When you delete your articles from eHow, they can step this unfair competition up a notch by redirecting your old link to either a list of their prepaid articles or to a (very) similar, prepaid article that they no longer have to pay residual earnings on.

eHow keeps the age of your URL and any backlinks you created that are out of your control to redirect or delete. The net effect is that your article, which hopefully you have moved to a legitimate residual income site, is going to have trouble unless you let Google know that the original is gone.

Another blogger has kindly written a helpful procedure up for you to follow to remove dead eHow article links that should solve this problem. Please let one of us know if it doesn’t work for you for any reason, as we all need to help each other deal with the eHow scam and keep on top of these things.

I use Traffic Travis (a free download) to find out which social bookmarking sites, and which user-generated content sites rank highest for any given keywords, and then focus on promoting my articles using those sites.

For example, articles submitted to Stumble Upon often get more traffic than articles that were not “Stumbled,” and if I search for a long-tail keyword phrase in Traffic Travis, Stumbled articles frequently appear in the top 10 or 20 results (though not in this particular example). This example does tell me that adding articles with my long-tail keyword to some of these sites, and adding links to my blog (or to my higher paying articles, like HubPages), may boost my traffic.

This also shows why watching Yahoo! Answers for questions in your niche and then answering them with a link to your site can pay off. But you should answer a few questions without adding links for every one answer that you do add a link to to avoid appearing spammy and having your account banned.

But what is true today may not hold true tomorrow in SEO land. So watch the trends.

Lately, I have been seeing more Mixx results in my Traffic Travis searches, which tells me I may want to start “Mixxing” my articles.

IMPORTANT: Use social bookmarking in a “social” manner. If you give the appearance of being a spammer by submitting only your own sites, most of these sites will suspend or delete your account. Try to bookmark at least five of other people’s sites and articles for every one of your own that you submit.

Obviously, broad keywords are more competitive, and larger, more established websites will usually rank in the top 20 for those. For example, pet food companies such as, “Purina” will usually own most of the top spots for the broad term, “cat food.” But if you search for “which cat food is healthiest for my cat,” at least 7 of the top 20 search results are for user-generated content sites. (Above is an example of using Traffic Travis to determine this.)

So if I write about “healthy cat food,” and I find that my long-tail keywords consistently show up in these sites, in this order, I’ll know that I should publish on some of these sites to rank higher. I’ll find questions at Yahoo answers to respond to, make a HubPage, etc. If I have a cat food site, I’ll point most of my articles to my own site, where possible.

You can see these same results in Google without using Traffic Travis, just not as clearly. And BE CAREFUL to not use Traffic Travis more than 3-5 times in one day, or Google starts banning your IP address from being able to use cache view. Google doesn’t like Traffic Travis, because automated search programs like Traffic Travis tie up their servers.

Bottom line: monitor your search results over time to see which social bookmarking and user-generated content sites are ranking highest for long-tail keywords, then use those sites to promote your content.

P.S. Read this very interesting article on the “Stumble Effect” by Crystal Williams…I think she’s on to somethng here…

I’ve seen comments suggesting that writers who don’t like some of the more unsavory content sites go find “real jobs.” Well, many of us live in states where it’s tough—impossible even—to find jobs, and still others must work from home.

So you need a plan that works for your personality, talents, and situation. Do you need to earn money fast? Prefer to be autonomous? Or do you work better under the pressure of having a quota to meet every month? Once you prioritize your needs, strengths, and challenges, you can better invest your online writing efforts.

But first, a warning.

From now on, I’m going to call content mills what they are: content mills. Not content aggregator sites, because my spell check doesn’t like that phrase any more than I do. They’re content mills. Sorry. I’ve been published nationally and I’m educated, and I write for them. As do many writers better than I.

So whatever your strategy, think it through first, read the TOUs if writing for someone other than yourself, and DIVERSIFY. Diversify which sites you write for, and diversify your ad sources on your own sites.

I know. But do as I say, not as I do.

When I reinstall my ads on this blog in three days (after having replaced them with Haiti relief PSAs), all I have is AdSense ads. But I’ll get there. I do have several of my own blogs and I write for content mills and do freelance contract work, so at least my earning venues are diversified.

If you’re having trouble deciding where to write next, open accounts at a couple of content sites and publish an article to learn the system. Then build your own blog or website to both diversify and integrate your efforts.

And if you aren’t yet confident about your article SEO skills, or you don’t know how to use keyword tools, and you’re not sure how to promote your articles, TIME OUT.

Go learn, because guess what? Writing online for residual income is not all about great writing. In fact, you’ll make more money as a lousy writer who understands and applies strategic SEO tactics than you will at a content mill as a good writer who doesn’t know keywords from Key Lime Pie.

That’s a fact.

So assuming you’ve got that base covered, here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. To build your own blog or website, buy a domain name and monthly hosting and be done with it. Install WordPress, whether you are planning a blog or a traditional website. Site building doesn’t get much easier or more SEO friendly than WordPress. And not WordPress.com or Blogger.com. Those are fine for temporary sites, but you won’t own your own blog.

And we all know companies can change their terms of service, don’t we?

2. If you need money fast, try Life123 while you’re working on other long-term projects. Or Textbroker. You won’t get rich, but you might not starve, either.

3. To start earning residual income by writing for a content mill without completing an application, HubPages and InfoBarrel are good bets. There are guest posts on this blog about how to make money writing for each of them. But plan on diligently promoting your content and not seeing any income for three months.

4. If your writing is above average, and you know that because your English teacher and not your girlfriend told you so, apply to Suite101 and Examiner. In that order. If you land a national Examiner column (or a local column, and apply for a national six weeks later), you will have quotas to meet, but if you’re good at meeting quotas and promoting your work, it will eventually pay off. And Examiner pays $50 for every qualified writer its writers refer.

5. Hang out on forums where other writers congregate. Warrior Forums and WAHM, for starters. The regulars will tell you the truth. Usually. Make friends and help each other with content promotion.

6. Write an ebook. Then sell it. Read Pat Flynn’s ebook guide to learn how.

7. Teach a class about online writing. The best money I ever made was teaching at a corporate education center of a college. I taught database engineering and Microsoft applications for end users, but the principles for teaching any community class are similar.

If you have an undergraduate degree, you may qualify to teach at a community college, and if you do not have a degree, you can teach at parks and rec centers, senior centers or other community venues. Or you can place ads to tutor people in web writing, SEO, or any area of expertise. Teach scrapbooking if that’s what you write about, and you’ll find sources of writing inspiration from your classes.

Most colleges and community centers have a proposal process that includes forms to complete with a description of the class you propose teaching, your fee for each student who attends, length of time, and any supplies or equipment that the school or students must supply. It’s not writing per se, but it’ll sure help support your writing habit.

8. Search online regularly for a common term that you would write about. Which sites are on the first two pages? I”ve noticed several Life123 article results in many of my searches lately, which tells me that it’s easier to get views now on this relatively new site. InfoBarrel comes up more frequently, too. Good clues–pay attention. And take note of which ones are missing, too.

9. Check Compete.com regularly. If the site you spend all  your time writing for has lost traffic in the last three months, you should probably focus on another venue for awhile. And while you’re on Compete, compare all of the sites you write for, and watch the ones you don’t.

Then relax. You’ve got your niche, your keywords, your network. Just write and stay current in your industry. You really can’t relax, I was just kidding. But relax in terms of writing about what you believe in, what you’re passionate about. Like someone else’s blog? Then link to them if they’re not spammy. If someone has a question or needs your help, give what you can when you have time. You will always learn something and build your credibility in the process.

Don’t play games. Give your readers what they came for. It will all work out. If you’re all about money, then the games will probably work for you. And you can probably sleep at night. But I’m talking to folks like me who need to feel good about what they put into the world at the end of the day, as well as what they take away.

Most importantly, remember that the Internet is not static. It moves at the speed of life, times 1,000. That fantastically generous revenue-sharing site today is going to eat your lunch tomorrow. You can earn a living online, (emphasis on the word EARN) if you can keep up. If you can’t, or don’t want to, then this is your stop.

Otherwise, get up tomorrow morning, set some goals, make a plan, and jump.

The following guest post is an overview of HubPages by Carla, with a link to more information. Thanks, Carla!

How to Build Residual Income with HubPages

By Carla Chadwick

If you’re a writer who wants to build residual income, you’ll eventually run across HubPages. I consider myself lucky that I did so early in my Internet marketing career, because my hub revenues now provide a large chunk of my income. It wasn’t easy at first, because there wasn’t anyone to give me an overview of how HubPages works. That’s why I wrote How to Make Money Writing on HubPages, which gives step-by-step instructions on how to build hubs and monetize them.

Even though the hub linked above is about as long as War and Peace, there are still subtleties it doesn’t cover. So I’d like to address some of them here. My goal is to give writers who are considering investing their time in HubPages a better sense of what awaits them.

Do-follow vs. no-follow links

Many people want to know whether HubPages links are do-follow or no-follow. The answer is that they can be either; it just depends on your status within the HubPages community. If you keep your HubScore (the score attached to your profile, not to individual hubs) above 74, your links will be do-followed. Your links will automatically be no-followed if your score falls below that.

You can keep your score above 74 by making sure that at least some of your hubs have more than 1,000 words. If some of them are even longer, so much the better. It’s also a good idea to include some of the extra capsules provided within each hub, which allow for the inclusion of polls, quizzes, news and RSS feeds, photos or illustrations and videos. The more capsules you add, the higher your HubScore will be. One caveat, though: there should be no more than 100 outgoing links on a hub, including RSS and news feeds.

Speaking of links, it’s important to note that you’re allowed only two links to each domain in a hub. That restriction is waved, however, if you include an RSS feed to your blog. Feed capsules allow for up to eight links, as long as you don’t have any other links to that domain within the same hub. Also, be aware that if you have two sites connected by redirects, those will count as one domain.

Residual income potential

HubPages offers four official revenue streams: AdSense, Kontera, Amazon and eBay. AdSense is run by default if you have any “commercial” links (links that provide any SEO and/or marketing value to the hub owner) within your hub, so you’ll want to enter your AdSense affiliate code immediately. Otherwise you may miss out on some revenue. The other programs are optional, but I’ve found they all produce revenue.

HubPages doesn’t split revenue with their authors; they split impressions, at the rate of forty percent of the impressions going to HubPages and 60 percent going to you. That means that if a visitor lands on your hub when your affiliate code is being displayed on the page (which happens 60 times out of 100), you will get 100 percent of the revenue, whether it’s AdSense, Kontera, Amazon or eBay. HubPages gets 100 percent of the revenue from the other 40 out of 100 clicks.

You can use your own affiliate links too. If you do, the revenue from those would be 100 percent yours. There’s also an opportunity to build even more residual income by signing up other authors under you. The payment formula is a little complicated, so I won’t cover it here. You can read about that in the hub I’ve linked above.

As with most Internet marketing endeavors, HubPages revenue is entirely dependent on the keywords you choose, and how much you promote and optimize those pages. One of the things I love about HubPages is that someone who won’t click on an ad elsewhere will click on an ad on HubPages. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen that behavior consistently, and so have other Hubbers. So if you get the traffic there and the hub is well-optimized, you will make money.

Because of this, I and many other Hubbers have niche blogs that exist primarily to send traffic to hubs. Blogger blogs work nicely for this, because there’s no money needed and they’re easy to maintain. If you should pursue that approach, though, make sure your blog is relatively plain. Fancy backgrounds and a lot of colors will only distract your visitors from clicking over to your hubs. I use graphic ads to get people to click through, but you can use text links if you want. You can see an example of how I direct traffic through ads on my WordPlay blog.

Naturally, if you already have niche blogs that are getting traffic, those would also be great places to post links to your hubs. Using web properties that already have traffic to direct visitors to your hubs would greatly speed the time it takes to begin generating revenue.

Because of the diversity of reporting methods for revenue sources, it’s not really possible to tell you how much I make on individual hubs. But I can tell you that I made approximately $2,000 in December 2009, using the four standard HubPages revenue sources, plus a separate affiliate program that I promote on some of my hubs. That revenue came from a mix of 153 hubs of varying ages and was higher than I usually experience because I have quite a few holiday hubs. I anticipate the revenue for December 2010 will be even higher, because I will have built more hubs by then, and my existing hubs and their incoming links will have aged.

The revenue the rest of the year goes up and down for me, depending on which of my seasonal hubs is getting traffic at any given time. I built many of my seasonal hubs first, because they have a tendency to pay more and generate huge bursts of traffic. But that’s not enough to create a consistent income, so I’m now in the process of building more hubs on topics with year-round appeal.

I promote my hubs through article marketing, link exchanges and other link-building. Hubs get an initial lift in Google because HubPages.com is a strong domain. But that lasts only for a short while and won’t happen at all for some more competitive keywords. So if you don’t plan to do link-building for your hubs or at least for blogs that point to them, save yourself some time and don’t build any hubs at all. If you’re willing to build links but don’t know how, though, the hub linked at the top of this page will explain it and give you linking resources.

Community

I’ve found many supportive and wonderful people who write for HubPages. These people have become my fans on Twitter and often leave comments on my hubs. Truth be told, though, there are also Hubbers I don’t like as much. That’s life though. I’ve found that staying out of the HubPages forum is a great way to avoid the more toxic element. Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of nice people who frequent the forums. But unless I have a support issue I’m researching, I stay away. Your mileage may vary, though, so if you like to mix socializing with money-making; those connections are definitely available on HubPages.

I have also found HubPages management to be helpful, and any issues have been resolved quickly by writing to their support team. But be forewarned: HubPages is picky. If one of your hubs doesn’t have what they perceive to be value, you’ll probably be penalized by a lower HubScore or even being unpublished until you alter it. This is how HubPages keeps their good standing with Google, so in the long run their pickiness is great for everyone who builds good content.

I hope this overview has helped you evaluate whether HubPages is right for you. If you join, please feel free to stop by any of my hubs and say hi.

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.

First of all, the reason I have not posted on Examiner recently has been purely personal. There’s been a lot going on in my life, including a recent move, and I have let it interfere with writing on a regular basis. I do enjoy writing for Examiner, and I recommend it for writers who want to increase their exposure and build their networks. And if you are good at convincing others to join Examiner, referrals currently pay $50 each–not too shabby.

Building residual income by writing for Examiner.com does not have the same potential as a site like InfoBarrel, because earnings drop if you don’t publish every day or two on Examiner. On a site like InfoBarrel, your earnings continue to accrue long after you stop publishing, as long as your article still garners viewers and ad clicks.

Examiner stops paying their writers after they have been inactive for one month. That’s something to consider if you are thinking about writing content for Examiner. Are you the type of writer who doesn’t mind being obligated to post an article four times a week?

Examiner pays approximately one cent per page view. This does not generally add up to much for local Examiners, but can pay well for a national Examiner who actively promotes his or her column.

If you are interested in writing for Examiner.com, here is what I suggest: Apply for a local position, write good articles consistently for six weeks, then apply for a national position with high-paying keywords in a subject that you write passionately about and with authority.

To increase page views for your Examiner column, (besides applying article SEO, adding images and backlinks) here are my top 10 tips:

1. Write about good bloggers, and they will promote you. If you are a local Examiner, find local bloggers with good content and email them. Interview them for an upcoming post, then send them the link to your post. They will blog about being featured in your column, bringing you lots of traffic.

2. Promote events, and email the organizers with the link to your article. Many of my Examiner event posts ranked even better in the search engines than the original source sites!

Just remember never to plagiarize, and ask permission before using someone else’s content, event if it’s just to copy dates, times, and event details.

3. Stumble, Stumble, Stumble. If you don’t belong to StumbleUpon.com, join today (it’s free). “Stumble” other great sites at least four times as often as you Stumble your own. Do the same with Digg.

If you only promote your own content, you’ll lose your accounts, so play it smart.

4. Add Statcounter.com code to your Examiner articles to track your individual article page view analytics. It’s worth the time and effort. That’s how I know Stumbling and Digging works.

5. Attend an Examiner orientation conference call and additional Q&A calls. They are excellent, and will answer your questions and give you tips to improve your earnings and page views.

6. Read Examiner tutorials. Examiner has good training, so take advantage of it. I have an excellent manager, and hopefully you will, too.

7. Network with other Examiners. Before you have enough articles of your own to link to, link to other Examiners’ articles. Believe it or not, it can increase your earnings.

8. Add links to your own Examiner articles as much as possible in the text of your articles. Add a section of article links below each article, and a link to follow you on Twitter and subscribe to your column.

9. Add links to your own website or blog when appropriate–Examiner links are top-notch do-follow links, so use them!

10. You can add relevant affiliate links to your articles, just be careful to use them sparingly and appropriately to avoid the appearance of spam.

The top Examiner earner makes $8,000 a month. I’m sure it’s not easy, but if you are ambitious and if this venue is a good match for your writing skills and interests, you can earn a good residual income writing content for Examiner.com, too.

I knew that I had some Propellor links to articles that both eHow and I had deleted, but was not able to find a way to delete those links, nor to “Un-Stumble” any previously Stumbled articles. I was, however, able to “Un-Digg” Dugg articles, which was some consolation. I discussed this with a friend, who also writes about earning residual income online, and he said that he keeps a spreadsheet of backlinks to his articles, which helps him to redirect those links if articles are deleted or moved. I wish I’d thought of that, but I haven’t been keeping track of mine.

So here is my new, future strategy for building backlinks to articles, that you can hopefully benefit from: I will only point backlinks that I cannot control (edit or delete) to content that I can control in the future. If someone informs me that they are mentioning me on their blog, for example, I will ask them to use anchor text that links to my blog or website–not to an article on a content aggregator site. Any articles or posts I write with backlinks will point to my own blog or website. And I will track my backlinks as Brian suggested.

This way I minimize having to ask others later on, “Uh, can you please change the URL pointing to my article in your blog post of October 11, 2009?”

In a nutshell, a good backlink building strategy for articles is to point backlinks that you can control to articles you cannot control, such as those on web content sites, and save the backlinks that will live on in spite of your wishes, to your own blog posts and web content. This will help you to avoid having your newly transplanted articles compete with your original, defunct articles in the search engines.

Based on more than three months of data analysis of five eHow accounts by three eHow writers, I can offer some possible–and probable–explanations.

The Growth Factor

On July 27, 2009, Time magazine published a nine-sentence article about eHow saying in part,

“This is no get-rich-quick scheme. But eHow.com whose popularity has soared during the recession as DIYers seek advice on topics like ‘How to Run Bathroom Plumbing,’ will pay any Joe Blow for content. All writers are welcome, regardless of expertise or ability to string sentences together.”

And eHow’s web servers, already overrun by newcomers, gained another three million visitors in the next three months. According to Compete.com, eHow gained a total of 13,000,000 visitors between October of 2008 and October of 2009. That is a significant increase for any website to deal with.

We don’t know how many of those new visitors are members, and how many members are writers. eHow requires anyone who wants to comment on or rate an article to join, so there are undoubtedly numerous members who have never written an article. But with the current economic conditions, it’s safe to say that eHow has gained a large number of writers during the past year.

The Quality Factor

If eHow ever had the reputation of offering quality “How-to” advice, they don’t now. As Time Magazine noted, anyone can write for eHow. Yes, eHow has quality standards, but they don’t appear to have been enforced prior to their “article sweeps” that began a few months ago. To survive as a power player in the user-generated content game, eHow’s management knew it could not afford to continue to ignore quality.  Search engines penalize for lack of quality, and so do visitors. But then, they knew this all along.

The Quantity Factor

So whatever the game plan was initially, the effect was that eHow gained a huge amount of content from its writers.  And although the search engines penalize for poor quality, they tend to reward for quantity. So now eHow begins to position itself for both. Ultimately, this can be a great thing for “real” writers and for eHow’s bottom line.

The Money Factor

As one of eHow’s members recently pointed out on an eHow forum, it makes more sense for eHow’s bottom line, and that of its parent company, Demand Media, to get as much quality content as they can for as little money as possible. As it currently stands, eHow writers earn monthly payments for their content based on some secret formula that undoubtedly includes number of page views and Google AdSense clicks that their articles draw, and the author retains the rights to the content.

So a really great article can earn upwards of $100 a year, and an article with no SEO value may never earn a penny. And an author can delete that great article any time they wish. It probably doesn’t happen often, but when eHow’s next big competitor comes along and offers more money to writers, there could be a mass exodus that would drastically affect eHow’s earnings. Sure, eHow can still use all or part of the article in site promotions for the next six months, but that probably doesn’t happen often, either.

Demand Media has always provided articles to eHow from its Demand Studios’ authors who earn $15 or $20 for each article, and then Demand Media owns the content forever. No more residual payments, and good content to boot.

The eHow UK Factor

At the end of July, 2009, the same time that eHow was experiencing this rapid growth and Time Magazine published their article, eHow was quietly launching its eHow UK site. The UK site appears to be a clone of the eHow US site without the forums or ability to join and write for eHow UK. All of the US members profiles and articles appear as clones on the UK site, with only the date formatting and ads changed.

EHow has been asked in the forums whether US members will be paid for the income that their UK clones generate, but no one from eHow has responded to the questions as of today. And since more members have reported their income dropping than increasing since the eHow UK launch in early August, it’s probably safe to say members do not earn for their contributions to the UK site. I personally analyzed data from two accounts that showed a small, but distinct decline in earnings per page-view, with a correlative increase in page views between October and November.

And there’s the rub: Links for related eHow UK now frequently appear in Google search results below the link for the original article searched for–where related eHow US articles used to appear. When a searcher might formerly have clicked a related article that was lower on the search results page, instead of the first title appearing, the visitor might have still ended up at the writer’s original article and even have clicked an ad or two, generating income for the writer. But now that same writer’s article clones on UK are competing for searchers’ attention, yet they earn the writer NO MONEY.

Draw your own conclusions.

So What Happened to eHow?

Bottom line, this is the law of supply and demand at work. Writers are more plentiful, so they get paid less. Content is more plentiful, so buyers are demanding higher quality. A company that might be making “enough” wants more. And if you really want to see where this is all leading, visit the eHow forums.

My Reaction

I joined eHow at exactly the wrong time, and spent my first month wondering why my earnings stayed at $0, like many others who joined at the same time. It was resolved, but the entire time I wrote there (past tense), there were numerous technical glitches and unanswered questions from eHow staff. The amount of time I invested there was a waste in terms of income.

However, I joined forces with several other eHow writers and a few bloggers, and we dug into the data and experimented, and we learned things that we have not yet shared. We compiled and analyzed data from five eHow accounts, and three of us are writing a book based on what we learned. I will announce it here when it is published, as well as on our launch site, which is one of the other authors’ blogs.

Are You Asking, “Should I Write for eHow?”

If you were searching for the answer to whether you should write for eHow, I obviously cannot decide that for you. But while I have removed my articles from the site, the decision was based on principle, and not on whether I think there is still income potential there.

I believe that eHow will continue to allow the general public to write on their site for some time to come. But I do not believe the income potential is as high as it was. That said, it is a great place to connect with other writers, and to learn what works in writing online and what doesn’t. If you have articles that are earning money there, I suggest you leave them, but BACK THEM UP! And re-write them to publish elsewhere. If it was ever a good idea to write for one content aggregator site to earn residual income, that time has definitely passed.

And Most Importantly:

When you re-write your eHow content, position it to compete with your original content instead of allowing eHow to exploit your articles to raise their UK site in the search engines, thereby reducing your chances of earning from them. Do your SEO research, and post your new, optimized articles on  InfoBarrel, Mahalo, HubPages,and Suite101 where they will build your residual income. Publish Squidoo Lenses and Ezinearticles content that points to these new articles. Make thoughtful comments on blogs that allow do-follow links with links to these new articles.

I do not believe that it will again be possible for writers to average $3 to $5 per article on eHow, as some eHow ebook authors have claimed they earn. I believe you can still average $2 for each well-optimized, well-written article that eHow does not randomly delete, and this is still a good monthly residual income.

It has always been important for web content writers to diversify, and now it is imperative. The equivalent of “publish or perish” in content writing is “diversify or cry,” and you would do well to apply this principle now. Like, today.

And then come back! My next post may be the motivation you have been looking for to help you write web content on a regular basis. So stay tuned! You won’t want to miss it.