Review of Wizzley: The new online writing and earning website

I took the leap and joined the (relatively) new online writing and earning website, Wizzley last week, so I thought that I’d post my ‘early impressions’ in the form of a review of Wizzley review. Wizzley have been up and going now for over 9 months, I believe. Generally speaking, the site operates in a similar way to other online writing sites in where you can receive some degree of financial reward, such as HubPages and Squidoo - infact, if I understand correctly, Wizzley was set up by Squidoo writers.

The Wizzley site follows a similar set up to HubPages and Squidoo in many respects, essentially you write one page articles and are paid a share of the money generated by the advertising. One technical detail that’s interesting is that Wizzley have dispensed with the idea of having tags for the articles which is the traditional way that search engines decide what your article is about, before channeling searchers to them, so I am intrigued to see how well Wizzley articles perform with regard to Google and the other search engines. So far (and I know a week is not long enough to form an accurate opinion) the omens look promising.

The other thing that is striking is the make up of the writers, which is weighted towards women. Alexa describes Wizzley visitors as being disproportionately female compared to the average, but this description could just as well be used for the writers there, if one scrolls through the list. I am not in any way criticizing female writers (if anything, the standard is higher at Wizzley than most other places of a similar nature), just intrigued by why the gender balance at Wizzley falls as it does, as most writing sites tend to be more evenly split along gender lines according to my experience.

One thing that writers who are used to the big established sites like HubPages and Squidoo will notice is that Wizzley has a smaller, more intimate feel to it. Indeed, there is more human involvement with the vetting of articles. Already I have fallen foul of the strict standards and been asked to correct one of my articles on the grounds of including too many backlinks. There are relative pros and cons of both being vetted by a bot or a human (a bot is dogmatic but predictable, a human is more flexible, but can be subjective in their interpretations). I must say, though, that the personal message I received was written in a very polite and respectful tone.

Whatever the user experience of human vetting, I strongly suspect that the major search engines, such as Google, will love Wizzley because it’s difficult to slip things past a human, whereas you can follow the literal rules with a machine, without actually following the spirit of them. Whether Wizzley can maintain that level of vetting, if the site were to grow dramatically (which may well happen in my opinion), I do wonder. A large site like HubPages, for instance, would need hundreds of moderators to vet articles at such a scrupulous level.

Having been at Wizzley for only a week, I really couldn’t give you an accurate personal account of the earnings situation at Wizzley. My impression is that the earnings potential is roughly on a par with HubPages, but I couldn’t confirm that with any conviction. My impression is formed from reading what experienced writers on there have posted as their earnings. I might revisit this Wizzley review in 6 months time and give you a fuller account of my impressions regarding earnings.

There are one or two things that slightly irritate me as Wizzley user. Generally speaking the site is attractive to look at and easy to use, but there are some glitches on there that I have encountered – if I view my own page in Firefox, for instance, the right hand column on my screen keeps going out of sync. Another thing that is a little annoying is that when I insert photos or affiliate adverts into pages, there seems to be no way of automatically wrapping the text around them.

Overall, I have to say that I like Wizzley and would recommend it to other writers. The site is well run, usable, friendly and the standard of the articles seems relatively high to me. What the earning potential is I hesitate to say without more personal experience, but I consider it worth trying. Even if you are happily entrenched at another writing site such as HubPages, it can be a good idea to spread your eggs around several baskets, as the internet can be such a fickle and unpredictable place.

If you wish to join Wizzley, then I would appreciate it if you would consider doing so via my referral link (it won’t have any impact on your Wizzley account or earnings in any way, but it might earn me a few extra pennies). Thank you.