UPDATE: Thanks to AJ Tyne, here is the link to the FAQs about eHow’s latest maneuver.

So you eHow writers have been invited to apply to Demand Studios if you want to continue writing for eHow. Many have already been automatically accepted into DS if they wrote 5 or more articles with a low rejection rate. Frankly, anyone who has a choice (meaning you have food in the cupboard and your mortgage or rent is covered) and willingly associates themselves with Demand Studios after the treachery Demand Media has demonstrated toward its residual income writers deserves the abuse they will undoubtedly receive as a result.

From the announcement, it’s not clear whether eHow will continue to pay residuals for existing articles. Knowing eHow’s track record, that would mean NO.

I warned you all before and told you that DM didn’t want eHow writers any more. So please take heed now and move on to an ethical company. Write for InfoBarrel, HubPages, Suite101 or Examiner or another proven site.

And don’t look back or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt, and don’t say that Crunchy Data didn’t warn you.

As soon as I can, I will publish a post detailing how Demand Media rigged eHow to maximize their profits in anticipation of this very day by scamming writers. In the meantime, here is the text of their “surprise” (not) announcement:

It doesn’t seem quite right.

There’s been speculation that size matters, hence the supposed reason that an original or upsized version ranks first, and it just happens to be linked to someone else’s article–often belonging to Demand Media–instead of your own, with its thumbnail image version.

There’s been speculation that Google controls the outcome of the search, and that’s not accurate. Google follows the lead of the publisher. That’s a big part of what makes Google search relevant; if a publisher says,

“Hey, lookie here, search engine. See that H1 tag? That’s important stuff, and those bold words are something I want my readers to notice, so pay attention.”

Google notices and responds accordingly. And Google gives your pages and images the same importance that you give them. Do you link to one page from several places on your site? Google will notice, and that page will rank higher than others in your site that have fewer internal (and/or external) links.

It works the same way for images.

So I was curious. What would happen if I searched for one of my own original images that I had uploaded to an InfoBarrel article a couple of months ago?

The results were so natural, and so—what you would normally expect them to be—that I will let them speak for themselves. Below is a screenshot of my Google image search for: make a scrapbook in Photoshop. You can repeat these results for yourself.

All of the images with red arrows pointing to them are mine. Notice that the LARGER image version, which links to a set of articles that are related by keyword, (mine and other authors) is SECOND, which shoots that theory down.

This screenshot shows that my image ranks first in Google for the original InfoBarrel article in which I posted it.

And Bohica the elephant will be back soon (I hope) to help prove my theories as well, just as soon as Google finds him. It seems the Google image bot doesn’t visit the Pink Elephant jungle nearly as often as it does Text City.

Crunchy Data: The primary reason that my friends and readers ask about InfoBarrel is that it’s one of the more similar models to eHow and as you know, eHow has broken trust with its members in a big way. Writers are wary of investing months of their time in yet another online bait-and-switch scheme.

With that in mind, the most common questions that I see people ask about InfoBarrel are these, Ryan:

Will you reduce the revenue share for writers when your site becomes more profitable?

Ryan: We have no plans on changing our revenue share model. We feel the current model works and has allowed us the ability to grow at a comfortable rate. Our goal is to be one of the top places for writers to create content online; in order to accomplish this I think it is imperative we have a very competitive, transparent revenue share model.

Crunchy Data: Will you ever use writers’ profiles and articles without permission and/or without compensating with at least the same revenue share that all writers earn, for anything other than advertising InfoBarrel? (like eHow did with the non-earning site mirror.)

Ryan: I was actually pretty baffled from both an SEO and moral standpoint when eHow created a mirrored site. First of all, it creates tons of duplicate content across their two sites, and second of all it is essentially hurting the people who helped create your brand in the first place.

If you take away the thousands of writers who built your site, you more or less have nothing. With that said, we love our contributors and will not be publishing their content in any malicious manner.

Crunchy Data: Can IB members add Statcounter’s HTML code to their articles as an additional way to track views?

Ryan: No, a lot of code is stripped when users publish on Infobarrel. We offer users the ability to use Google Analytics once they’ve published ten articles*. As far as I am aware Google Analytics is an industry leader that provides very accurate statistics.

Crunchy Data: Do you have any documented earnings to show that IB writers can earn, on average, between $2 and $5 or more per article, per month? Can you give us any examples of high-earning members or articles?

Ryan: A number of users are vocal about their earnings, others are more private to prevent people trying to hijack their keywords. One member who is pretty vocal about his earnings is JCMayer777. He was earning over $700 per month when we did this interview. Howie also makes a few hundred a month, and I know of someone else who makes roughly $50 a month.

The earnings per thousand are really dependent on what topics you write about. Somebody who writes recipes is going to earn substantially less per thousand visitors than somebody who is writing about lawyers and lawsuits. On the flip side, the recipes articles will probably be easier to rank for due to the fact that there is less money in the niche.

From my experience, and the accounts I’ve looked at, I’m seeing people’s eCPM range from $5-$20 depending on the topics they write about and how much keyword research they apply. Promoting your articles can also impact your earnings, probably more than most people realize.

Crunchy Data: What can you tell people to reassure them that InfoBarrel is going to be around for several years to come?

Ryan: While I’ve been working in the online space for over a decade, I can tell you that I’ve never had a project that I held so closely to my heart as InfoBarrel. I struggle to fall asleep every night because I have ideas bouncing around in my head for the site.

Our team has big goals for InfoBarrel, and we take baby steps every day pushing it towards becoming a large player in the space. I spend more time thinking about this web site than is probably healthy, and have some pretty big long term goals for it.

Our passion for this site flows into our customer service, and I think quality customer service is the basis for all successful businesses. I’m a very ambitious person, and will not settle for anything less than success with InfoBarrel.

Crunchy Data: What is your best advice for people who want to earn a long-term, residual income on InfoBarrel?

Ryan: Set goals, and do something every day, even if it is small, it will help you get closer to reaching them. Generating income online isn’t as simple as posting an article and forgetting about it. If you can learn to be proficient with the following things, your earnings potential are limitless.

1. Learn how to do keyword research properly
2. Learn to format your content for the web (for viral purposes)
3. Interlink your content
4. Create at LEAST 1 back link for every article you publish

If you go after low hanging fruit (low competition, high value long tail keywords) and build at least one to two quality backlinks per article it should be a breeze to make at least $1 per article per month. I’ve tested this strategy time and time again and as a result have created at least a couple Infobarrel test articles that generate over $50/month. It is just a matter of honing your craft.

Crunchy Data: Would you ever use inside information (i.e. Google Analytics) about which articles do well, to write your own competing articles, or to help other members write articles that compete against general members’ articles?

Ryan: Morally, I think this is pretty low.  Trying to compete with your members more or less defeats the purpose of crowdsourcing.  Without success people become discouraged, and if somebody has hit the jackpot on a series of articles, creating competing articles is going to reduce their success and potentially stop them from creating future content.  If people stop creating content, then the site is a failure.  This business is built on people, and we would never do anything to hurt our members.

Crunchy Data: One eHow member/insider recently claimed to have obtained another member’s IP address, which would be impossible without that person having been granted some level of admin access. Who sees users’ private information on InfoBarrel, and how do you protect personally identifying information?

Ryan: The only people who have access to information like that is myself and Kevin.  We don’t even have a control panel available where people can access that information.  If we need to compare IPs, we do manual database calls.  Outside of the two of us there is NOBODY with access to the InfoBarrel databases.

Crunchy Data: Any plans for member-moderators on your forum, and if you ever go in that direction, would you be transparent about their roles?

Ryan: We will most likely eventually have member moderators.  With the amount of people currently contributing on the forums, we don’t think we need additional moderators.  When things get a bit busier, we will definitely be considering member moderators and like just about every other aspect of the site, we will definitely employ full transparency.

If you have any other questions, feel free to let me know!

Crunchy Data: Thank you, Ryan!

InfoBarrel is one of the sites that I have examined closely, and based on its traffic trends, transparent communications, generous revenue-sharing with writers, and quality control policies, I believe that InfoBarrel is one of but a small handful of sites that writers can invest in with confidence.

Writers, you are not likely to make thousands on InfoBarrel overnight, or even in three months. But based on what I have seen, and on Ryan McKenzie’s answers to our questions, I believe it is possible to slowly and steadily build a passive residual income stream on InfoBarrel that will reap consistent dividends for the next three to five years or more.

InfoBarrel has not inflated initial earnings to lure writers in, as at least one site seems to have done in the past. The InfoBarrel site and its management are as candid and transparent as they appear to be. This is how InfoBarrel works, and it’s good news for writers in the long run, which is what writing online for residual income is all about.

*Note: IB members no longer need to be pre-approved to have access to Google Analytics. Once you have published ten articles, you will be able to use this feature to learn more about traffic to your articles. Ten bonus stars for InfoBarrel!

InfoBarrel, in my personal opinion, is a scam. They have a traffic counter so that you can see how many people look at your articles. However, that doesn’t translate into the AdSense traffic they promise. If you ask about it, they tell you that hundreds of bots are reading your articles, not people, so you don’t get the AdSense views. I’m sorry, but I have been writing content full time for years, and I have several of my own sites. I know Web traffic. You get a bot or two every few days, but hundreds a week? It’s completely ridiculous. I wouldn’t recommend InfoBarrel on a dare.”

The commenter makes some valid points. So, is InfoBarrel a scam? As you may know, InfoBarrel makes my short list of sites that I recommend writing for. They are transparent, have more quality control standards than many sites, are responsive to members’ questions and concerns, and it is fairly easy to make 90% revenue share on their site. Their standard share is 75%, and meeting a quota or contest goal is enough to increase that to 90%.

But it turns out that InfoBarrel did used to have a system that merely counted all visits to a page, and did not give writers a true picture of their traffic. However, I found that they posted on their blog in January that InfoBarrel had resolved the bots view count issue.

Being a relatively new site, InfoBarrel is still working out a couple of kinks, but the site is user-friendly, and the management is quite responsive. So when they realized that members wanted true view counts, they fixed the problem, and now when bots visit your articles on InfoBarrel, those visits are not included in view counts.

Better still, InfoBarrel has added Google Analytics for pre-approved writers. Writers become pre-approved on InfoBarrel after posting 10 well-written, spam-free articles. Not difficult at all for most experienced content writers.

So there you go! I’m happy to report that I can still recommend them. And thanks for commenting, LS. I’m sure others have had the same doubt, and it’s wise to carefully consider all aspects of sites in which you plan to invest your time and talent.

I want to know that the sites I stand behind are not going to run the old eHow bait-and-switch, that they are transparent, and communicate quickly and directly with members, and I will check out any similar questions for readers. This was not an easy answer to find, but I’m confident that InfoBarrel’s management would have responded had I asked.

And no, in my opinion, InfoBarrel is not a scam. But you can’t blame people for being gun-shy these days!,

Some friends and I recently asked Brian to analyze SEO on a few eHow articles to find out if any particular categories seemed to be decreasing in earnings more than others. Brian likes math. I don’t. And he does a great job on his blog of analyzing article SEO factors.

Brian’s preliminary findings on the data that was sent to him leads him to conclude that on-page SEO for many older articles is a moot point. Brian has other ideas for how you can move those articles up in the search engines. He says,

The thing is however that you can only do so much on-page SEO. You can’t keep improving it; there is a point of maximum return and no amount of time or effort will make the on-page SEO any better. That’s why you should not dwell on it. Just do what you need to do and move on to more important things.”

And then he spells out the “more important things” in detail. So if you want to move some stubborn articles into the residual earnings zone, go read his Ultimate Guide to Making The Most Money With Online Writing and start kicking some residual income butt today!

Not all deleted posts have been captured, but many have. Maybe enough to surprise even eHow.

They are searchable and printable and are secured against editing to the extent that the software allows. Not exactly hackproof, but I wouldn’t want anyone accusing us of tampering with them, so I gave it my best.

I hope you find these helpful. You will most certainly find them enlightening, whether in retrospect or with fresh eyes.

Funny how perspective changes over time for us humans.

These are based on publicly available RSS feeds and published under the Fair Use doctrine. This is in no way commercial in nature, but is provided as a public service. The average computer user would not easily be able to create these PDFs from RSS feeds, and as a couple of friends have asked for them, I realize that more of you may have use for them as well.

Thanks to Julien Giles’ Google Print Button free plugin for Firefox, converting these feeds was made considerably easier. And there is free PDF software available at CNet.com if  you want to save/print your own threads to PDF and do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro.

The print plugin requires Google Reader, and you must have all of the posts opened in “Expanded” view and fully loaded before printing all posts in a thread at once, meaning you may need to scroll down or several minutes to reach the bottom of a long thread.

Then “print all” from the button at the bottom of your screen, and choose “PDF” as your printer (if you have installed PDF as a printer) in the dialog box. You can also print to hard copy, and the program returns a web page that you could also print or copy and paste.

Here are the first two eHow forum threads to download as PDFs. Please let me know if you have any trouble downloading them or have any questions. More will be added as time allows.

1/11/2010 eHow UK Website and WCP Participants

1/22/2010 UPDATE on eHow UK website and US member articles

Writer's block tool from WeBook

It’s as easy to use as it looks. Click a button according to your needs. Stuck for a character? Let Peg inspire you:

Peg can help you get your mojo back!

Dial “5″ to commiserate (quotes to help you feel a little less…alone). Dial “3″ for dramatic entrances, and when you’ve had enough, dial “8″ to kill your character off.

Katie Krum, of WEBook, says,

WEbook is an online community for writers and readers alike. Our goal is to help improve the writing of aspiring authors by allowing them to share their work and receive feedback in a variety of ways. So, whether authors are looking to tweak their skills, find a literary agent, or enter their manuscript into PageToFame, our innovative writing competition, WEbook is the place to be.

911 Writer’s Block is one of our writing tools that’s meant to help authors punch through those occasional freeze-ups. The interface offers quick suggestions on everything from picking a setting to killing off a character. It’s fun, and it can really bail writers out when the idea-faucet dries up.

WEBook also has a forum for real, live writer’s block recovery support. So if “911 Writer’s Block” doesn’t quite do the trick, head on over to the forum for some human interaction.

Because the people who don’t play that game are CATCHING ON. And please EXCUSE MY CAPITAL LETTERS, but it’s ABOUT TIME.

The news? Professor Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? announced today on his blog, BuzzMachine.com, that he had declined Demand Media’s invitation to join their advisory board.

Professor Jarvis said in his announcement today,

…Demand is uniquely controversial right now and so I decided to decline its invitation to advise and also thought I should disclose that here once it made its announcement…”

“Uniquely controversial.”

Yes, Demand Media’s CEO has recently objected to his company being called a content mill, because, well, content mills tend to not like that term, but the only real controversy that I am aware of regarding Demand Media that might cause a highly regarded person to cite controversy as the reason for declining such a post is the [alleged] eHow UK scam.

I can’t read Professor Jarvis’ mind, and I can’t speak for him, but there is a good chance he smelled what Ian Lurie recently said about the eHow controversy and its terms of service,

If it stinks and it’s mushy, it’s probably bullshit.”

And Professor Jarvis is the kinda guy who does his homework and who understands the online content industry as few others do.

So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that Mr. Jarvis did his due diligence to learn the stinky, mushy details of the eHow UK scam.

That’s not to say he necessarily agrees that it’s a scam or has any particular opinion about the controversy, just that he is no doubt aware of the allegations, and is concerned enough to decline the association.

But Professor Jarvis, if  you see this and I’m off base, call me on it and I’ll apologize right here. And not an eHow-style apology, either. A real, I’m sorry I messed up, bona fide apology.

Here is a quote from my recent comment to a reader, showing all that Mr. Jarvis would have needed to do to get a little background information on the company that wanted him to associate his good name with theirs:

…Any investor can run a quick search of the phrase, “ehow is a scam” (in quotes, or results are skewed to unrelated content) and find 9,170 results. Try it.

Okay, now search “InfoBarrel is a scam.” There are 0 results. ZERO. But InfoBarrel is relatively new, so let’s look at “HubPages is a scam,” and consider those 5 results, four of which are actually stating that HubPages is NOT a scam and used the phrase for attention. Zero for “Squidoo is a scam.”

Those three COMBINED have 5 search results for their names, in quotes, associated with the phrase, “is a scam.” eHow has 9,170 not counting “eHow UK scam,” at 1,480.

Do you think future investors will consider that significant? They will if they care about their money. Because those numbers will catch up with you, Demand Media, if they haven’t already.

By scheming to deprive writers of their earnings, during the winter holidays, during one of the worst economic times this country has known, history will show that for want of principles, the Demand Media-eHow kingdom was ultimately lost. And that is as it should be.”

THIS, dear readers, is going to snowball.

And it’s thanks to you. You spoke up here and on the eHow forums, on your blogs, and Tweets, and comments all over the Web, and you continue to speak up.

When uninformed (or possibly unequally compensated) eHow members and staff tell you to shut up and go away if you don’t like being…scammed, you stay and take it. And that’s not easy.

You ask the hard questions over and over, and you hang in there and take the insults and excuses and lies and double talk and censoring, and you don’t stop.

It’s enough that some of you merely say, “Hey, I’m here, count me in,” in the off-site groups that have formed and grown and continue to swell with the ranks of the righteously angry, the betrayed, dismayed, and played.

(Sorry, I prefer a little bad humor with my anger.)

So hey, ya’ll. Even if the reckoning stops here–and I’m betting it won’t–Demand Media just lost a battle. They lost the opportunity to add a wise, ethical, and informed contributor to their team.

And if you have been sitting on the fence about this issue, do your homework. Join us. If you didn’t agree with us before, even if you were once a forum troll yourself and you now see the light, come on over.

You owe it to yourself and to the future of the Internet to be informed and take a stand.

The Internet is where the people who will sign your retirement checks and teach your grandchildren when you are old will get their information, and to a great extent, where they are already learning how to treat others in business and in life.

And P.S. You may comment here anonymously. I personally read every comment before posting it, and if you want to share your opinion or information without having it made public, just say so.

I can keep a secret like a Demand Media employee manipulating internal links and keywords on New Year’s Day, but without screenshots.

For the latest in non-answers to the eHow UK scam questions, we go to eHow’s community rep, Rich Noguchi. An eHow member asked Rich yesterday,

“…I do have a very important question, and it relates to earnings.  Does eHOW plan on changing the WCP thing?  In other words, once this new global site is up, will we writers still be paid like we are today, by ad clicks?  I know there are many who are wondering about this very question.”

And Rich’s response,

“Yes, we will make sure to accomodate to our writers’ needs. However, I must clarify and say that today’s WCP payment algorithm is not based on “ad clicks.” We do not disclose in detail how our algorithm works, but we do indicate in our writer resource page as well as our TOS that many variables are considered when payments are issued.  Thanks. -Rich”

Okay, the primary question is, is eHow going to continue its Writer Compensation Program. It sure doesn’t look like it, the way they are squeezing out residual income writers in favor of prepaid articles, which is why the member is asking.

But that question gets brushed off with, “we will make sure to accommodate our writers’ needs.”

Well, eHow has two kinds of writers, and one of them, which eHow is increasingly favoring, is not paid via the WCP. They are paid small, one-time payments. So what does that even mean?

EHow has not “accommodated” the majority of its WCP writers’ needs in any sense of the word since last August when it launched its mirror site in the US, threw a UK flag on it, and used it as an excuse to bilk WCP writers out of many thousands of dollars–maybe more–for more than six months, and continues to do so.

EHow has not accommodated its WCP writers who want access to change their own personal profiles on its scam UK site, in spite of the members’ continued protests.

But Rich has a real answer for the secret algorithm, to which he devotes most of his response, using semantics yet again to avoid the real issue. We all know that ad clicks are a significant component of the secret algorithm. That’s what it’s all about. But instead of just answering the guy’s question, he zings him on a technicality. Sheesh.

This writer’s questions (mine, actually) on the same forum thread from two days ago have still not been answered:

At least two major issues remain that many of us would appreciate an answer to:

1. Not all of our losses can be accounted for by what the so-called UK site gained. Sure, you estimated what some people’s articles earned there and “compensated” them, but I know for a fact you did not pay everyone for their “UK” views.

But besides that, will eHow compensate us for our earnings losses that can be attributed to our original articles disappearing from the search engines for a time, or falling so low that no one saw them? You caused us damage in more than one way, and still have not compensated everyone. Is there a phase 2 planned for compensating everyone who lost potential income by investing in eHow during this fiasco?

2. What does the invitation-by force have to do with the global community, when the “UK” site is and always was in the US, with US writers’ articles, and that UK residents could not join? I am beyond perplexed, and I know I’m not the only one.

Another way to not answer pressing issues is to ignore them. Good strategy, eHow.

This is the “eHow way” these days. Scam your members, then skate around their questions like you’re Apolo Ohno.

Stay tuned for the eHow UK Scam Part Trois. Or be smart and run like hell.

I hear Examiner is looking for pet writers (meaning writers for topics about pets, not secret forum moderators.)

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.