Fantastic. Now what?

Well, “now what” will probably not be determined in the forums. Member concerns have been brought to light, and eHow’s hand has been forced to some degree. EHow has been called out, and they have finally begun responding. That’s a start.

But friends are fighting with friends now, fingers are being pointed, and names are being called. What a shame for such a great community of collaborators to spend their time and energy hammering this into the ground.

So because I have had a hand in exposing the issues related to eHow’s UK site, I believe it is important to balance that by also stating my opinion that the eHow community of members is among the best on the Internet.

This blog is about earning a residual income by writing online. Spending unproductive time in forums is time that everyone could be applying toward writing and earning that residual income that, let’s face it, we need.

This blog is also about collaborating to advance the online writing community as a whole. Revealing business practices that are potentially harmful to this community is part of that mission, but wallowing in negativity is not.

So whether you are, have been, or want to be part of the great eHow community, please help to keep that spirit alive.

If you have made eHow aware of how their actions have hurt you and what you expect from them, you have helped to give eHow, Demand Media, and other user-generated content sites notice that writers will not accept unfair treatment.

Demand Media and eHow have finally answered our initial calls to action, so let’s take some time to observe whether and how they will honor their stated intentions.

Only eHow and Demand Media know what all the facts are here. Speculating and threatening will not help anyone at this point. So how about we all put this into perspective, take a step back, and remember what makes us so passionate about eHow.

It’s the community. The people. The ones who write to you privately when you don’t know what to do next, and tell you. The ones who have your back on the forum, and who comment on your blog.

EHow is the members who collaborate on the forums and on their own blogs to bring attention to the plight of a missing child, to try to bring her home and protect her with prayers.

EHow is the people who rally around those whose family members are sick or injured.

EHow is a community of people who show they care, time and again.

If you join eHow tomorrow as a new member, and you post on the forum that you need a little help getting started, other members will quickly offer their assistance. I guarantee it.

When I was new to eHow and I was discouraged because I had earned no money after writing several articles, one long-term member helped me to carefully analyze each of my articles and why they might not be earning money. Although the lack of earnings was later said to be a technical glitch, I learned valuable strategies from this member, and from others, that have improved my article writing significantly.

Here are some of the many positive actions I have seen promoted on the eHow forums and the eHow messaging system:

• Keeping Lindsey Baum, a child missing for more than six months now, fresh in the public’s hearts and prayers.
• Recruiting members to post holiday greetings to a child with cancer.
• Throwing virtual holiday forum parties for the entire community.
• Offering helpful, free tools, such as the Earnings Tracker by 17of26, and ebooks/guides by Desolator and David Sarokin.
• Supporting members whose articles have been plagiarized by others.
• Coordinating a joint entertainment venture based on a doll that travels from member to member, and whose exploits are documented in the forums and eHow’s official blog.
• Rallying around a member whose child was badly injured in an accident, to help promote her articles on their own blogs.
• Generously sharing resources, such as reviewing other residual income opportunities and tips for earning more money.

Some of eHow’s best and brightest are quietly posting their own thoughts on the Internet, asking for us all to remember that eHow is a great community. I vote for honoring that community spirit, respecting those whose opinions are different from our own, and encouraging and helping one another again.

Let’s let the eHow UK Clone Saga play itself out for awhile. Most of us have already lost potential income one way or another through this whole debacle, and we owe it to ourselves to focus on writing and on our families and friendships, while still keeping an eye on the situation.

I challenge everyone reading this to spend time you might have otherwise used posting to the eHow forums, to earn an extra $10 by writing online next week and then donating it to Haiti quake relief.

And I challenge you to thank your friends. Publicly. If you hurt a friend’s feelings, apologize. Save your eHow relationships as you would your articles.

Please, post your comments here about positive actions you have seen from the eHow community. Your email addresses will never be shared, and they don’t have to be addresses you normally use if you are concerned about that.

So who’s first? Dolly?

P.S. Read about one member’s experience with eHow Dolly here. I ran across this today, and it’s a great example of the eHow community spirit.

And while I may choose to turn my head from that train wreck as much as I am able, and to focus on what we can all do to improve the industry and our individual opportunities, I am honored that someone has entrusted me to carry their message to the public.

The source of this message, in this case a third party, will remain private. Records will be retained in the event of a valid court order to produce them.

Following is the opinion sent to me today by Anonymous:

I wouldn’t get too excited yet about today’s announcement. Ehow is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or because it is the right thing.They are doing it because they got caught with their pants down and a bare arse in the dead of this cold, cold winter.  I personally believe they underestimated the masses, being the the ‘users’, and gave no thought to the fact than any of us were smart enough or would dare speak out. When the lawyer piped in last week with what could very easily be an argument presented in court and debated on its merits for jurisdiction of the site, I believe those on high took notice and perhaps thought better of proceeding.

I’ve not checked but my guess is the UK site is not domiciled in the US as someone said, but in the UK where the rules and laws are very different. And if someone who knows about this were to dig a little, I wouldn’t be surprised if they, DM have a surprise up their sleeves with reference to the TOU where we sign away all our rights and give them the right to use our material anyway they want. If they are out of the US doing it, then we have no recourse. Maybe it’s my paranoid freedom fighter rearing its years-old head, but frankly, this is not an innocent little game being played. I have no idea of their agenda, only that they like to make money

Anyway, don’t hold your breath. You’ll probably turn blue by the time the the articles are removed from the UK and we’ll be rolling in our graves before they give us any earnings from the time they were listing. I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

Thank you, Anonymous.

Although I do not plan to continue coverage of the current eHow / Demand Media issues, I have been contacted by several eHow members asking if I know certain other eHow members and whether I can help them contact each other.

Whether this is due to lack of confidence in eHow’s private messaging system, or avoidance of the website in general, members seem to need a way to facilitate communication outside the eHow platform.

If you are an eHow member trying to contact another member outside the system, you may post your request in comments with your email address. I will then post the UserID of the person you want to contact, and they can choose whether to respond to that request or not.

Or you can simply email me at contacts[at]crunchydata[dot]com.

All comments here are moderated. That is, they are not posted publicly unless and until I approve them. So I will not post your requests publicly unless you request that I do so. I don’t need to know who you are. You can use a temporary email address and a fictitious name, then explain when the member contact you who you are. I don’t care.

That said, here are a few members that others have asked me to try to contact on their behalf:

JPWriter
LovingLife357
Smith57
eDonkey

If you are one of these members, please contact me via email or comments, and I will tell you which member wants to speak with you.

And if you can suggest a more elegant solution for this, I’m listening. Thanks!

Collaborating with other writers online to guest post on blogs, write ebooks, and promote each others’ work improves the quality of my writing, but more importantly, it breaks the monotony of working in a vacuum.

You know what I mean. If you write, even if you also have an outside job, you write in a vacuum. Just you and the computer. You shut out your family, friends, and pets to focus on writing. Writing online is a solo gig. Or is it?

Are you writing online for content sites,  your own blog, or a combination of these? Hopefully you diversify your efforts, but one thing is for sure: individuals are in for tougher times this year when competing online for readers.

It’s inevitable. The tides of search engine traffic are shifting toward larger content aggregation sites and away from individual blogs and smaller websites. Big companies have the edge.

Not only that, but the trend is for these sites to increasingly pay a one-time fee (Demand Studios), or cap their payouts (Life123). That’s fine, but you may want to write individual articles and blog posts to build residual income, and you need a way to compete for traffic to your content to maintain that residual income.

Search engines favor sites with more pages, more content, more images, and more videos. Content aggregator sites deliver–and profit from delivering–so more of them join the fray, giving you more big competition.

Search engines also favor fresh content, and the big sites deliver that, too. You, as a solo writer, can post fresh content a few times a week. Content sites can post fresh content several times per hour.

So how can you compete? By collaborating with other writers. Co-ops have long offered refuge for the lone business person, whether farmer, artist, or writer by combining talents and goods for mutual profit. Profitable Collaboration can take the form of a large, formal, structured co-op, or simply two friends sharing resources.

One renowned blogger known as, “Grizzly” has mastered the art of the Internet co-op. You probably already know who I am referring to, but if not, check him out. And the Keyword Academy offers a similar type of Internet group for people to network and form mutually beneficial teams.

But you don’t need to join a formal group to find others who want to collaborate. A few months ago, I met some good writers and like-minded people on a writing forum. We formed a Google Group to help each other learn, to promote each others’ articles, and to share ideas.

Each group member who invested time in the project saw significant increases in blog and article traffic, and we even improved our writing and research skills. We introduced each other to our own networks and formed new friendships and partnerships. We boosted each others’ morale, and we are all better for it.

Sounds nice, huh? Well, it is. But collaborating is no longer a nicety or a luxury. If you plan to grow your business by writing online, collaborating is now essential. The big sites are getting bigger, and you need to “get bigger” to compete. It’s like opening your coat when a mountain lion approaches you on a trail to scare it away. You’re not really bigger, you just look that way, thanks to collaborating with your coat.

While you can offer a level of quality and personal attention to readers that not many content mills can, readers have to find your voice among the rising tide of content. By collaborating with other writers, you increase your visibility and many other opportunities to learn and grow, while retaining (even increasing) your ability to provide quality, personal service to your readers. The Internet is like a mountain lion. It doesn’t know you’re not big if you look big.

Do you know how to find others you can work well with to form collaborative teams? Here are a few tips that have worked for me:

1. Start with a sense of generosity of spirit. Just give. I mean, be smart about it, but if you’re dealing with quality, ethical people, it’s not going to kill you to promote their stuff. Give them links. Share that inside info you just learned. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

2. Watch forums and read articles and blogs by other writers. Participate in forums. You can always find an  eHow member or Warrior Forum person to learn from. When you find a writer online whose style and quality resonate with you, subscribe to their blog or article feed. Leave positive, constructive comments for them. Write to them personally. It takes time for both parties to get a sense of trust and compatibility, so give it time before suggesting a joint project.

3. Be honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. Choose partners whose assets and liabilities complement your own so you can learn from each other. Or team up with someone who is also strong in your niche to boost your power exponentially. Or if someone just has you outclassed, be a groupie. Just don’t be a creepy groupie.

I’m a big Ian Lurie fan, and he doesn’t even know I exist. And no, we’re not collaborating, but you can bet I’m learning from him, and I may find another Ian Lurie groupie to partner with based on our mutual interest. That guy can really turn a phrase. Which leads to my final point…

4. Appreciate and praise others who deserve your admiration. If I tell you that someone else is phenomenal, it doesn’t take away from my own phenominalness. It’s like love. The more you give, the more there is to go around. So start by giving, and remember to ask, too. We all want to be needed. And we are all going to need each other this coming year more than ever.

5. Keep your standards high, and ego low. And look for others who do the same. One reason the previously-mentioned group excelled was that each member was as willing to follow as they were to lead. I started the group, but another natural leader emerged and took the group to greater heights than it might otherwise have gone.

Recently, new opportunities for collaboration have arisen for me, mostly connected to previous networking partners. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that will improve your life and your writing indefinitely.

So don’t wait, collaborate!

And may you have your happiest, most productive and profitable New Year ever writing online.

P.S. An extra special thanks to the most brilliant and generous collaborators ever, Fritz, Marty, Brian, Karbyn, Ann, Robin, Howie, Jason, Ellen, Barkha, AJ, and all the other friends and partners, new and ‘old’ alike, who I have been, and continue to be, blessed to know. Here’s to teaming up for a successful year ahead.