Cash Campfire » Content Writing

eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

Christina Crowe — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:37:37 +0000

When I wrote my last update over a month ago, I estimated that I would earn at least $412.92 for the month of January. If I met this goal, I would surpass my overall goal of earning $3 per article in any given month (or $339 a month – though one of my articles was removed, reducing my goal to $336 a month).

Well, as it turns out, my estimations were more than correct.

In January I earned a total of $420.29, which is about $3.75 per article a month and $13.56 a day. And, so far in February, I earned $368.44 (earnings were last updated Wednesday), which is about $4 per article and $16.02 a day. If this keeps up, I should make an all-time high of about $449 by the end of the month (and there’s only 28 days as opposed to 30 or 31)! Not bad for doing very little work as far as backlinking is concerned.

I’m also happy to see that my earnings are continuing to grow. If you remember, last year saw 3 months (Oct, Nov, and Dec) where my eHow earnings sort of leveled out and didn’t increase by much. That was when I started giving a few of my highest earning articles backlinks from content written on other Web 2.0 sites. If you compare now (or my estimated total income for the month) to my earnings in December 2010, my earnings increased by 64%.

Why the Dramatic Boost in Income?

When I saw how well my eHow articles were doing, I took a look at each article individually. I discovered that many of my articles were earning about $5 a month, and, in January, my highest earner made $346.25 in that month alone. So far in February, this article brought in $314.45, which isn’t bad at all considering there are still a few more days left in the month.

But I wasn’t happy with just those stats. I wanted to know exactly what ranks each of my highest earning articles were at.

So I opened Market Samurai.

And, mouth unhinged, I discovered what contributed to much of my growth – I had 3 articles ranked 2nd on the first page of Google and another ranked 6th! To the left is a screenshot from Market Samurai (to view what each acronym means, visit my 6th eHow update – I removed keyword listings and article links for privacy reasons).

Now, one of my articles did move down a rank (was on the #1 spot until it was moved down to #2). However, I’m still pretty impressed with my progress. The best thing is – my highest earner (when it was previously on page 2 of Google) is now ranked 2 on page 1 of Google, which is probably the reason for its increase in earnings (the article only made $225.83 in December – now it’s making $346.25+).

I’ve heard from many sources that earnings almost double when ranked 1 as opposed to 2 on Google, so just imagine how much more income this article will bring in when it hits rank 1! And if I can keep it there? That’s a possible $500+ from one article. And even if it doesn’t earn $500+, $346 a month from only one article is pretty damn good in my opinion.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go. Right now I’m just going to stick with my goals and work on sending my articles more backlinks (I must admit, I haven’t been doing as much backlinking as I could have the last few months – but all that’s going to change).

Speaking of goals, here are my major eHow goals and accomplishments.

Major eHow Accomplishments

Average $3 an article per month (earn $336) – ACHIEVED

Top 3 eHow Experiment Goals

Make my first $500 on eHow
Updated – Average $5 an article per month (earn $560)
Rank on the first page of Google for 57 articles

With enough time, optimism, and effort, I should be able to accomplish all 3 of these goals.

How about you? Whether you’re working on improving your own eHow articles or you write on Demand Studios for residual income, what are your content goals?

Progress

eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery

Christina Crowe — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:05:59 +0000

It has been a little over a month since I last updated this eHow Experiment series – and oh do I have good news to tell you!

If you remember, last month I had one article sitting on the second spot in Google search listings, one on the third spot, and another on the sixth. The other two showing up in search results were sitting on the twenty-fifth and fifty-first spot in Google. Keep in mind that these were broad match results for each keyword phrase, instead of phrase match (the results from exact searches).

Well, I noticed that my eHow earnings this month had improved quite a bit lately since last year. Here’s a screenshot of my earnings from last year (2010). You can click on it to enlarge the image.

Last month, I was earning about $8.81 a day – $2.44 an article (eHow removed one of my articles by the way, though I’m not sure which one – now I have 112 articles published).

Now, let’s look at my earnings so far for this month (keep in mind that we’re only 12 days into the month and earnings don’t include what I accrued today).

So far, this month I’m earning $13.32 a day – a 51% increase from last month! If I can keep this up, I’ll earn $412.92 for the entire month of January – well surpassing my overall goal of earning $339 a month.

After looking at these stats, the first thing I did was open Market Samurai to analyze my ranking data. I wanted to find out which page each article is ranking on in Google search results.

If you don’t understand what each acronym means, I explain it all in the last experiment. The green numbers show areas where I’ve improved and the red numbers show areas where I’ve gotten worse since the last time I checked for rank updates. Grey areas stayed the same.

Now, looking at the list, do you find anything out of the ordinary? I’ll give you a hint: look at my broad and phrase match rankings.

Yes! One of my articles managed to rank on the first spot of Google. I can’t even describe how excited I am! I immediately searched for my keyword phrase in Google search for myself – and, yep, Market Samurai is dead on!

So, I checked to see how much money this specific article earned so far this month.

Only $2.61.

Well, OK. I then estimated (based off of my current earnings) how much I would make with this article by the end of the month. Based on my beautiful green calculator here, I can expect $7.36 by the end of this month (I multiplied daily earnings by 31).

That’s an improvement from last month (last month I earned $4.58 for this article), but the earnings per 1,000 page views for this particular article is pretty low. So far, this article has seen the most traffic but also the worst earnings for the number of page views it has. To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, this article has earned a total of $38.51 with 49,650 views since it was first published. I only have one other article with views in the 40k range (and yes, I’m also working on its page rankings – it’s not even on the first page yet), and that one has earned $1,227.52 in total income already (and it was published 2 months after the article I just mentioned).

Not good, and this tells me one thing – I need to work on what ads are being displayed on the page of the first article I mentioned. I’ll be able to do this by targeting brand names in the article, which will hopefully trigger more relevant ads. So, this is exactly what I’ll be doing this month. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

I Dug Deeper

Since my newly ranked article isn’t the one making the incredible difference in earnings, I decided to dig a little bit deeper.

And, to no surprise, I discovered that the article mentioned above that accrued $1,227.52 in total income (to the right is a picture) is kicking butt where the other articles are concerned. So far this month, it has earned $119.38. After comparing its past and current rankings in Google, I discovered that its rankings did improve. Since I last updated this experiment, it sat on the twenty-fifth spot in Google. Now, its on the twentieth for broad match and ranking on the fourth spot in Google for phrase match.

Incredible!

Could it be luck? I don’t know, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this opportunity slip by.

The funny thing is, I haven’t backlinked this article much yet – only once just yesterday. However, this particular article was one of the ones I edited on-page (mainly adding info – I didn’t really touching any of the keywords at all). But just think – if I can get this article on page one of Google, earnings might even double! I could be making over $200 a month with just this article alone!

I’m definitely going to be renewing my efforts and focusing all of my backlinks on this article until it hits that #1 spot.

I also noticed that a residual income article I wrote on Demand Studios on a similar topic is also doing well, though not nearly as well as the above article. However, I wrote this one not too long ago and already its ranking on the first page of Google and earning over $4 for the current month. I’m pretty excited to see how this one does as well – though I’m not going to backlink it just yet.

How about you? Did you notice an increase in eHow earnings?

Progress

I’m Joining the Demand Studios Holiday Club – Are You?

Christina Crowe — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:12:36 +0000

Photo by Pacdog (flickr)

It’s been a wild month for me, as I try to write up a storm, raise over 30 newly hatched tadpoles (two of my African Dwarf Frogs had mated), publish a weekly newsletter, and tackle various obstacles holding me back from progressing – all with Christmas just around the corner.

I must admit – this month has been a pretty lazy month, and I have myself to blame. My mind is getting ready for the relaxation holidays bring, so I’ve found myself putting things off and procrastinating more than usual.

I should have known better than to tackle so many projects at once right after I just launched my first big project in a long while – Jump Start Your Freelance Writing Career. I’ve also been struggling with sharp pains in my back, followed by arm numbness, which made it almost impossible to type for a day or two (every time I would try, it felt like my arm was about to fall off). Luckily, I’m fine now.

To top that off, I have a vacation coming up (well, sort of) and I’ll be going on a 6 hour plane trip to California late January for 3 weeks (I’ll talk more about this later), so I’ve been planning that and packing my bags. I’ll still be working while in CA – writing blog posts here, writing weekly newsletters, and publishing articles elsewhere – so I’m not going on a complete vacation, but I’ll be calming down a bit and relaxing more (so no extensive writing periods). However, I’ll try to preschedule a lot of my blog posts and newsletters in advance so I can free up a bit more of my time while I’m away.

So, with that said, I wanted to talk about the Demand Studios Holiday Club event going on for the next week. To be honest, I’m a bit ashamed of my progress right now, and I’m hoping that this event will help boost motivation so that I can get more articles out there and published.

Basically, every now and then the Holiday Club hosts a special event over at Demand Studios to encourage writers to write more during the holidays. Generally, one writer and one copy editor who publishes/edits articles each day while the event takes place are randomly chosen to receive a cash prize. This month starting on the 24th and ending the 31st (and I’m really, really excited about it), the cash prize increases as the days progress.

Here’s what we’re looking at:

Every article you write for Demand Studios during those dates are counted as an entry toward the random drawing. So, the more you write the higher your chances of winning – a perfect motivator for me.

So, I’ll be writing those 15 Demand Studios articles during this time (and maybe even more if I feel up to it).

How about you? Are you going to join in?

eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results

Christina Crowe — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:21:42 +0000

As many of you already know, 8 days ago I posted my first Goals and Achievement post in a long while, where I shared my goals of December. I wasn’t able to work much on my goals for the past week, since I’ve been working on launching my eBook and setting up a newsletter for Cash Campfire.

However, the 3 goals I have set for eHow (in case you’re too lazy to read the actual post) are…

Increase my monthly income by $100
Edit 15 articles
Rank on the first page of Google with 10 out of 113 articles

Now, this might seem like a lot of work, since I have other tasks I also plan to complete, but I believe these goals are obtainable if I really push myself. To achieve these goals, it will require a lot of keyword analyzing and backlinking (so tons of writing on my end) to increase search engine rankings.

I’m not too worried about the editing, since eHow articles are generally short (400-500 words), and I’m so used to writing 1,000 or more word blog posts here on Cash Campfire and other content sites.

Also consider that editing generally takes half the time (or less!) than it would take to write the actual article. So, for me, editing 15 articles is like writing 4 regular blog posts if you divide 15 by 2 (editing takes up half the time) and divide the resulting number by 2 (a 500 word article is half of an 1,000 word article). I also don’t expect to change much in each article – just probably add a few keywords here and there and make the writing more professional (my writing quality has vastly improved since the time my eHow articles were written, so some of my eHow articles are a tad amateurish).

But I’m excited to get into the editing process, since this will help my overall brand by increasing the quality of the articles already published – it pains me to even look at them as they are now, heh.

Back to the task at hand though.

My Plans for December

To go along with my 3 goals of December, I’m going to edit 15 of my highest earning articles (one makes over $100 a month) and naturally backlink these articles to hopeful raise 10 of them to page 1 of Google (only 3 are there, despite how much all of these articles are earning – it baffles me still).

The reason why I’ve decided to work on my highest earning eHow articles first is because they have the highest potential of earning more (especially when they’re not even ranking well yet).

However, to analyze my keywords, keep track of my rankings, and follow backlinks to each article, I’m going to use Market Samurai (affiliate link) – a handy keyword tool that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things SEO-related. Of course, Market Samurai is only free for 7 days I believe (so that you can try it out) until you’re asked to pay a set price of $149 for the full version (a good investment, I say, and not because I’m promoting the product – I actually do recommend it based off of my own past experiences using Market Samurai).

But first, I need to analyze exactly how much work these 15 articles need and which keyword phrases I’ll be optimizing for (one keyword phrase per article).

eHow Rankings and Keywords

So, I logged into eHow, went to the “articles” tab, sorted my articles by earnings (clicked the “earnings” menu item twice to sort them), and got out the spreadsheet.

After typing in all the information I wanted to use to monitor each article, here’s what I came up with (includes the results from Market Samurai).

The first field “Average $/1k PVs” lists how much money each article is making per 1,000 page views, which I ended up calculating myself by dividing the total income an article made so far (rounding to the nearest dollar) with the number of views the article received (rounded to the nearest 1,000). This field is important, since it tells me how well the ads are performing for each article. Low ad clicks might either mean that irrelevant ads are displaying or my content isn’t really optimized well for the products I’m promoting. Either way, I want each number to be as high as possible – because, besides affiliate marketing, ads are the only source of my income. You can read more about increasing ad clicks on each article here.

Just by glancing at each result, you can see that 3 out of 15 are earning poorly considering the traffic coming in and 2 are earning really well. However, poorly earning articles aren’t entirely hopeless. I can improve them by making sure ads are relevant to the article (if they aren’t, all I have to do is add more keywords) or by including a product name or two in the article body (to encourage more ads to display with that product name).

The third field, “SEOT,” just lists the estimated number of daily visitors each article would receive if they were listed on the #1 spot in Google search results. These results were recorded from Market Samurai. The higher the number, the more potential an article has to make money – and the higher the competition will be for the keyword I’m optimizing for (so the more backlinks the article will need to rank well).

The next field over, “SR,” stands for “search results” and lists what position each article is on for the keyword phrases I’m optimizing for. Again, I got these results from Market Samurai (by the way, I searched for each keyword phrase in Google beforehand, and Market Samurai is dead on).

Based off of results, only 5 articles are even ranking in the top 1,000 for the keyword phrase – which is terrible. I’ll need to do some serious backlinking to boost up this count. However, a few are already ranking on the first page of Google, which is very good and means that I don’t have to do much backlinking to boost them up to the #1 spot.

The last two fields list the page rank of each article and the number of backlinks each article has (in order). I think the page ranks are pretty good, especially considering that these articles are actually sub-pages of the actual domain name (eHow.com). The backlinks, however, are pretty poor – which is probably why many of these articles aren’t ranking well at all.

And here’s a screen shot from Market Samurai (got rid of the keyword and link fields for privacy reasons).

I already recorded these results in the above spreadsheet, but I thought that it might be useful for you to actually see what I’m looking at in Market Samurai when I update the ranking data and Market Samurai shoots out the results.

To conclude, all of my articles need serious backlinking work. While I’ll describe my backlinking strategy in more detail in a future post, I plan to basically backlink my articles by writing for other content sites, providing a link back to a few eHow articles as I do so. This will help boost rankings, since quality sites with already high page ranks will be linking to my articles – telling Google that my articles are somewhat popular.

As each page climbs in search results, my eHow articles will get more traffic (since they’ll be more accessible in search engines), and this will eventually translate into more money down the road (since I can reasonably expect more traffic to lead to more ad clicks).

I’ll update you all on my progress as I go along, and I’m hoping you’re enjoying the series so far. Until the next update, I wish you continued success!

Progress

eHow Experiment 01: Keyword Optimization and Backlinking Strategies
eHow Experiment 02: A New Beginning
eHow Experiment 03: Some Progress and Results
eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth
eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach
eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results
eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery
eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

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Christina Crowe — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:08:08 +0000

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Jump Start Your Writing Career: Design Your Future and Control Your Lifestyle

Christina Crowe — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:29:51 +0000

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No matter which event strikes you as the most prominent, chances are you were once happy, but that happiness was fleeting the moment you stepped back into work.

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eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach

Christina Crowe — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:16:09 +0000

It’s been a little over a month since I updated the experiment. Even so, I’m really excited to say that I nearly met my income expectations!

In the last eHow Experiment update, I did some calculations and estimated that I would earn $279 or more in the month of October.

Well, guess what?

My predictions were nearly right – only $4.63 off the mark – and I managed to earn $274.37!

As you can see, last month was definitely the most profitable month for me, and my earnings only continue to rise. However, looking at my current earnings for this month (earnings don’t include today), I’m pretty sure I’m now at my peak in eHow income unless I do something about it.

Last month (October) I earned an average of $8.85 per day. The month before that I only earned an average of $4.58 per day. This month, however, I’m earning an average of $8.66 per day, so it’s definitely starting to slow down. I’ll probably continue to earn an average of $8.50 per day next month (December) as well.

Though I’m not complaining about making $270 a month, I still believe that it can be better if I start to do some heavy backlinking for my articles. I recently purchased Market Samurai (affiliate link), a really awesome keyword research tool, that allows you to research profitable keywords, how much competition each keyword has, the difficulty level of ranking for your chosen keywords, affiliate products to use for your niche site, and so much more.

The most interesting feature (at least for me) is the one that allows you to track your keyword rankings in Google search results. In other words, you can put in the keyword phrases you’re trying to rank for on a particular website, and Market Samurai will automatically update what page you’re ranking on in Google for those keyword phrases so that you can follow your progress as you try to rank for your keywords.

I’m going to see if I can track the rankings of the eHow articles that have the highest earning potential (not all of them, of course), so that I can more easily track what pages they are ranking on. I can’t wait to get started, and I’ll let you know about what I find as I progress.

My New Backlinking Approach

As I track the search engine rankings of my articles, I’ll backlink them by writing for other content sites and then including a link in the bio section or body of the article. Then I’ll backlink the articles I write for various content sites by writing for article directories. Backlinking the articles linking to my eHow articles will help increase their link strength, and I’ll be making even more money by writing for other content websites.

Of course, each article I write has to be relevant to the eHow articles I’m linking to. Otherwise, the link quality won’t be as great, and I’d be doing a disservice to readers who want to find out more about a certain topic.

I’m not yet sure which other content sites I want to write for (besides Info Barrel and Suite101 that is). I’ll give a more detailed update about this in a future eHow Experiment post, so stay tuned!

Want to join in the eHow Experiment? I’d be happy to hear how well you do and the tactics you’re using to increase your eHow rankings. Feel free to share in the comment section!

Progress

eHow Experiment 01: Keyword Optimization and Backlinking Strategies
eHow Experiment 02: A New Beginning
eHow Experiment 03: Some Progress and Results
eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth
eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach
eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results
eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery
eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

Are You Ready to Join the Double O Club?

Christina Crowe — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:03:42 +0000

While browsing blog posts for the day, I came across an article called Time to Join the Double O Club by Felicia Williams. Needless to say, I was curious, since Felicia always shares valuable tidbits with her readers.

Photo by Refracted Moments (flickr)

Basically, the Double O Club is a concept (not an actual club) where you tack on two zeros at the end of a digit and use this number as your primary daily goal for the month. In Felicia’s case, she’s aiming to maintain club membership by making $100 every day each month. She would earn this amount by using a combination of upfront earnings and residual income.

I found the concept interesting and exciting, so I figured I’d join in as well. However, I’m only going to focus on residual income to achieve my membership, and I’ll start working for it in November.

Here are the income sources that I plan to utilize in order to acquire my Double O Club membership.

eHow: eHow is a web content site that allows writers to publish articles and earn residual income from their work. Now, the only way to write for eHow is by applying to be a Demand Studios writer and write for residual income there. The articles you write will display on eHow.
In order to utilize eHow for the Double O Club membership, I plan to continue the eHow Experiment and start writing more articles for residual income on Demand Studios. I’ve been putting the Demand Studios Work Challenge off for far too long. This would be a good opportunity to start up again by publishing residual income articles on DS.
Suite101: I recently got accepted to write for Suite101, another content website that allows writers to publish articles for residual income. I’m not earning anything yet (since I only have 1 article published), but I plan to write more articles for them next month once I have more time free.
Informational Products: Since as long as can I remember, I’ve always wanted to become a published author. If you love to write, you’ve probably wanted to publish your own book time and time again as well.
Well, a month ago, I finally decided to make it happen. I was going to write my first eBook and get it launched. I’m not 100% done yet, but I plan to be able to call myself an author by the end of this month. You can read more about my progress on my post Are You Setting Lofty Goals? Take Baby Steps.
Affiliate Marketing: I haven’t played around with this income opportunity much before, as I only like to recommend products and services that I’ve tried and like. However, I don’t recommend things as often as I should. It’s mainly due to laziness on my end, since I don’t have much experience with writing reviews and so have put off writing them. I’m going to try to utilize this income opportunity more.
One way I’m going to utilize affiliate marketing is by joining in the Niche Site Duel that Pat Flynn and Tyrone Shum have been hosting. For the Niche Site Duel, you basically have to create another blog in a new niche and try to rank to the top of Google search results with your chosen keywords. The only rule is that you can’t use paid advertising to increase your search rankings.
I haven’t joined the Niche Site Duel yet, since I’ve mainly been focusing all of my attentions on this blog and creating the eBook I’m going to launch soon. However, I plan to join in soon with three targeted blogs. I’ll describe the blog niches in more detail later on down the road, but I have experience with all three topics. I’m pretty passionate about these topics as well, so I think that it will work out nicely. Of course, since I’ll be dividing my attentions to three different blogs, it will take me longer to rank well on Google for all three, but I’m up for the challenge.
I also have another surprise that I’ll share with everyone in a few weeks that relates to affiliate marketing to a certain extent.
Freebie Trading: While freebie trading isn’t exactly 100% passive income, it does only require minimal work to earn money, since all I have to do is bump my trading thread, answer referral questions, submit accounts for approval, and pay referrals. While I probably won’t receive amazing results from freebie trading, it will help my income goal some (I earn about $100 each month from referrals).

Right now I’m in my experiment stage, so I’m going to be testing each of the different sources of income to determine what works best for me. Then, I’ll focus all of my efforts on my highest income earners.

I’ll update the Double O Club each month, once in the beginning of the month with my goals and once at the end of the month to share my progress. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to call myself a Double O Club member!

How about you? Do you want to join me and Felicia? If so, I’d love to hear how you are progressing towards your Double O Club membership. Share your story with us so that we can walk the journey together!

eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth

Christina Crowe — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:22:26 +0000

It’s been a while since I last updated the eHow Experiment. In case you didn’t know, I had started an eHow experiment on May of this year to see if I could maximize my earning potential with the articles already written on eHow. I planned to do this by maintaining a keyword density of 2% and increasing backlinks to my eHow articles. Truthfully, I haven’t done much article improvement in the past few months, as I was primarily working on this blog and the new eBook that I’ll be launching soon.

However, I did notice a massive growth in my earnings since the last time I updated the eHow Experiment about 5 months ago, and I wanted to share this growth with you. At the time when I first started this experiment, I was hoping to earn at least $100 on eHow. Now, I’m making over $200, and I haven’t added any additional articles to eHow (since they closed down their writing platform).

Here’s a screen shot of the progress I made this year on eHow in terms of earnings (click the image to enlarge it).

As you see, my earnings on eHow for this month has been phenomenal. Most of the earnings are coming from one article, but many of the articles are making around $3 a month (which is my aim). Keep in mind that I have 113 articles written for eHow.

I want to eventually average out $3 a month for each article, which would then earn me $339 in monthly income. I’m almost there and, if I keep working on backlinking my articles, I should be earning far more monthly.

So far for this month, I’m at $224.84 in earnings, with 5 more days left in the month (excluding today). Since my earnings this month exclude the money I earned today, I’m averaging $9 a day. This is a huge improvement for me. By the time the month is over, I should total $279 or more – only $40 away from meeting my first eHow goal.

My eHow Experiment Goals

Average $3 an article per month – $339
Make my first $500 on eHow
Rank on the first page of Google for 57 articles

I’m going to get back to working on my eHow articles after I launch my eBook Jump Start Your Writing Career. I’ll start updating this blog on a monthly basis, starting next month, with my progress.

If you’re a former eHow writer or write for residual income on Demand Studios (your articles get published on eHow) and you want to join in the experiment, I’d love to hear how you’re progressing as well! Feel free to post your progress here in the comment section or submit updates to your own blog with your progress. Send me a link to your first post for the eHow Experiment, and I’ll link back to it on a new eHow Experiment thread listing the participants in the experiment.

Progress

Past the Basics: 6 Expert Web Content Tips

Christina Crowe — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:28:59 +0000

This is the eighth and last part in the series Writing Web Content for Websites. In this part of the series, you’ll learn 6 expert web content tips to help make writing content for other sites a bit easier.

I’ve given you tons of information in this series so far to get you started in writing content for websites, so that you can gradually build an online residual income. So, in this part of the series, I’m just going to give you 6 of the most important (at least, what I think is most important) web content tips that I haven’t yet touched on, which will improve your freelance writing experience. Use these tips throughout your freelance lifestyle and you should do pretty well.

Web Content Tip #1: Do the Article Research before You Write

By doing the research before you write an article and not during, you save time since you’re not constantly reading in between sentences. Your ideas are more of your own, and you’re also putting the information into memory for future articles you may write on the same topic. This reduces the research you’ll have to do for your next article. If you research as you write, you’re more likely to just rephrase what has already been written by someone else, even if it’s not intentional.

You should limit how much you research. Only spend about 5-15 minutes researching a specific topic. Copy and paste the important information into a text file. Then, read through the research and take out unnecessary bits that you don’t need to condense your research into manageable chunks. Make sure you have a good understanding about the topic, get any quotes necessary, close the text file and start writing that very minute. Don’t wait or the information that you just learned may be hard to remember.

Web Content Tip #2: Link Back to Your Other Articles

You increase your search engine rankings by backlinking to your articles on content websites. There are many ways you can link to your articles. You can link to your articles from other articles you’ve written on the same web content site, from your blog or from other web content sites you write for. Links from the same web content site won’t be as valuable as links from your blog or another site, but they’re still good to have.

As you link to each article, you’re increasing the exposure of the article and also telling search engines that your article is important (since more sites are linking to it). However, still focus on quality content so that your readers can link to the articles naturally. If people love your content, they’ll gladly spread the word.

Web Content Tip #3: Set Goals to Achieve

Goal setting is an important aspect of freelance writing. After all, if you don’t have goals, why should you write? If you’re not going to get anything from writing, what’s the point? Whether you write for enjoyment, money or both, you need to set clear goals so that you can stay productive and don’t lose motivation. I mention more about goal setting in my article Do You Feel Tied Down to Your Goals?

While setting goals is important, it’s also important to keep track of your progress. If you can actually see how you’re progressing, you’ll be more influenced to write. You can keep track of your progress in a number of ways. The planners over at Productive Flourishing allow you to mark each task as you finish them. You’ll also be able to fill in bubbles as you complete each task. By the end of the week, you’ll be able to look at how many bubbles are filled in and measure how productive you were during that week. This can motivate you to be more productive for the upcoming week.

If you don’t like planners or want another motivational tool to use, you can use my method and make a growth chart, where you fill in a growth bar as you make progress in your freelance writing goals. When the bar is complete, you’ve completed that specific goal and can then celebrate for accomplishing your tasks.

Rewarding yourself is also a crucial part of goal planning, so don’t forget to do something special once you’ve accomplished your goals!

Web Content Tip #4: Write When You’re at Your Productive Peak

Everyone is different when it comes to how productive they are during different times of the day. Write at your productive peak, and you’ll find that you get a lot more work done than if you just wrote at any time of the day. If you don’t work at your productive peak, it becomes a struggle to write and the lack of motivation you have can put a halt to your accomplishments. Moreover, as you struggle, you’re wasting time trying to be productive rather than actually being productive.

I mention how to discover when you’re most productive in my article How Heat Maps Can Double Productivity and How to Use Them. Keep track of your productive state throughout the week so then you know what times of the day you’re most productive on average.

Web Content Tip #5: Write without Editing

Far too often, writers will write one sentence or paragraph and go back to read, edit or rewrite that same sentence or paragraph. This can slow you down enormously, as it reduces the time you get that article done. Instead, organize the article into sections, and then write non stop until you get to the end of the last section. Don’t worry about how you’re writing or if your words aren’t flowing properly; just write. You can do the introduction last if you work best that way. When you’re completely done writing, either leave the article for later (to refresh your mind before you edit) or go back and read the entire article, editing along the way. Then publish the article. Don’t edit as you write, for this will decrease the speed in which you write and take up more time… time that can be used doing other productive tasks.

I must admit, I was guilty of editing as I write for a while, until I noticed that I wasn’t getting as many tasks done as I wanted to. It was taking me an hour or more to write one 500 word article, which takes other writers about 30 minutes or less. I made some changes, stopped constantly editing and now I can write an article in about 30 minutes. By just writing what I know about a certain topic (according to the heading of each section, of course) without worrying what I’m going to say next or how I’m going to phrase something, my article can be written 3 times as fast. Then I’m free to edit and rephrase sentences as much as I’d like. It definitely works and is a lot less stressful.

Web Content Tip #6: Don’t Forget about Taxes

As you get paid month after month, you’ll also have to submit taxes quarterly or at the end of the year, since the content site doesn’t do it for you and doesn’t take out a small portion of what you earn for taxes like many 9 to 5 jobs do. You’ll have to stay on top of how much make and how much you owe. It can be a grueling process, and some freelance writers just hire accountants for this type of thing.

If you’re just starting out, I recommend to be familiar with the whole tax process so that you aren’t charged any extra money by the end of the year. Cleaver from the blog Freelance Folder wrote a helpful article on the subject – 5 Tips For Filing Your Taxes Easily.

Cash Campfire » Content Writing

eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

Why the Dramatic Boost in Income?

Major eHow Accomplishments

Top 3 eHow Experiment Goals

Progress

eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery

I Dug Deeper

Progress

I’m Joining the Demand Studios Holiday Club – Are You?

eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results

My Plans for December

eHow Rankings and Keywords

Progress

Free eBook – Making the First Leap Into a World of Writing

Are You Ready to Make the Leap?

Do You Have What It Takes?

Get a Sneak Peek into the eBook Jump Start Your Freelance Writing Career

Get Your Free Copy Today!

Jump Start Your Writing Career: Design Your Future and Control Your Lifestyle

Why Let Someone Else Govern Your Life When You Can Shape Your Future?

Now You Can Quit Your 9 to 5 Job and Earn a Sole Income Freelance Writing

Who is this eBook For?

You Don’t Have to Have Years of Experience to Create a Lucrative Business

This eBook is Much More than a Guide

Read What Others Had to Say

Free Bonus Special Report Included

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed

Hurry – Pick Up Your Copy Today!

eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach

My New Backlinking Approach

Progress

Are You Ready to Join the Double O Club?

eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth

My eHow Experiment Goals

Progress

Past the Basics: 6 Expert Web Content Tips

Web Content Tip #1: Do the Article Research before You Write

Web Content Tip #2: Link Back to Your Other Articles

Web Content Tip #3: Set Goals to Achieve

Web Content Tip #4: Write When You’re at Your Productive Peak

Web Content Tip #5: Write without Editing

Web Content Tip #6: Don’t Forget about Taxes

Other Parts in this Series