After the furor over users who found lenses on squidoo about how to make pipe bombs (more here) I'm stepping back from lenses to work on other projects for a few days.
The hatchery code is nearly there. Magistream is pretty much complete and I've thrown it out for an open test.
DragonCave is proving trickier, as "check all" options aren't going to be as simple as I thought. The Javascript doesn't like picking up the checkbox, due to the PHP array code linked to it, so I'm looking at work arounds. Multiple pages for the hatchery are still in development - the database can handle it but the PHP doesn't want to.
I've also had a tester ask what happens if bandwidth starts getting expensive. Well, that's when adverts start appearing in footers. Sorry, but I'm not paying to hatch other people's creatures!
Otherwise I've got several blogs, a set of articles and an ebook to update, so it isn't as if I'm not busy.
Update - 10:37. Dragon Cave: Fixed check all, added a "find by scroll", added images, and still need to fix that dratted pagination!
And all of this without counting the 5,000 words I feel I owe Nano.
Wednesday 30 November 2011
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Nano...Over...?
This was not expected: apparently I just won NanoWriMo. My word count says I'm only on 40,000 words, so I think their count is off. Still, I haven't finished the story, so I will keep writing and see if I can get my count to the target level.
Monday 28 November 2011
More coding
Some more writing done, although Nano looks like it's turning into a set of linked short stories more than a novel. Trying to code and write at the same time is really cutting into my time.
The hatchery now has a manual "remove creatures" option for both magistream and Dragon Cave, and a check for Dragon Cave's little trees. There are a few changes under the hood to give it a few more automatic admin features (validation mostly), and I have a very long list of changes and nice-to-haves to add in from my testers.
I also need to add a thank you page for them - without them it would not be at a point where I could add it to my lenses...
The hatchery now has a manual "remove creatures" option for both magistream and Dragon Cave, and a check for Dragon Cave's little trees. There are a few changes under the hood to give it a few more automatic admin features (validation mostly), and I have a very long list of changes and nice-to-haves to add in from my testers.
I also need to add a thank you page for them - without them it would not be at a point where I could add it to my lenses...
Sunday 27 November 2011
Coding a hatchery
There are a few things to work on, like integration with lenses which will probably be handled with RSS, and badges/banners etc. Then there are advanced features, an emergency room, manually removing creatures before they are adult etc.
Still it's halfway working so hopefully I'll have some tests on the way shortly.
Friday 25 November 2011
Should v Will
- be keeping traffic numbers up for the blogs for Project Wonderful
- be writing more squidoo lenses
- be building backlinks to promote my pages
- be writing more Wizzley pages.
Instead, since I got very little writing done recently, I will be doing Nano.
50,000 words. 5 days left. Tight deadline...
Time to type!
Updates:
10:49 am, 1,200 Words.
11:30 am, 2,130 Words
Thursday 24 November 2011
Smashwords
A new lens, largely because I spotted a URL free that was too good to pass up.
A review of my currently preferred publishing plaform, ways to use it, what's in it for readers and more - including their affiliate scheme. I was rather stunned to find the URL available, as it had been "Under Construction" the last few times I looked.
With a search engine friendly title, a good UR, and hopefully useful original content, I'm pretty happy about this lens.
What I did find today were a few typos in the added content for Great Western Railway. Unfortunately, as I am going to be rather busy today, they won't get fixed until Friday.
The other thing I need to ask - would anyone be interested in a print version of these? It would probably have to be Lulu again since I'm not made of funds, but it is doable. What I need to know is, would it be useful?
A review of my currently preferred publishing plaform, ways to use it, what's in it for readers and more - including their affiliate scheme. I was rather stunned to find the URL available, as it had been "Under Construction" the last few times I looked.
With a search engine friendly title, a good UR, and hopefully useful original content, I'm pretty happy about this lens.
What I did find today were a few typos in the added content for Great Western Railway. Unfortunately, as I am going to be rather busy today, they won't get fixed until Friday.
The other thing I need to ask - would anyone be interested in a print version of these? It would probably have to be Lulu again since I'm not made of funds, but it is doable. What I need to know is, would it be useful?
Wednesday 23 November 2011
A new lens, a book launch, a new ebook and a busy week
A new lens went up:
This is a reworking of the 2009 lens about Lens Companions. After I looked at the lens companions lens I realised just how out of date it was, and that the URL was no longer appropriate either. So I created a new lens for these ebooks. It has also replaced the blog as the Ciamar Price homepage on Smashwords, as squidoo has a higher pagerank so will send more visitors to the ebooks, but also because any visitors to the lens mean that I get a small share of royalties. It also has a Paypal "coffee jar", largely because a few readers get very suspicious about anything free and want to know the catch.
For the original lens I plan to write an ebook about lens creation and tips and use the lens for that, along with a few other people's titles, rather than waste the work and URL.
To celebrate the new lens, and as if I didn't have enough on with a book launch tomorrow (just in case you'd somehow managed to avoid hearing about it), I've just released another ebook.
The Great Western Railway is a rewrite of the original lulu title. It is currently working its way through Smashwords processing and distribution to flag up any formatting issues that I need to correct.
If you want an advance look, the ebook can be found here:
I'm also investigating an issue with Project Wonderful that will affect blogs that have erratic traffic, like some of mine, but I want one more piece of test data before blogging that.
This is a reworking of the 2009 lens about Lens Companions. After I looked at the lens companions lens I realised just how out of date it was, and that the URL was no longer appropriate either. So I created a new lens for these ebooks. It has also replaced the blog as the Ciamar Price homepage on Smashwords, as squidoo has a higher pagerank so will send more visitors to the ebooks, but also because any visitors to the lens mean that I get a small share of royalties. It also has a Paypal "coffee jar", largely because a few readers get very suspicious about anything free and want to know the catch.
For the original lens I plan to write an ebook about lens creation and tips and use the lens for that, along with a few other people's titles, rather than waste the work and URL.
To celebrate the new lens, and as if I didn't have enough on with a book launch tomorrow (just in case you'd somehow managed to avoid hearing about it), I've just released another ebook.
The Great Western Railway is a rewrite of the original lulu title. It is currently working its way through Smashwords processing and distribution to flag up any formatting issues that I need to correct.
If you want an advance look, the ebook can be found here:
I'm also investigating an issue with Project Wonderful that will affect blogs that have erratic traffic, like some of mine, but I want one more piece of test data before blogging that.
Tuesday 22 November 2011
Squidoo referrals button in a module.
I've made a change across all the squidoo LensLove modules, adding a Join Squidoo button. Most of my lenses have no sign up button, but the ones that do get a lot of referrals, so it seemed a good (and unobtrusive) place to put one across all my titles. I also added a Digg button, although at the moment that does little more than open Digg in a new window.
I'm looking at adding a few distinct buttons to the bookmark module, including Tweet, just to make things easier for users. After all if I had to click through three times just to get to the bookmark site I want to use, I wouldn't, so why ask my users to?
Regarding ebooks, Early Railways just had its 500th Smashwords download. The story of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway, the Surrey Iron Railway and a few others it is my second most popular lens companion.
I'm still working on the Great Western re-release. Every time I get down to it, something else comes up.
I'm looking at adding a few distinct buttons to the bookmark module, including Tweet, just to make things easier for users. After all if I had to click through three times just to get to the bookmark site I want to use, I wouldn't, so why ask my users to?
Regarding ebooks, Early Railways just had its 500th Smashwords download. The story of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway, the Surrey Iron Railway and a few others it is my second most popular lens companion.
I'm still working on the Great Western re-release. Every time I get down to it, something else comes up.
Saturday 19 November 2011
Mini sinks and Basins
That's right, a wizzley page on DIY. I'm not sure why I did this one on Wizzley rather than squidoo, except that it just seemed to fit the layout better.
Micro sinks and basins - all about tiny sinks for cloackrooms, half baths and converting waterclosets into either. These are sinks with less than 9 inches projection from the wall, but which are still useable by most people.
Micro sinks and basins - all about tiny sinks for cloackrooms, half baths and converting waterclosets into either. These are sinks with less than 9 inches projection from the wall, but which are still useable by most people.
Friday 18 November 2011
Squidoo lenses and OpenGraph
The first thing to mention is that Squidoo have tried to tie up with Facebook's Opengraph. We are all meant to classify our lenses to make it easier for Facebook to learn about the type of people who visit out lenses. If you do classify them, you can't go back and remove the tag, and it seems this gets you no extra traffic.
It hasn't been greeted with overwhelming joy by lensmasters. There was initial scepticism followed by a disturbing update that lensmasterswho used it actually saw their traffic drop.
I haven't used it. I'm not going to. I'm not a fan of facebook.
On a brighter note, here's a revamped and newly-live lens. I do feel rather like I was conned into making this one: It had been carefully run down, lensrank around 700K, I was geting ready to delete it, when I got told it had been selected for the winter magazine. I spent two hours revamping it instead of fixing the bust "Like" module on my lenses. Then I found out it wouldn't show up anyway because it's rank was too low.
It was certainly more fun looking at cat pictures then wading through code, though!
Since there was a debate going on about how good the magazines are for promotion I also fixed up the lens below it that wasn't selected for the magazine, Madeira for Christmas. Comparing the traffic patterns for these two could be very interesting.
It hasn't been greeted with overwhelming joy by lensmasters. There was initial scepticism followed by a disturbing update that lensmasterswho used it actually saw their traffic drop.
I haven't used it. I'm not going to. I'm not a fan of facebook.
On a brighter note, here's a revamped and newly-live lens. I do feel rather like I was conned into making this one: It had been carefully run down, lensrank around 700K, I was geting ready to delete it, when I got told it had been selected for the winter magazine. I spent two hours revamping it instead of fixing the bust "Like" module on my lenses. Then I found out it wouldn't show up anyway because it's rank was too low.
It was certainly more fun looking at cat pictures then wading through code, though!
Since there was a debate going on about how good the magazines are for promotion I also fixed up the lens below it that wasn't selected for the magazine, Madeira for Christmas. Comparing the traffic patterns for these two could be very interesting.
Thursday 17 November 2011
A new page on Wizzley - A redgage review
I wasn't exactly going to review Redgage on Redgage, and Squidoo has a lot of lenses on the social bookmarking site already, so I found another use for Wizzley. For all those articles I wanted to write on crowded topics elsewhere, as a new site it is a pretty ideal home.
I will point out that these are only my personal views, which can be summed up as great for promotion but you can have serious problems outside the US if you actually expect to get paid:
I will point out that these are only my personal views, which can be summed up as great for promotion but you can have serious problems outside the US if you actually expect to get paid:
Wednesday 16 November 2011
One IP != One computer
Not so much a rant as an observation.
I don't know if this works differently in the UK to the US, but IP tracking on many pieces of software need to be fixed - badly.
The example I am going to use is an office building in London with six hundred people and about the same number of PCs. Because of the firewall it will display one IP (cloaked) to the outside world.
And everytime you log in, google tries to amalgamate the accounts of every user in the building. A notable vBulletin mess-up meant that if one person forgot their password and locked themselves out of their account, the forum locked the entire company out - including people who were already logged in and currently using it. Nabble was a lot of fun, if by fun you mean all posts from that address showing up as the last user from that IP...the forum certainly made it look as though there was one incredibly prolific user talking to themself a lot (we're talking six or seven simul-posts).
One competition, run by the a US individual, accused me of cheating for getting fourteen votes from one IP. When I mentioned that was the local college, they shut up. (The computer lab had 30 PCs - it was easy to prove the cookies were set by different user profiles on different machines...)
This idea that one IP equals one computer isn't true - at least for any company or individual with decent security. It might equal one gateway or one network hub, but you won't see past that.
Then you encounter the idea that one computer equals one person, and so all accounts on it can be combined, which is so wrong I am baffled. Families. Libraries. Web Cafes. Many users on each machine.
On the technical side it can also go the other way: Multiple network cards and backup ISPs mean that one machine can have multiple IP addresses. User profiles and browsers can be split down easily. It's how I finally stopped certain parties trying to combine my personal account with the ones I manage for third parties.
There used to be an option to mark a machine "shared" or "public". Many websites seem to have removed this, assuming that nowadays all the data they capture from an IP is specific to a user.
Could I suggest that they go back to the old sensible method of using what their users actually tell them? If you are logged in, then they know it's you. Otherwise it could be the janitor or the CEO at your place of work, any of a thousand college students, or anyone who uses the same webcafe. Otherwise companies are just making assumptions, and there's an old saying about people who assume...
I don't know if this works differently in the UK to the US, but IP tracking on many pieces of software need to be fixed - badly.
The example I am going to use is an office building in London with six hundred people and about the same number of PCs. Because of the firewall it will display one IP (cloaked) to the outside world.
And everytime you log in, google tries to amalgamate the accounts of every user in the building. A notable vBulletin mess-up meant that if one person forgot their password and locked themselves out of their account, the forum locked the entire company out - including people who were already logged in and currently using it. Nabble was a lot of fun, if by fun you mean all posts from that address showing up as the last user from that IP...the forum certainly made it look as though there was one incredibly prolific user talking to themself a lot (we're talking six or seven simul-posts).
One competition, run by the a US individual, accused me of cheating for getting fourteen votes from one IP. When I mentioned that was the local college, they shut up. (The computer lab had 30 PCs - it was easy to prove the cookies were set by different user profiles on different machines...)
This idea that one IP equals one computer isn't true - at least for any company or individual with decent security. It might equal one gateway or one network hub, but you won't see past that.
Then you encounter the idea that one computer equals one person, and so all accounts on it can be combined, which is so wrong I am baffled. Families. Libraries. Web Cafes. Many users on each machine.
On the technical side it can also go the other way: Multiple network cards and backup ISPs mean that one machine can have multiple IP addresses. User profiles and browsers can be split down easily. It's how I finally stopped certain parties trying to combine my personal account with the ones I manage for third parties.
There used to be an option to mark a machine "shared" or "public". Many websites seem to have removed this, assuming that nowadays all the data they capture from an IP is specific to a user.
Could I suggest that they go back to the old sensible method of using what their users actually tell them? If you are logged in, then they know it's you. Otherwise it could be the janitor or the CEO at your place of work, any of a thousand college students, or anyone who uses the same webcafe. Otherwise companies are just making assumptions, and there's an old saying about people who assume...
Saturday 12 November 2011
The fine line between syndication and stealing
I am absolutely furious.
One of my articles is on the second page of search results of google. It hasn't had a hit in months. The first page of search results are "syndicated" versions. This shouldn't annoy me, after all it is available through creative commons.
What does annoy me is that the licence the article is available under only allows reprints if it is attributed and backlinked. Half of them don't mention I am the author. The other half do, but don't link to any of my profiles or the original - they link to their own. They copied it, pasted it, killed my links and then couldn't even follow the licence on a free article.
Filing DMCA would be difficult. People like this rely on the fact that if you file DMCA through Google your name and address will promptly be given out publicly online. All the data serious crooks actually need to make someone's life difficult, neatly up there on one downloadable form. The article thieves don't have to do anything - the identity thieves pounce in seconds. (Proof that governments are way behind on online crime)
On the other hand, the article that's been "syndicated" is under licence by the host who initially displayed it. Therefore they can take action, without this issue, and have just been kicked in that direction. Failure to defend your IP is a good way for an article site to die, since no one puts content on places that don't look after it.
And if they don't take action? I'l be rather public and very loud about the fact they don't defend their IP.
The article is here: An Evolution of Diving Games
Valid attribution links are this,
An Evolution of Diving Games written by tirial on bukisa
or this:
Written by tirial
Non valid:
"Written by Tirial" and linked to someone else's profile on your own site!
Here's an example of a site with a valid attribution:
An Evolution of Diving Games on Wizzley
Excuse the frothing. When something is free to share anyway, and you have to go out of your way to breach the licence deliberately, that's someone trying to hurt an author and deceive their readers, not someone after something for free.
So if you are one of the people hosting this, whether you removed the attribution or you didn't know where the original was from, consider this fair warning to add the backlink. One line (that was in the original) is all you have to add to be inside the licence.
But, bloody hell guys, even book pirates usually manage to get the author right!
One of my articles is on the second page of search results of google. It hasn't had a hit in months. The first page of search results are "syndicated" versions. This shouldn't annoy me, after all it is available through creative commons.
What does annoy me is that the licence the article is available under only allows reprints if it is attributed and backlinked. Half of them don't mention I am the author. The other half do, but don't link to any of my profiles or the original - they link to their own. They copied it, pasted it, killed my links and then couldn't even follow the licence on a free article.
Filing DMCA would be difficult. People like this rely on the fact that if you file DMCA through Google your name and address will promptly be given out publicly online. All the data serious crooks actually need to make someone's life difficult, neatly up there on one downloadable form. The article thieves don't have to do anything - the identity thieves pounce in seconds. (Proof that governments are way behind on online crime)
On the other hand, the article that's been "syndicated" is under licence by the host who initially displayed it. Therefore they can take action, without this issue, and have just been kicked in that direction. Failure to defend your IP is a good way for an article site to die, since no one puts content on places that don't look after it.
And if they don't take action? I'l be rather public and very loud about the fact they don't defend their IP.
The article is here: An Evolution of Diving Games
Valid attribution links are this,
An Evolution of Diving Games written by tirial on bukisa
or this:
Written by tirial
Non valid:
"Written by Tirial" and linked to someone else's profile on your own site!
Here's an example of a site with a valid attribution:
An Evolution of Diving Games on Wizzley
Excuse the frothing. When something is free to share anyway, and you have to go out of your way to breach the licence deliberately, that's someone trying to hurt an author and deceive their readers, not someone after something for free.
So if you are one of the people hosting this, whether you removed the attribution or you didn't know where the original was from, consider this fair warning to add the backlink. One line (that was in the original) is all you have to add to be inside the licence.
But, bloody hell guys, even book pirates usually manage to get the author right!
Friday 11 November 2011
Lest we forget
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the twenty-first century.
The ninetieth anniversary of the Royal British Legion.
Wear your poppy with pride.
The ninetieth anniversary of the Royal British Legion.
Wear your poppy with pride.
Thursday 10 November 2011
Google, Bing and a song
I am not a happy person right now, after finding one of my articles pushed to the third page of search results - by stolen copies of itself.
Now I have already had problems with the massively inappropriate ad content google have served on my blogs, so my patience was stretched. My current feelings towards Google are difficult to sum up - but after their last set of Adsense tokens arrived right after they failed to act on copyright over this, I've got MacAlmont and Butler's "Yes" playing in the background.
Yes I do feel better
After all, Google may have asked me to publicly disclose my name, address and all those details that identity thieves love so Google can put them online(?!) before they will act on copyright. This seems rather like if your wallet is stolen, the police insisting that you have to hand the thief your name and address and display them on a billboard in the town square before the authorities will take action and return your goods.
Yes I do, I feel alright
And it's not as if Bing took a look at the comparable article dates and licence, and nuked the offending sites from their search results - oh wait... Well it would have been nice if Google did the same, since they are making so much noise about their new algorhythm being able to detect content freshness, which would logically let it detect the earliest occurrance of an article and therefore a have good idea of its originating source...
Anyway excuse me, I hear a refrain.
I feel well enough to tell you what you can do with what you've got to offer...
*Lyrics from McAlmont and Butler's Yes (Full Version)
which I have on repeat right now. It's soothing.
Monday 7 November 2011
Redgage - an update, earnings and backlinks
Anyone who follows me on redgage might have noticed that I am currently putting all my lenses up. This is because of a change of approach, because of some information I received at the weekend that does change the site's value to me.
Initially I was spacing these out to ensure I got decent earnings and exposure to each. After I got my first Redgage card (and all the fun with that) I kept doing this because I thought it was a problem that could be solved. In summary: it can't. Visa US doesn't recognise my UK address so the card can't validate, unless I want to make a fifteen minute phone call to the US at about $5 per minute, every time I withdrew money...
The earnings just became worthless. The backlinks aren't, so I'm putting all my lenses on there now to get the boost before Christmas.
Initially I was spacing these out to ensure I got decent earnings and exposure to each. After I got my first Redgage card (and all the fun with that) I kept doing this because I thought it was a problem that could be solved. In summary: it can't. Visa US doesn't recognise my UK address so the card can't validate, unless I want to make a fifteen minute phone call to the US at about $5 per minute, every time I withdrew money...
The earnings just became worthless. The backlinks aren't, so I'm putting all my lenses on there now to get the boost before Christmas.
Thursday 3 November 2011
More thoughts on Wizzley
A second Wizzley page, this time about a certain set of free non-fiction ebooks:
My general thoughts are that the interface is easy to use. It reminds me more of hubpages than squidoo, particularly with positioning. The modules are not as flexible as the squidoo versions, but it has a better range of options than hubpages. It takes European affiliates as well as US, which is a big advantage to me since I'm UK-based.
That said, the Ciamar Price page is up mainly for backlinks. If you have a site that pays you credit for some of your affiliate sales against a site that pays 50% of all sales and a percentage for traffic, it is basic business sense to put the serious content on the latter.
The other good reason to put Wizzley pages up? There's one thing squidoo can't do: spread your risk. If Squidoo goes down or is bought out, you could lose your sites. It's as well to have an established presence on another site as a fallback.
However for now I'm back working on Squidoo. It turns out that Google no longer reads the "About me" module, which means a lot of my backlinks have vanished. I built a handcoded alternative, put it live on 70+ lenses this morning, and republished them. Now I have to do the rest. This is the problem with having a lot of lenses: the time it takes to do manual updates to all of them.
Other things done since yesterday? Added a Magistream Image-free Mine to the Cat Blog. Although the charity mine works well, some users can't deal with issues squidoo throws up so after discovering I can't really fix them, I mirrored the mine on a page where I had more control. I've got a few ideas for converting my "Translate Lens" module into a real module, which are underway.
And I'm still planning events, writing new stuff and other tings, including a new project in the planning stages since last night. The only problem with the idea is whether our servers could handle the potential load, or if we'd have to move to a larger dedicated server. The technie in me likes the idea of new hardware anyway, it's just my business sense that objects.
My general thoughts are that the interface is easy to use. It reminds me more of hubpages than squidoo, particularly with positioning. The modules are not as flexible as the squidoo versions, but it has a better range of options than hubpages. It takes European affiliates as well as US, which is a big advantage to me since I'm UK-based.
That said, the Ciamar Price page is up mainly for backlinks. If you have a site that pays you credit for some of your affiliate sales against a site that pays 50% of all sales and a percentage for traffic, it is basic business sense to put the serious content on the latter.
The other good reason to put Wizzley pages up? There's one thing squidoo can't do: spread your risk. If Squidoo goes down or is bought out, you could lose your sites. It's as well to have an established presence on another site as a fallback.
However for now I'm back working on Squidoo. It turns out that Google no longer reads the "About me" module, which means a lot of my backlinks have vanished. I built a handcoded alternative, put it live on 70+ lenses this morning, and republished them. Now I have to do the rest. This is the problem with having a lot of lenses: the time it takes to do manual updates to all of them.
Other things done since yesterday? Added a Magistream Image-free Mine to the Cat Blog. Although the charity mine works well, some users can't deal with issues squidoo throws up so after discovering I can't really fix them, I mirrored the mine on a page where I had more control. I've got a few ideas for converting my "Translate Lens" module into a real module, which are underway.
And I'm still planning events, writing new stuff and other tings, including a new project in the planning stages since last night. The only problem with the idea is whether our servers could handle the potential load, or if we'd have to move to a larger dedicated server. The technie in me likes the idea of new hardware anyway, it's just my business sense that objects.
Wednesday 2 November 2011
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.
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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