Blog Carnival Started for eHow Writers

One lovely eHow writer has started an eHow blog carnival, something that I wish I had thought to do a year ago. I plan on hosting it as well at some point. I missed the Sunday deadline for the next one (oops!), but there are supposed to be plenty more after the next one.

Getting involved in blog carnivals is a good way to build a few links, and it may even bring in a few readers. I have been participating in a writing blog carnival for some time, and my writing blog has pretty good search engine placement, though I don't know that it has brought in many readers through the links alone. If you are already bookmarking to get links, consider finding a blog carnival to get more free links as well as to talk to other eHow writers.

Surprise! Your Article Sucks

Well, I got notification a few hours ago that eHow cut another one of my articles. I was actually relieved that they cut only one this time. eHow is notorious for cutting huge numbers of articles every time they do a cleansing of the site. I have heard of people losing 20 and 30 articles in one day because of these episodes. The most I have ever lost at once is six, and that was really pretty inexplicable. This time, it's more splicable.

Long ago, eHow would tell you that an article was cut and then tell you why. I lost one because it talked about a site that competes with eHow. Fine. I put it up elsewhere and won an award for it. It does very well there. Thanks, eHow! Then, they stopped telling eHow writers which articles were cut. I had two cut once and I never found out which ones they were. After almost two hours of trying to figure it out, I had to let it go. Two articles are unpublished and that work is down the drain.

Understandably, eHow writers revolted against this and left the site in droves. Freelance writers can't expect to get every article they write to find a home, but any writer deserves better than this. The site decided to go back to telling writers which article they were cutting, but not why. There was another revolt and a landslide of questions sent to the site. They do now tell writers why the articles were cut and what the articles were.

That's a what freelance writers deserve, but it didn't take the sting out of getting an article cut today. The reason it was cut? "Poorly written." After a double take and a "no they di'int," I looked at the article. It kind of sucked. It was actually very in depth and informative, but it was so keyword heavy that it was awkward to read. I don't like seeing that, so it actually was a good lesson. I went from not enough keywords to bring in the money to the right amount to too many. It's time to backtrack and look at the articles from the reader's perspective.

I may have said this before, but I'll say it again- always, always keep a backup of every article in a Word or Open Office file. If you have an article cut, you can always place it elsewhere. I've placed almost all of mine in other places, giving me more streams of passive income. So, in the end, it's not so bad. The work won't go to waste if you can submit the article elsewhere, and it does give you the diversification of income that is important to freelance writers.