eHow

Step Two -- October, 2008

I had looked up some stuff on eHow in its early days, but had never considered writing for them. However, in October, 2008, I saw a horrible eHow article, and thought, I could do a lot better. Then, I discovered I could get paid to write there, and so I signed up for their Writers Compensation Program (now closed), and started publishing articles there. At first, I published some articles related to my blog to get a backlink there (I didn't understand about backlinking then, but I knew I had to get people to the blog somehow). As time went on, I started reading the forums, where I found a few helpful people (and a lot of unhelpful ones) and ended up with 100 articles there (eventually two were deleted) before the WCP closed and no more articles were accepted under the WCP. At the end of 2009, I added Amazon affiliate links to each of my eHow articles--and just as I finished, eHow announced that affiliate links would no longer be allowed on articles, but that existing affiliate links could remain, so I lucked out. Even before then, it was clear that eHow was having some problems, so one of the things that was next on my list was to diversify . . . and a good thing, too. First off, I was running out of steam on "How-To" articles, and secondly, I was unhappy with dropping earnings from the eHow.uk website copying the writers' articles without compensation (I had read their TOS carefully, and knew that I retained the copyright to my articles). Second, eHow was paying upfront for articles from Demand Studios and then featuring poor content above good content written by writers in the WCP, and even publishing and featuring articles from Demand Studios that were essentially plagiarized works of articles already on eHow by writers in the WCP. They were also using keywords unethically, to send readers to articles that had nothing to do with what they were searching for, but had keywords there. Here's the Kindle edition of the eHow blog of one of the most helpful members: eHow.com/Alrady