Three Ways to Make More Money with Your Existing eHow Articles

So the dust is starting to settle and the information is being sorted out around eHow's change to using the Demand Studios platform for all it's content. eHow writers are learning whether or not they have been pre-approved for Demand Studios or whether they need to apply at DS to be able to continue writing how-to articles for eHow. They're also making the decision about whether they want to continue writing for eHow at all.

Regardless of where you are in your decision-making process, the fact remains that you probably have a bunch of eHow articles that you've already written still live on the eHow site. And according the eHow, you will continue to earn from those articles with the same algorithm you already have.

So what can you do to beef up earnings on the articles that are already on the eHow site?

1. You can backlink to your existing eHow articles. There are a variety of ways to do that but two places where you can backlink to all of your eHow articles and earn money in the process are Xomba and She Told Me. I've already written about my Xomba experiment in backlinking to my eHow articles. Recently I joined She Told Me and I'm starting to experiment at that site as well.

2. Another thing you can do is to re-write your highest earning eHow articles for other sites. If you've written an article for eHow, chances are it's on a subject you either a) already knew a lot about or b) did the research necessary to write on it. In fact, you probably have groups of articles on eHow written around various subjects. You may find it surprising how easy it is to re-write articles on that topic for another site.

At first I was reluctant to do this because the 'how-to' format was something of a security blanket for me. Staring at a blank page was a little intimidating after writing 200+ eHow articles. If you find yourself in the same boat, remember that you can still write in how-to format for other sites. In addition you can create other 'security blanket formats' that might help you get the writing ball moving forward. This article is an example of that. '____ Ways to _______' can be a format where you fill in the blanks depending on the article you're writing.

You'll find publishing articles at sites like Xomba and Info Barrel a real pleasure and re-writing articles you've already written can be a real shortcut to getting content up fast. You can also write different articles on similar topics for revenue share at Demand Studios.

3. Finally you can improve the SEO of the eHow articles you already have up. If you look at your earliest eHow articles, you will probably discover that you've learned a thing or two about SEO since you started writing. Make some changes in the keywords, etc. and see if you earnings on those articles don't improve.

So this can all be summed up in three tips:

1. Drive traffic to your existing eHow articles.
2. Examine your successful eHow articles and write similar articles on the same topic at other sites.
3. Improve the SEO of your existing eHow articles.

An Additional Note About Putting More Time Into eHow

I know some are less than trusting about eHow's claims that our WCP articles will stay up and continue to earn. I feel about this the way I felt when I wrote about what I thought was the future of the WCP over a month ago: the WCP articles may not last forever but they're there for now and I might as well maximize my ability to earn money from them. Especially since they are already written and aged. I don't need a guarantee that they will be there forever because there is nothing in the online business world (or offline business world for that matter) that will be unchanging. My strategy is to:

• Make my best guess about what is worth putting my time into. 
• Give it my all. 
• Adapt and move forward when someone moves my cheese.

Choosing eHow Keywords with the Google Keyword Tool

Wondering how to write eHow articles that pay? Well a helpful guy named Nate (barrelroll on eHow) has written a free, one-page guide on how to pick profitable keywords with the Google Keyword Tool. Nate has been writing on eHow for less than a year and his earnings have grown to over $650 per month.

Take five minutes and see if you can't learn something from Nate's free article about using a free keyword tool. It's the most 'to the point' explanation I've ever read.

eHow Quick Tip: Add the Right Photos and Related Articles at the Time You Publish Your Article

Recently I wrote about adding your own related articles to your eHow articles in order to increase your views. Here's another tip in that regard.

It seems to be a bug of eHow that you can't change your related articles after the article is published. At least I haven't had any luck being able to do that. The same also seems to be true of changing photos on your article.

Since this is the case, take the extra time to choose the right photo(s) and related articles at the time you publish an eHow article. The right photos and related articles will go a long way toward making your article work for you.

How to Choose Related Articles for Your eHow Articles

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.

Why have multiple accounts at eHow?

My friend, Kate, posted some excellent information on the eHow forums about why someone would want to have multiple eHow accounts. She graciously agreed to let me share it with all of you. The question posed was why would someone want to have multiple eHow accounts? Kate's answer:

I do it for several reasons.

1. If you have a particular expertise, you might find it reflects better on your credibility to keep 'How to Build a Computer' out of a library containing 'How to Make Super Duper Pancakes Like Grandma'.

2. Some of us have been targets for forum retribution... our articles have been given poor ratings or flagged for violations, we believe, as a result of forum conflicts. I don't use my other IDs to post in the forum and the articles for those IDs have never been attacked.

3. When applying for other writing jobs, I may want to use my eHow ID in a resume. Not all the articles I have written are suitable for all my clients.

4. A niche ID can be used to promote a niche blog.

The reasons vary from person to person, I am sure.

Excellent info! I only have one eHow account and I used my real name because of reason #3 in Kate's list above. Now, however, I am less interested in applying for other writing jobs and am more interested in working for myself. As I start to branch out with my online writing, I plan to create different online personas for different subjects I write about. I was first exposed to the idea in Potpiegirl's One Week Marketing.

My reasons are twofold:

1. It protects any keyword research I might do.

2. It is a kind of online branding. Once you begin to develop a lot of online content, it makes you a little less of an authority if someone clicks on your profile and sees articles written about everything from hot tubs to paying down debt to making the perfect chocolate cake.

At the moment, I'm a little more concerned with the branding aspect than the keyword aspect but I think they are both good arguments for creating multiple accounts where allowed.

Thanks again to Kate (Limowreck at eHow) for letting me share her list!

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.

Using the eHow Widget

I'm not going to lie. I'm in love with the eHow widget. It's such a professional way for us to feature up to five of our eHow articles. In fact, someone on the eHow forums said she started a blog just so she could use the widget. How cool is that?

So which five articles should a writer feature? In my opinion, you should go one of two directions:

1. Feature articles that have been performing well for you. Play to your strengths. Don't try to prop up articles that aren't doing well; help the high performers do even better!

2. Feature new articles. Help your new articles get views (and hopefully earnings) by getting them seen in the widget.

This is also a good time to mention that when at all possible, use a photo with your article. That widget looks so much better (and clickable) with those photos featured along with the articles.

Quick eHow Tip: Related Articles

You should always attempt to include your own relevant articles in the related articles section of the eHow template. The idea is that when someone clicks away from your article, you want them to click on something that benefits YOU, whether that is an ad, an affiliate link, or another of your articles.

I've found, however, that when searching for my articles using the search function in the eHow article template, I can't always find them. Even when I put the title in word for word.

One trick I've found is to use different combinations of words in my title until I hit on my own. I may have to remove the 'How to' part of the title. If that doesn't work I'll remove other words and then add some back if necessary. Sometimes I can find it when entering just one or two words from the title.

The good news is that once I've played around with this enough, I can usually hit on the article I'm looking for in the search results and add it to 'related articles'. Hopefully that little bit of persistence pays off with additional article views.

A Great Source of Article Ideas for eHow

I have a folder in my favorites called 'eHow Article Ideas'. Anytime I run across something online that has ideas for articles, I bookmark it and put it in this folder.

Today something landed in my email inbox that will definitely go into the folder. It's Amazon's Top Ten List for New Year's Resolutions.

The list includes everything from losing weight (of course) to starting a new hobby. Each resolution is accompanied by Amazon products that fit with that resolution. So not only can this list spark some article ideas, if you're an Amazon affiliate there are products you can put in the eHow article resources box using your affiliate link.

Where do you get your eHow article ideas?

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?

eHow Article Template vs. Word

I’ll admit it. I love writing my eHow articles directly into the eHow template. I know I should write them in Word and transfer them over, but it’s so much easier to just open up the template and start writing away.

Even so, I’ve committing to change that practice. I’m even going back to the 140+ articles I’ve written to date and copying and saving them as Word documents. Ten a day, every day, until it’s done.

Why go to all that work?

Well, the obvious reason to create eHow articles in Word is so that if the system goes all buggy while you’re typing you won’t lose all your work. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens often enough and it’s incredibly frustrating when it does.

But there is another reason – a more exciting one – to create your articles in Word or another word processing software. It all has to do with the fact that at eHow, you own your content. You’re not selling your content to eHow, you’re sharing it with them for a piece of the revenue pie.

Why does that matter?

Well, since you own the content you can place your eHow articles other places on the web and reap additional earnings from them. Whether it’s another revenue sharing site like Bukisa or Squidoo, or a site or blog that you’ve created yourself, owning the content means you can make those articles do double (or triple) duty.

Now before you go all crazy with the copy and paste, you should know that it’s best not to place your articles elsewhere word for word. The word is that Google doesn’t like duplicate content and you’re not as likely to rank as well if you’re placing the exact same content somewhere else. But with your articles in Word, it’s easy enough to re-write paragraphs and make some word substitutions so as not to have duplicate content.

That requires a little bit of work but it’s certainly easier than coming up with a new article idea and creating an article from scratch.

And even if you’re not interested in creating content somewhere else, having all your articles in Word helps you hedge your bets a bit regarding creating content for a site you don’t control (eHow). So if eHow were ever to go *poof* (as unlikely as that might be) you could take your content and place it somewhere else on the web.

And for those of us who worry about putting our writing up on someone else’s site, that should help us sleep a little better at night.