When writing an article for eHow, one of the options you have is to choose up to five related eHow articles that will display along side your article. If you elect not to choose articles, or opt to choose less than five, eHow fills in the rest for you.
So why is it important that you choose your own related articles?
Consider this: when a reader is on your article page, eventually they will leave by clicking away. There are any number of ways they might do that, including clicking on your profile, clicking on a related article or video, clicking on an ad, etc. When a reader clicks away, you want to do everything you can to assure that they're clicking on something that benefits you. One way to do that is by including related articles that belong to you.
How to choose your related articles.
When selecting the five related articles, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
1. Choose truly related articles. The reasons for this are two-fold: First, readers are more likely to click on an article that bears some relevance to what they are reading. And second, providing highly relevant articles creates a better user experience for eHow visitors and that benefits everyone.
2. Choose your highest earning articles. Pareto's principle, or the 80/20 rule, applies to eHow too. 80% of your earnings will come from 20% of your articles (or something close). Resist the urge to try and prop up low earners; choose the best-performing articles you can.
Here is how I quickly choose relevant, high-paying related articles when I'm writing.
1. Open up another tab in my internet browser and go to my eHow profile.
2. I select the Articles tab and then sort by highest to lowest earnings by clicking on 'Earnings' twice.
3. I start at the top of the list and quickly scan downward to select the five highest-earning articles that bear some relevance to the topic I'm writing about.
This process hardly takes any time at all. Like a lot of people, I write in niches so I often have a lot of relevant articles to choose from. If I'm writing on a new topic I will occasionally have just a couple of relevant articles and I'll let eHow choose the rest. Very rarely I find that I don't have any relevant articles to choose from so I'll skip the step. If later I write more on that topic I try to remember to go back and link my relevant articles together.
Quick tip: When searching for my related articles in the eHow template, I sometimes have trouble finding them. After some trial and error I have found that the best plan seems to be to start by typing in the complete title and then subtracting words (or using various combinations) until I find it. Every once in a while I have an article that I absolutely cannot find this way but it's rare.
6 comments:
Julie - Great Tips. I find it very frustrating trying to find my articles to place in the related articles so I often just forget it. I know that I should do it and probably will try it again after reading your tips. Thanks!
PFI, I know, it is frustrating. Using the process I posted about, however, I can usually find my article and it doesn't take very much time at all.
This is a good idea, but I always worry about being charged with cloning, especially if it's a related article on a different aspect of the same topic.
Niche Momma, I'm not sure why adding an article would make you more likely to be flagged for cloning.
I agree it's important to make use of those links wherever you can! I do it with Hubpages too, though I'm still learning about the best strategies. Thanks for visiting my blog :D
Thanks! I am fairly new with eHow (started writing July 7) and it hadn't even occured to me yet to use my articles as related articles. Great tip. I am going to go back and edit some of my articles and add in some of my links where applicable. :)
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