Wizzley - an alternative to squidoo?

I've been looking at this for a while. Squidoo provides a regular income, while Hubpages has fallen straight down the ranks and has no traffic. Bukisa no longer works for users outside the US, so I need to find an alternative. At first site, Wizzley, another "write articles and share the revenue" site looks ideal. It's easy to use, has multiple affiliate set ups and can be picked up in no time. I even have an account on there.

However there is one reason I am doubtful about Wizzley, and it is their revenue share model. You input your afiliate codes and 40-50% of the time Wizzley subsitutes their own. If, like me, probability tends to work against you you can probably understand why I won't use sites that use this model.

This isn't to say this model is a scam. However it can easily be broken in the hosting site's favour - if it's a 50% share on time and their codes are put in at periods of high traffic, if there's a glitch that means their affiliate overrides yours (e.g. if they've used a HTTP_Referrer model for an affiliate site it wouldn't matter whose code was showing, they get the sale), if it's not a random 50% and they take the customers most likely to purchase...

My main reason however is more personal. Chance does not work in my favour e.g. I don't win raffles, lotteries or even tombolas. It's something of a talking point among friends. It even stretches to affiliate marketing.

I tried this model before and, being cynical, used products where I could access click and sales records. What happened was interesting, specifically that I did not get a single clickthru in the entire 3 month period. However, there were nine clickthrus from the link and seven purchases - all credited to the site in question. With another example, the Amazon.co.uk solution I used was supposed to swap my links out 25% of the time - in practice the sales and clicks I got were credited solely to them. When I switched to my own links I suddenly got a healthy amount of traffic and sales. There was no fraud in either case, and believe me I looked!

Given all this, I will happily work with sites that split revenue 50/50. That gives us both an incentive to maximise revenue. Splitting views 50/50? I'm less keen.

Now I could put the Bukisa articles up without affiliate links, for backlinks and traffic. However there are more popular sites for both at the moment. I'm moving away from a site that offers 100% revenue to the author, and I don't think Wizzley's 60% of clicks is a reasonable alternative. Other sites I should be looking at include Helium and others, but at this point I'm more tempted to move the Bukisa articles to Associated Content with links to my other pages embedded in them. The articles might be syndicated for free, but the traffic boost and the backlinks would help, and Associated Content still gets the most hits on the web for that.

Even allowing for all this, there is one other way to use sites with this model that does work, and can provide revenue, and that is for promotion of your other sites. If it is your product you are discussing or linking to, then whoever gets the affiliate sale, you still benefit. And, of course, these articles are all worth backlinks and hopefully traffic.

This is why I've just put my first Wizzley article up, and will be watching its performance carefully. Depending on how well it does, I'll put up an assessment of how easy it was to use (definitely more like Hubpages than Squidoo), but my initial thoughts so far sum up roughly as: Squidoo for revenue, Wizzley for adverts.

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