Thursday, September 3, 2009

August Earnings Update, Some eHow Tips & eHow is Not Forever

Hi! I'm here. We were busy in August, out of town ALOT. There was a wedding, a vacation on the pristine beaches of Lake Michigan, and a writer's conference. There wasn't a lot of internet access.

Fortunately, I worked my butt off in early August and had 15 new articles on ehow as well as wrote niche content. While I was out watching my toddler go swimming for the first time and bust a move on the dance floor at the wedding reception, I earned $40.

My total ehow earnings this month were $110, down $30 from last month because my time sensitive moneymaker died.

Adsense was close to $30 for the same reason, time ran out on the money train. *sob*

It will be interesting to see how earnings go this month now that I'm not raking it in anymore.

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Some eHow Tips

Here are some simple eHow tips for newbies:

1. Make sure your link to your other articles in the resources section. For example, all parenting related articles, should be interlinked.

2. You can also choose your articles as 'related articles' when you first publish content on eHow. It's a bit awkward to do, but well worth the effort. Note that, from what I understand, this has to be done the first time you publish as you can't go back and edit the related articles later. (Note: You can still edit your content, just not the related articles.)

3.Link from blogs and websites back to your eHow articles. I've been using my niche blogs for back links and I think this has helped. Out of the last 10 articles I wrote, I have three at or over $1--one is almost at $5.  9 out of the 10 articles have earning something, at least $0.40.  This is much faster than it was when I started, I think in part due to the backlinking I now do as well as, I think/hope/pray, concurrent improvement in my SEO skills.

If you don't have a blog, start one for each of the main topics you write about on ehow (i.e. a Parenting blog, a cooking blog, etc..).  Segregating topics, in my opinion, helps create targeted traffic and ad clicks as opposed to just one blog where you dump everything all together--SEO is not a pot luck! I think topic matters.

Anyway...Use a free blogging platform like Blogger. Put one or two original articles on it that have been SEO-ified so that google will rank your blog for that topic. Then post links back to your ehow content.

Do NOT put adsense on these blogs as you could risk losing your account for TOS violations.

This will give you a bump in the rankings for a minimum amount of work, but realize it will take some time to see results. The blogs I'm using have some good google ranked content on them, so I get a boost, I think, fairly quickly from my backlinks, but that took some time and sweat.

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eHow is Not Forever.

The latest article sweeps at eHow continue to highlight the company's flawed business model and poor customer relations. I think it is unwise to go into a business that depends on public goodwill and then piss all over that goodwill and tell people to shove it. However, someone at eHow thinks this is a sublime business paradigm.

I understand eHow thinks they are doing everything ethically and responsibly, but the complaints are mounting as are the examples that show eHow management to be capricious and untrustworthy,which means something is not working.

Is it just me or do you ever picture the eHow staff as a group of twenty somethings with no kids, a surfing habit, and growing marijuana on the balcony of their apartment so they can toke up during smoke breaks at work?  Okay, maybe that was off base, but I've been to the West Coast several times and have seen that dynamic in companies there. I'm just trying to understand how they make the decisions they do.

eHow is the glitchiest site I've ever seen. They routinely take days to answer questions. They are now deleting articles that shouldn't have been deleted and they don't seem to care. Or, if they do, that is not the impression eHow contributors are getting.

Having also worked on the Demand Studios side of eHow, I can attest to the fact that DS is just as quirky. It's a pervasive problem that has permeated the company culture.

eHow needs to revamp their business model with an eye to treating contributors, who have many many many options to take their work elsewhere, with respect. Just because there are a lot of spammers doesn't justify treating every single writer as one. I'd like to remind eHow (and DS) that Quality Control isn't only important for their writers, it's important for them too.

And just so no one thinks I have sour grapes, I have not lost any articles in the sweeps, although I'm sure my time is coming.

2 comments:

  1. I know how you feel with the article sweeps. I have mixed feelings on it. On one hand I know they need to keep up quality standards, but it seems sometimes they take down decent articles while leaving garbage ones up.

    I think they need to be more transparent in how they do things. If you think about it though, it's probably difficult for them to decide to remove articles that are making money for them as well (if you make $100/mo from an article, they are making at least double that from that article). But if they lose their credibility on the web, we all suffer.

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  2. The eHow sweeps are certianly frustrating, as are the site glitches (currently, my articles won't publish!) and yet, the site is excellent for building residual income.

    I recommend that writers contribute to eHow as well as build up their own niche sites and blogs. While they may not earn as much as eHow articles at first, with time a good collection of niche content sites can be your key to a full-time onlien income.

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