozens and the odd one or two individuals.

My plan is to write more like those proving to be popular and the rest will just follow suit.