eHow Ending WCP

After several years and a lot of writers finding their SEO footing, eHow is now ending the Writer's Compensation Program. A lot of eHow writers did see this coming, but like a lot of people, I didn't see it coming so quickly. It looks to me like a poorly-written NYT article got to the owners and made them feel self conscious about a lot of the bad WCP articles that were out there.

Here's what this means if you are an eHow writer:

If you have draft articles, you can finish them right now and still get them published. Some people are reporting that they can still create new articles, complete with new titles, and that they are going through. That might be possible for another couple of days. But, if you have draft articles, get them done in a hurry. You have seven days from today.

Your articles will still earn you money. Your articles will stay on the site, and you will still be paid for them.

You will no longer own your articles. If the articles are now being run through Demand Studios, you will no longer retain the rights to them. They haven't clarified this yet, but trust me. It's coming. All Demand Studios articles are bought outright, and their rev share articles are no different.

If you were accepted to write for Demand Studios and haven't written for them before, congratulations. They are sought after by a lot of Web writers because they pay quickly and there is as much work as you want. Here is a look at what it's like to write for them. Actually, this is more accurate, but there are some positives. The pay is twice a week, and you can decide between up-front pay and rev shares. If you write a good number of both, you have money coming in quite often and can buy tons of Cheetos.

More About the eHow U.K. Situation

If you talk to anyone who writes articles for eHow, you will undoubtedly hear about the U.K. eHow situation. If you haven't heard much about it, here is the perfect wrap-up of the entire situation. It really is as bad as the article describes. I was happy to get a small payment this month that was to compensate me for the U.K. traffic that stole traffic away from my U.S. eHow articles, but that appreciation lasted only a few minutes.

Based on the last revenue from the site, I believe that a more accurate amount would have been roughly seven times what they paid. Technically, they didn't have to even offer the small amount they did. Or did they?

There are loud cries of eHow fraud and it looks like a class action lawsuit is building. I don't know if it's all just talk, but there's a pretty good case being made in the court of public opinion for bad faith and fraud. I'm not happy with revenue dropping and I'm not happy with the site refusing to answer questions for such a long time.

To top that off, I've had an article stuck in limbo for five days. The "10 minutes" it takes them to approve an article has been stuck at about 24 hours for several weeks now. But, five days? Why should we wait so long? I have one more draft article that I intended to do, and then I think that's it for me for now. eHow will have to seriously clean up its act for me to ever write for them again beyond that article.

If you still like rev share sites and still do well with them, here's an article that I wrote about various revenue share sites and how they work. I recommend all of them except for Bukisa. All of them send me a monthly payment for work that was done long ago- some of them for work that was done four years ago. That's what revenue share sites are all about.

No Affiliate Links in New eHow Articles

If you have ever used affiliate links to make money online through your eHow articles, the rules just changed. Starting yesterday, no more affiliate links are allowed in new eHow articles. You don't have to take out the old links, and you won't have your old articles deleted for having affiliate links, but no new articles can have them.

Here is the ruling on using affiliate links. The actual rule is the one at the very bottom in tiny print. So, not only is the new rule one that can get your article deleted from the site, it wasn't even brought to the attention of eHow writers. It wasn't emailed to us, and I only heard about it, a day later, from someone else who happened to see it. This is coming on the heels of the whole eHow U.K. fiasco, which I am now hearing is not yet resolved. My eHow payments are actually lower this month, per day, than they were last month when the problem was supposed to have been solved.

The infrastructure problems, the deletions, the U.K. problems and the lack of communication are tempting me to turn away from a site that used to be a fairly fun little money maker. I am still undecided, though. If revenues go back up to what they were pre-U.K., continuing to write for them may end up being worth it.

What are your eHow payments like now? Have they gone back up, or are they tanking like mine are?

U.K. eHow to Take Down U.S. Articles

If you're an eHow writer, you may know that the mirror site, the eHow U.K., has been posting our U.S. articles over there and would not answer the question about whether U.S. writers under the Writer's Compensation Plan would be paid for the U.K. views and clicks. Today, that questions was answered.

It was announced on eHow this afternoon that U.S. eHow writers under the WCP do not get any revenue from their articles that are posted on the U.K. site. Unfortunately, the U.K. site is currently ranking better than the U.S. site in search engine results because it is growing rapidly with mirrored content. It's growing faster, so it's ranking better, taking revenue away from all U.S. WCP writers.

However, with the announcement that we were not receiving any off that revenue came the announcement that eHow will be taking our articles down from the U.K. site. This is extremely welcome news for the many, many eHow writers who had abandoned eHow. Many had actually taken their articles off the site and put them on sites like Bukisa and Infobarrel.

The articles are being taken down incrementally because of the huge number of articles that have been republished there. All of them are supposed to be gone within the next few weeks.

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.