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

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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.

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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.

One more scam came to light tonight, and if you don’t know enough to run as fast and far from eHow as you can by now, there’s no hope for you.

Either that, or you’ve got 1K or more articles tied up there and are overwhelmed at the daunting task of moving them. Or you’ve figured out how to use what you have there to drive traffic elsewhere.

Otherwise, there is a beautiful, golden bridge a few miles from here that I’m looking to sell…

So. You’re looking around, and you maybe haven’t decided exactly where you want to invest your time writing articles online for residual income. Once burned, and all that.

What do YOU want to know? What would you ask InfoBarrel’s owners or HubPages’ community manager if you had a half hour of their time? Do you Squidoo? Are you Suite? Need an Examiner’s perspective? Does Helium do it for you? Like Mahalo’s funny money?

Please. Tell me what you know and ask me what you don’t so we can find out together. Let’s share some info about legitimate residual income opportunities.

If you’ve had a good experience at another site, please tell us about it with as much factual information to back it up as you can. A specific instance, a real number. No Spam, no scam. If a site’s traffic is in freefall, let’s skip that one for now and look at it again in a few months.

If I search for a content site on Google and they have even a fifth of the results for, “is a scam” after their names that eHow has, forget about it.

I will bring you answers from the people who know. I know what I would ask, starting with, “How do you view a model where prepaid content competes against writer-owned content?”

But what do YOU want to know? Ask me, and I’ll find out for you as best I can.

If I’m going to tell you to jump eHow’s sinking ship—and I am, make no mistake about it—then I think I owe you some answers. Real answers.

And that’s only one difference between this site and the site formerly known as eHow.

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.

Now, the eHow forums, where members could at least discuss their questions and opinions until they were banned and/or censored, have eHow member-minions helping the scam along. The last couple of days, the suspected “secret forum moderators” (oh, please, tell me I didn’t just use that phrase with a straight face), have been throwing red herrings into the forum like it was Lent.

Oh, wait a minute…what week is this?

And if that’s not bad enough, members posting their valid opinions on the forum, (which is where you would THINK eHow would want them to feel free to post, as opposed to, say Conversation Marketing, Crunchy Data, or ComplaintsBoard.com), have actually had their words twisted and edited in an apparent attempt at humor in quotes by one “secret moderator.”

And you stood by and let them, eHow reps.

eHow, you won’t let me ask you where your so-called “UK” server resides, but you let your minions deliberately misquote and misrepresent other members in your forums?

This is so wrong. First eHow exploits member-owned content for their own financial gain without fair compensation, and now they are letting their senior minions run roughshod over other members with legitimate opinions, in direct opposition to their own stated forum rules.

Don’t think so, eHow. Ya’ll are diggin’ yourselves in deeper, and you’d best take another look at that.

Because when your members cannot discuss their opinions peaceably and reasonably in your forums about YOU victimizing them not once, not twice, but at least three times, without fear of their words being twisted…where do you think that discussion will end up?

Yup. All over the Internet. That place that’s stickier than a 10-year-old boy’s Xbox 360 remote. And harder to clean up after, too.

Okay, but that’s not all. The newest eHow UK scam is over member profiles. Many members want their personal photos and profile text removed from the fake UK site, or to at least have the ability to control the profiles that represent them. But no, eHow’s not having any of that nonsense. Control your own profiles? Pshaw, peeps.

Here’s what eHow’s forum rep, Rich, had to say about that:

In Response to Re: 01/22/2010– UPDATE on eHow UK site and US member articles:
[QUOTE]In Response to Re: 01/22/2010– UPDATE on eHow UK site and US member articles : To answer your question, profiles will not be removed from the UK site. eHow.com is growing and as a result, we’re expanding to international markets and audiences. As we expand, we want our community to grow with us– therefore, we’re inviting each member to truly become a part of a “global” community. However, the bug you mentioned has been noted and I’m seeing what can be done to get this fixed. Thanks. -Rich
Posted by Rich – eHow Community Manager[/QUOTE]

And here is one eHow member’s quite understandable response to that invitation-by-force to be part of a global community that exists only on a fake site on a server in the US:

If profiles are not coming off the UK site, at what point will we be able to edit them? My profile on the UK site is no longer accurate and I would like to be able to change it. It is also my face there and I want to be able to change avatars.

See, this issue has to do with moral rights, which cannot be waived in the UK. And eHow wants us to believe their “UK” site is physically located in the UK, so…are they trying to have it both ways here?

And before we wrap this party up for the night, I will give you another taste of how out-of-hand this eHow UK scam has gotten. Please bear in mind, I do try to keep a clean house here. But this member spoke for many of us today (I have personally heard from at least three other people who said so), and I just want to acknowledge that publicly:

The initial post by Rich, eHow “Community Manager”:

In Response to Re: 01/22/2010– UPDATE on eHow UK site and US member articles:
[QUOTE]In Response to Re: 01/22/2010– UPDATE on eHow UK site and US member articles : *****member, Please do not harass our members by calling them names.  Once again, I would rather not have to penalize people for acting out of order.  The forums is a great place to have a productive conversation, but attacking others is not necessary.  Thanks. -Rich

Posted by Rich – eHow Community Manager[/QUOTE]

And the member’s response:

Go F**K yourself buddy.