eHow U.K. and Earnings

As you may know, eHow started a U.K. site, which is a great thing for U.K. writers. But, as it turns out, it may not be so good for us. I am getting Google alerts nearly daily saying that eHow is cloning my articles for the U.K. site. And, as many eHow writers are discovering, the U.K. site is getting a higher page rank than the U.S. site.

How is this bad for us? Well, we aren't actually being paid for our articles that are being put onto the U.K. site. That's right- our articles are being taken and cloned for a site with better page rank and we aren't seeing a dime for it. This is prompting a lot of eHow writers to take their business elsewhere, and I don't really blame them. My revenues have been down slightly since this has been going on, but I will stay put for now. I am making almost as much as before from them.

However, if revenues from eHow fall any further, I may transfer some of my articles to Infobarrel. This is a site that is supposed to give you 75 percent of the Adsense revenue plus Chitika revenue. The site is getting good reviews from freelance writers, though I don't have much experience with it yet. I'm trying out a few articles with them this week to see how they stack up with eHow. If it's better, I'll report back. If it isn't, well, I'll still report back.

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.

Which Category Makes the Most Money on eHow?

I have heard a lot about the categories that people do the best with on eHow, and most of it centers on legal and medical topics. I have heard many times that legal and medical topics pay better through Google AdSense and through eHow and similar sites because of the money to be made form the ads and the competition that exists for them. I have no medical articles on eHow and a very few that could be considered legal articles, so I can't say how accurate that is from personal experience.

But, there is something that has become very clear from looking at the amount that I have made for each article. The articles that are about hobbies, personal issues, etc., make small to moderate amounts. The articles that solve very specific problems are the ones that earn the most. My top earner has now made $120 and my second highest has made almost $70. These two and all of my articles that have made more than $30 are ones that solve a problem that brought people to the Web to search for the answer.

I have written several articles about astrology and how to deal with certain signs, etc. I've written eHow articles about how to make different types of crafts and about interpersonal relationships. All of these articles are ones that I think people just happen to look at rather than actually searching it out and scanning the page for all of the information they can get. Some of them have earned decent figures, but none of them have reached the amounts that the problem-solving articles have made.

To make articles about solving problems, think about topics that people will run to the computer to figure out how to solve. Instead of "How to Choose a Car," write "How to Negotiate With Car Salesmen." The first one is too vague- it's an article that people may run across, but they aren't running to the computer to find out the information. The second one is a specific-problem-solving topic. Instead of writing about how to keep mice out of the house, write about how to kill them. The first one may interest people when they are online and think about the topic or see a link to it. The second one is what will bring in readers who are craving the information, and those are the ones who will be interested in the ads on the page.

eHow Starting Up in the U.K.

I've had a good week at eHow, though last month wasn't as good as I would have liked. I think that part of the problem may have been that I wasn't adding articles regularly. CPC rates vary throughout the year and with demand for specific keywords, and I don't know that mine are diverse enough to keep my earnings numbers steady. I didn't add much of anything for about two months, but I've started up again with the intention of writing at least four articles a week for them. That represents only about an hour and 20 minutes of work each week, and it will add at least 16 articles to my account each month.

I noticed today that eHow has started up a U.K. version. It looks like U.K. residents will now be able to sign up for the Writer's Compensation Program and get paid just as U.S. residents have been doing on the U.S. site. I'm so glad to see this! There are a lot of people outside the U.S. who have been searching for residual sites and paying content sites and have been unable to write for the many sites that only pay U.S. residents. This is a welcome change for a lot of freelancers, and I hope that a lot of other sites will follow suit. Perhaps Demand Studios will start hiring British writers to write for the U.K. eHow site now?

New Time Limit for Draft Articles

Today I saw that my draft articles are marked in the article list with an expiration date. It appears that the site is now giving draft articles about one month to be completed before they are deleted. That's kind of sad news, since I have an enormous number of draft articles, some of which are a year old. Of course, it can also be a strong motivator to write those articles before they are snatched away. I doubt that I will get all of my current draft articles completed in time, but any new drafts that I create will likely be finished a lot faster than they were before.

Why have draft articles at all? There are several reasons. The biggest draft article creation time for me was when I spent several hours doing keyword research for this site and another site. Rather than do each article at a time, I created a couple of dozen draft articles that were based on popular keywords searches. That made it easy to write an article anytime I had the time for eHow. I could simply scan through the drafts and choose one.

Another reason to keep draft articles is to write them a few minutes at a time. If you are very busy or just hate writing eHow articles, you can write one step at a time whenever the mood strikes you, and eventually you will have a completed article. You may not be able to stretch that tactic over several months now, but even with the new expiration dates you still have time to stretch your article writing time over an entire month.

New eHow Submission Process

I've had a few ideas for eHow articles over the past week and put together a few quick articles recently. Today, however, the process for getting them published had changed. While eHow articles have always been published right away, that has apaprently changed as of today. The one that I put through today was met by a message saying that the article would be held for 10 minutes while somoene reviewed it to make sure it adheres to the eHow guidelines and until it passed through it would show as "pending."

So, is this a good thing or just an annoyance? Anything that keeps the quality level high, it's probably a good thing. On the other hand, how could it, really? How is it that the articles can be "reviewed" within 10 minutes? My article was published at right around the 10 minute mark, making me think that this is probably an automated system and not an editor actually reviewing them as the site suggests. It's likely a program that takes the length and keyword density into account to give it a preliminary screening.