Cash Campfire » eHow

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

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%

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

eHow Experiment 03: Some Progress and Results

Christina Crowe — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:23:24 +0000

My earnings on eHow for this month is now a little bit over $10 more than I made last month. Not too shabby. I might make the $100 mark in a few months.

Most of the articles I’ve been editing on eHow have a nice keyword density. The main thing I need to work on for the next few weeks are backlinking strategies and increasing the number of websites pointing to my articles. So far, I’ve backlinked articles on this blog, though haven’t really ventured anywhere else. Therefore, today I’m going to backlink articles on Yahoo Answers, as I answer questions users have that relate to my articles.

eHow Article Results

Over the weekend, I worked on How to Practice Effective Time Management Skills in College, How to Avoid Arguments With Your Children, How to Get More Blog Readers by Using Blog Carnivals, How to Avoid Arguments With Parents, How to Prevent Drowning Children, How to Stop That Mosquito Bite Itch, How to Benefit from Keeping Pet Fish, and How to Know If You Should Cut Your Fingernails.

Sadly, I’m not on the first page of Google for any of these titles. I definitely need to backlink them. I’ll keep you updated on their progress!

Progress

Post Your Input

What have you been doing to increase eHow earnings?
What are the backlinking strategies you use?

eHow Experiment 02: A New Beginning

Christina Crowe — Sat, 29 May 2010 18:07:33 +0000

As I mentioned in my introduction eHow Experiment post, I’ll be editing and improving 4 eHow articles a day in order to average $3 per article and make $339 or more per month for 113 articles. I plan to do this through maintaining a keyword density of 2-3% and using backlinking strategies.

My earnings on eHow per month have been steadily rising. In January 2010, I made $52.08 for the month. Every month after that, I made $57.85, $63.54, and $71.33. This month, with two days left until June, I’ve earned $78.58 so far. I should reach $80 by the end of the month. However, even $80 only gives me $0.70 per article a month. These earnings are pitifully low compared to what I should be earning according to Maria O’Brien’s eBook How to Earn Passive Income at eHow. So, I’m taking the initiative and stepping it up a notch.

eHow Article Results

In the past two days, I’ve worked on 8 articles: How to Stop Being a Junk Food Junkie, How to Stop Nail Biting Successfully, How to Finally Grow Long Nails, How to Cure Adult Acne Forever, How to Prevent Leukonychia Spots on Nails, How to Make College Friends, How to Make Chocolate Covered Strawberries Successfully, and How to Sue a Telemarketer.

So far only 3 articles out of the above 8 are ranking well on search engines. How to Stop Being a Junk Food Junkie has the first listing for “junk food junkie,” first listing for “eating junk food,” and fifth listing for “junk food.” With some backlinking, I hope to boost the listing for “junk food” up to the third spot.

How to Prevent Leukonychia Spots on Nails is listed third on the first page of Google with “leukonychia spots” but is on the second page with “leukonychia.” So, I need to backlink this article a little bit more than my junk food article.

How to Sue a Telemarketer is the last listing on the first page of Google for “sue a telemarketer” but no where to be found for “telemarketer,” so this article needs even more backlinking than the first two articles.

How to Stop Nail Biting Successfully, How to Finally Grow Long Nails, How to Cure Adult Acne Forever, How to Make College Friends, and How to Make Chocolate Covered Strawberries Successfully all need to be backlinked in order to get to the first page of Google for their keywords. I plan to backlink them a little on this blog, Yahoo Answers, forums, and other content websites. I’ll fill you in on their improvements, as well as the statuses of the eHow articles I’ll be working on for the next two days.

Progress

Post Your Input

Are your eHow articles performing well?
What have you been doing to increase their search engine ranking?

*This post has some affiliate links distributed in the content. Read more about them on the Disclosure page.

eHow Experiment 01: Keyword Optimization and Backlinking Strategies

Christina Crowe — Thu, 27 May 2010 11:59:22 +0000

As you all know, I had purchased an eBook several months ago to help me with my eHow residual income. Since reading this eBook and incorporating the tips in several of my articles, my earnings had went from $30 to around $80 without adding new eHow articles. According to Maria O’Brien’s eBook How to Earn Passive Income at eHow (the one I purchased), the earnings per article should average $3 a month. However, after calculating my average per article from last month, my earnings don’t even come close. My earnings last month were $71.33. I have 113 residual articles written and published. 113 multiplied by 3 gives me $339. At the moment, I’m less than one thirds of the way there.

So, in order to improve my eHow earnings, my first experiment is to optimize keywords by using a combination of keyword phrases, changing poor keywords to keywords with at least 10,000 global monthly searches using the Google Adwords tool, and maintaining a keyword density of 2-3%. My second experiment is to backlink all eHow articles that aren’t on page 1 of Google when I search for main keyword phrases used in the articles. My guess is that, when I improve my eHow article traffic by increasing keyword optimization and using backlinking strategies, I should receive more residual income, since I’ll be increasing my earning potential on eHow. By the time my eHow experiments are half way through and I edit at least 57 articles, I should receive a dramatic increase in earnings. I’m hoping that I’ll start averaging $3 per article a month or more by the time I’m done with my eHow experiments.

For the next few months, I’ll be working on 4 eHow articles a day, using keyword optimization and backlinking strategies to improve these articles. I’ll keep you updated on my progress every other day.

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%

Post Your Input

What eHow strategies are you using?
Has keyword optimization and backlinking strategies helped you?

eHow Writing Platform Switch: Good or Bad?

Christina Crowe — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:27:15 +0000

For the past year, eHow has been continuously changing their eHow writing platform so that users have to get used to the new set of rules again and again. It first started with their article sweeps, where thousands of eHow articles were removed if they didn’t meet eHow’s new guidelines. This created a lot of frustration in the eHow community and some members lost as much as 50 articles to the sweeps. Other eHow members had their whole article library wiped out. Luckily, I only had about 10 articles deleted during the time. Freelance writers began disappearing, upset with all the hard work and effort spent in articles that just got tossed down the drain without a second thought. A few dedicated writers, including myself, continued to write for eHow.

However, the problems didn’t stop there. The eHow website started shutting down at random times of the day, articles stopped publishing, and pictures stopped uploading. Several more eHow writers left, deciding to find more stable sources of income and not wanting to deal with any more issues from the eHow writing platform. Again, many hopeful eHow freelance writers remained, thinking that all of eHow’s problems will soon be fixed. After all, they were still getting paid and they had already invested months, and in many cases, years of time into eHow.

Though previous problems did, in fact, get corrected, eHow has now suddenly decided to change their writing platform to Demand Studios. Since Demand Studios requires all new freelance writers to go through their application process, many writers did not get approved. This caused great distress, since these members would have to search for residual income elsewhere.

Photo by Vanessa Yvonne (flickr)

eHow Writing Platform Switch: Good or Bad?

Because of the drawbacks and complaints, many freelance writers wonder if the eHow writing platform switch is really as good as Demand Media claims it to be. First, let’s look at the complaints.

eHow Writing Platform Complaints

Copy editors review each article and, sometimes, send the article back for rewrites. This is a big complaint many previous eHow writers have, since freelance writers used to never get articles sent back for rewrites when they would previously write for eHow. Having to spend the extra time to rewrite an article can be a downer and may even prevent freelance writers from continuing to write for eHow.
Copy editors can sometimes edit articles so much where keywords optimized for search engines can get deleted. Of course, if your keywords get deleted in an article you send for approval, there’s no way you can fix the wrong. Therefore, your article may suffer in search engine rankings.
Rev Share articles aren’t even listed under your Rev Share tab until it starts earning. This can be frustrating for freelance writers, since it’s harder to keep track of an article when it’s not even listed in the list with the rest of the articles written. As a result, many members believe that Demand Studios is scamming them out of their money.
Earnings are often lower than average earnings eHow members would receive. Several freelance writers on the eHow forums state that they’re earning relatively less than they used to earn on eHow per article (with the Rev Share articles). The articles are also not ranking as well as many members hope. For several writers, article titles need to be typed in quotes in order for the article to appear in search listings.
Writers lose their rights to their published work. Before, with eHow, freelance writers were able to maintain some rights to the articles that they wrote. Now, on Demand Studios, writers can’t even remove published articles.

eHow Writing Platform Praises

eHow members can now earn $15 per article if it’s not Rev Share. This praise has been controversial for many freelance writers. A lot of writers state that $15 for a 300-400 article is incredibly low and even insulting. On the other hand, eHow writers used to only earn residual income from their articles, so $15 an article seems like a lot in comparison to earnings before. Then again, one of my previous eHow articles has now reached the $50 mark and is still earning. Compared to $50, $15 an article is hardly anything.
Working for Demand Studios can look good on resumes. Because Demand Studios is so strict, adding that you used to work for Demand Studios might improve your chances of getting hired for a freelance writing job.
Demand Studios is a wonderful learning experience. Since I’ve been a member of Demand Studios, I have learned a great deal from copy editors reviewing my work. In fact, my writing has improved dramatically. At least, this is what I believe. Because of just the learning experience involved, I’ll probably never give up Demand Studios.

My Opinion

While I don’t like Demand Studios’ low pay and strict copy editors, I do appreciate how they’ve improved my overall writing quality. It has been tough writing for Demand Studios, and trying to keep a steady stream of articles published is almost impossible because I’ve learned to anticipate rewrites.

However, I especially like how you can still edit your previous articles written on the old eHow writing platform, so this gives me the chance to improve those articles for search engines so that they start earning more. In the days to follow, I hope to experiment with this opportunity. I’ll post the results of my experiment in upcoming posts.