Work Smarter, Not Harder, on eHow

The best way to generate eHow earnings is to write, write, write. There's nothing more sure-fire than adding articles to increase the money you make monthly with eHow.

But it also pays to work smart, and not just hard, when writing for eHow.

Here are some things to consider before you start tapping away at your keyboards:

Write what works

By that I mean take a look at your article library and see what your top earners are. Sign into eHow and pull up your list of articles. Now click on the earnings heading twice to order your articles from highest earners to lowest.

Look at your highest earners. Do they have anything in common? Are many of them in the same category? Consider writing in that category again. Are any about the same topic? Definitely plan to write more on that topic.

Sometimes writers can re-create their success this way, and sometimes not, but it's certainly worth a try. And if you've written on the topic before, chances are it will be easier to write on it again.

Promote your best earners

There was a discussion on the eHow forums a while back about whether it was better to promote or produce. In other words, if you want to make more money and have a limited amount of time, should you produce more articles or promote the ones you have?

My approach to that is to use Pareto's Principle, or the 80/20 rule. When applied to eHow, Pareto's Principle would hold that 80% of my earnings will come from 20% of my articles.

Keeping this in mind, any promoting I do is of my top articles, which have already proven productive. I don't spend a lot of time trying to prop up the low earners.

Link to your own articles

When writing an eHow article there is a section where you can place related articles from eHow. I almost always search for and put my own articles there.

Ideally I'll have articles that are closely related to the one I'm writing. That's not hard to do since I'm usually writing in one of just a few major categories. But even if I have to stretch a little I'll still try and put my own articles in this section. It increase the odds that when a reader clicks away from my article that they're clicking on something that will make me money.

Add Affiliate Links

One of the greatest advantages of eHow is that you can put affiliate links in the Resources section of articles. Even if you did nothing more than join Amazon Affiliates, there will almost always be a book or product that you can link to that is related to your article.

If you're not active in affiliate marketing, you can use this section to link to your other sites or blogs. Again, in order to create value for the reader, the links should be related to the article you're writing. But as long as that's the case there's no reason why you can't include these links and increase the odds that you benefit when the reader decides to click away from your article.

Re-Write for Other Sites

As I've mentioned before, at eHow you own the rights to the content you create. This means you can make your writing do double duty on other sites where you own the content.

I recommend doing some simple re-writing so you won't be placing duplicate content on different sites, but that's fairly easy to do and, again, it's writing smarter not harder.

What things do you do to make sure you're working smart and making the most of your eHow writing time?