eHow as a Test Market

If you're like a lot of writers, you might be thinking about moving beyond eHow and creating your own site or blog. Or maybe you have some sites or blogs and are thinking about adding more. If that's the case, eHow can be a great test market for any niches you might be considering. Particulary if you're planning to monetize that site with Adsense.

Then again, you might not have any niches in mind. Often times the hardest part for someone looking to create a niche site or niche blog is coming up with an idea. In that case, I encourage you to look at your library of eHow articles for inspiration.

A while back I was examining my top earning eHow articles and I noticed a couple of articles written about a certain topic that were performing really well. Taking the hint, I wrote a couple more articles around that topic and, sure enough, they performed better than average too. It wasn't long before I began considering building a niche blog around this topic.

This week I took that plunge. And while I know a little bit about blogging and a very little bit about earning money online, I decided to follow the advice of Amy Bass, who has a niche blogger program that spells out exactly how to earn money with niche blogging.

I considered using another popular program, which I actually bought and read, but I never could quite get my head around the method. I'm sure it's a fine program and that it works well for others, but once I explored Amy's system it all sort of clicked for me.

Amy's system is laid out month by month and - get this - it's in blog form. How smart is that for someone who is looking to make money blogging? The cost is $19.99/month and you can cancel at any time. For each month that you stay a member, you get access to that month's blog posts.

I am ending month one and coming up on month two. So far, the $19.99 I've paid for month one has been worth it for just this one piece of information: The Niche Blogger explains EXACTLY how to evaluate a niche to see if it's worth pursuing. That, combined with eHow as a test market, allowed me to move right away on one of the niches I was considering.

Of course month one provided lots of other information, but even if I only took away that niche evaluation piece, it would have been worth it to me.

The point of this blog post, however, is this: evaluate the writing you've already done at eHow and see how you can make it work for you. If you've got an article that's performing well, write something else on that topic. If that article does well, write a couple of more and see how they do. Then, if you seem to be onto something, evaluate whether it would be worth pursuing as it's own site.

You can use Amy's method to do that, or evaluate using something else, but if a topic is doing well at eHow, it's might very well do well somewhere else.