Everyone knows Ehow is jam packed full of desperate and greedy people trying to rapid-fire crappy, effortless articles out just in case one makes some money. All they succeed in doing is ruining Ehow's reputation and beating out legitimate articles in the search engines. Well if you're a real member who wants to do things the right way (which I bet you are since you're here reading this) then get ready to become an expert! Okay, let's get right into this...

How the earnings system works

If you want to make money, you should probably know exactly how you're getting paid and where the money comes from. Here's the breakdown: a company goes to Google's web advertising service named Adsense and decides they want to advertise their products or services. They pick out keywords to advertise under, which can be single words or several word phrases. Put yourself in an advertiser's shoes for a moment. Basically if you're selling pool supplies, you'll put "pool supplies" in for what to advertise under and when a website somewhere that carries Adsense ads has the phrase "pool supplies" occur a couple times on one of their pages, Google Adsense displays your ad up on their site. They charge the advertiser per click, NOT per view. So every time someone clicks on an ad, it costs the advertiser money. How much? Well, the more people advertising under that exact keyword or keyword phrase, you more you pay. "Turtle Racing" might be $0.10 a click but "dieting" or "refinance your mortgage" or "life insurance" may cost upwards of $10.00 per click.

Now pretend you're a website owner and you put Google ads on your website. Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the ads, Google charges the advertiser paying for it but since it's your website and you're providing all that business for Google, they give you a percentage. It's hard to tell exactly what your cut is but it's significant. I'm sure it's higher for the website owner but for this example let's pretend Google gets 50% and you get 50%. So if someone clicked on an ad that was based on the keyword "fishing" and it was bid up to $2 per click by all sorts of advertisers, Google gets $1 and you get $1. The advertiser gets a potential customer, Google gets some money, and the website owner gets some money. Everyone wins!

Now back to your point of view as an author on Ehow. Ehow needs users to write articles so they decided to pay them because that's great motivation. So every time they get paid by Google, you get a cut of it. Now the smart observer might recognize that a cut of a cut of a cut usually results in not a lot of money. Well, Google's cut is probably more like 20% and Ehow gets 80% and the author's commission isn't too bad either. Probably between 35% and 75%. You probably end up with around 40% of what the advertiser is paying. So it's pretty good considering you could still make like $5 from a single ad click under perfect circumstances.

How to make the earnings system work for you

So if advertisers are paying Ehow and Ehow's paying you, how do you get the biggest chunk of money possible from your article? That's where it gets complicated. The most important thing to remember is that there is no one magical thing you can do that will get you the best results. It's always a combination of things. You can hear people talk all day about how if you submit your articles to Digg, you'll be rich. Or if you change your article's title a little, that will solve all your problems. While some of these things are good tips (though most aren't) you can't just focus on one little thing and expect that to work for you.

Keywords, Keywords, KEYWORDS!

First let's start with keywords. They're pretty much any adjective, noun, verb, or adverb. Obviously showing baseball ads on a baseball articles will be the most logical thing to do but how does Google know that's what your article is about? It finds keywords on the page. While anything can be a keyword, the top keywords are what are important. Thus the term, "key" words. They're the key, as in the most important words on the page. An article on "baseball" should have "baseball" as the #1 keyword for example because that is the one key word that describes the whole rest of the content. As mentioned in the previous section, people advertise based on keywords so picking keywords is really important, right? Well that's right for a few reasons and for wrong for other reasons. One main reason that statement isn't completely correct is that you can't "pick" them, the robots decide for you. But first I need to explain how the advertising system pulls keywords out of your articles.

The robots control everything

It's a complicated, secretive system that Google uses to determine what your article is about and what advertising keywords your article contains. But I will give the simple explanation of known ways that it works. After you publish a new article, usually within 1 day if not a few hours, the Adsense system sends a robot to read your article. A robot is simply an automated program that reads a webpage. Google doesn't hire humans to read webpages and decide what they're about because that would be too expensive so they turned to artificially intelligent programs instead. The robot, named "Google adbot," reads the largest text on the page near the top and assumes that's the title, which is weighs significantly more than other text when determining keywords. So make sure you pick a good title!!! I'll get back to what a "good" title is later. Then it takes the words in the title and compares them with the introduction section. Then it also takes into consideration the rest of the text in the article. If all three places share similar, related keywords then it decides that's what your article is about.

For example, here's an article I wrote: How to Tell if an E-mail is Fake or Not. The words "fake" and "e-mail" appear in the title, the introduction, and several times in the article's text. In theory, those should be the top keywords because that's what the article is about. So the Adbot read my article and was smart enough to know the article is about e-mail scams coming from fake e-mails, right?

Apparently not. While this all works in theory, sometimes the robot screws up since it's not nearly as smart as a human. Unfortunately, I used the words "scam" and "domain" and "subdomain" too many times in the article's text and it confused the robot into thinking that's what my article was actually about. The words in the title aren't set in stone in the robot's opinion. While it is the most important text, it can override the title if it thinks the body of the article is about something else. So a lot of the ads on my article are about domain names and security instead of spam filters and fake e-mail detectors.

Wouldn't it be nice to know I made a slight mistake like that ahead of time instead of waiting a few weeks then looking at the ads and realizing they're focusing on the wrong keywords? Well, if you want to see through the eyes of the Adbot, check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. There are two functions of this tool. One is to tell you how popular keywords are and the second is to scan a webpage to see what keywords it thinks are significant in the same way that their adbot does it. So click on the second option, Website Content, and paste into the URL box your article's URL as seen below.



Click "get keyword ideas" and it will generate a list of keywords very similar to what the Adbot will come up with. Below is an example of the results I got from running my article, How to Tell if an E-mail is Fake or Not, through the tool.



On the very top are the biggest keywords and keyword phrases it found. Those are the ones that will be most heavily used to determine what type of ads to show. They're like categories that contain other possible sub-keywords that are related but may not actually be in your article. The number in parenthesis is the number of related sub-keywords that it found in those categories but those aren't very important. So basically after reading my article, the robot decided that it was probably about credit card fraud, identity theft, e-mail scam, ebay scam, internet scam, scam, fraud, phish, email, domain, and a few other miscellaneous keywords. Like I suspected, the robot got confused and now the keyword list is a little too heavy on the scam and fraud side and not heavy enough on the e-mail and phising side (phising means sending out fake e-mails pretending to be from a company to scam people).

So how did it come up with "internet scam" and "credit card fraud" when the words "credit card" and "internet" appear once or twice if at all in my article? Well, that's Google's artificially intelligent system. It's like a web of related words and it uses logic to determine what your article is about without certain words even having to be there. Like if you wrote a basketball article and never said the word basketball once but the words hoop, ball, dribble, dunk, and free throw showed up, they'd know it was about basketball and the top keyword from the article would probably be basketball. So when I put some internet related words in the article as well is fraud and scam related words, it mistakenly assumed my article contained some content about general internet fraud instead of just e-mail fraud.

They designed the system that way initially to determine the difference between words with two very different definitions. Like if it found the word "pool" in your article 15 times, it would start looking to other words to see if you mean the pool you swim in or the game you play with sticks on a pool table. If it reads the terms eight ball and pocket and cue, it knows what you mean and won't start serving up pool cleaning accessory ads like for chlorine and pH testing kits.

For now, use the results from that keyword tool just to get a general idea of what it thinks your article is about. If it's way off, you need to modify some of the text in your article. Most of the time, a well written article will get interpreted correctly and the main theme will be reflected in the keywords that the adbot finds. If Google finds a way that their adbot is making a mistake, they fix it so it gets smarter and smarter over time. It's very intelligent and isn't wrong very often. But once in a while, it will be thrown off in a way you didn't expect and then you need to fix it.


Why bother with all this keyword stuff?

So the adbot gets confused and unrelated ads start showing up. You'll still make money as long as there's ads showing, right? WRONG!!! People don't click on unrelated ads. Back in the day, most internet ads paid per view. All people had to do was visit your site and you'd get paid even if they ignored the ads. That ended years ago. Now you don't get paid unless people actually click on the ads. People coming to read my previously mentioned article are obviously interested in identifying and stopping fake e-mails so that's what the ads should be about or they'll never click on them and you won't make any money. If you've got a hunting article and all the ads are for window cleaning supplies, you are going to make around $0.00. But if the ads are for guns, cammo gear, hunting license renewals, and other hunting accessories now you've got something. If someone is reading your hunting article, they're probably a hunter and it's likely they're in the market for some hunting gear. So when they glance over at an ad that promises $19.95 professional rifle barrel cleaning with free shipping, they might just click on it. And it's like Christmas if something really good pops up like an ad for a company that wants to buy your used shotgun casings for cash. Then everyone's gonna click it! But if that used shotgun shell buyer has their ad appear on your how to bake a cake article, nobody's going to click on it because they're cooks and not necessarily hunters.

So every time you publish an article that you want to make money on, it's not a bad idea to run it through that tool once and make sure it's not picking up on incorrect keywords. Except for some majorly unrelated keywords popping up, you should be good. The results I got for my e-mail article above aren't actually that bad. There's always going to be some loosely related keywords but as long as terms like "phishing" and "scam" and "e-mail fraud" are top level keywords, I should be good. They really don't have to be perfect.

How do I fix it if there is a huge problem?

Luckily, if the results show that the adbot is really confused, it's really easy to fix. If I did decide to alter that article shown above, all I'd have to do is take out a few instances of the word "scam" and "domain" in the article body and add in a few more instances of the word "e-mail" or "phishing." If those start to outnumber the undesired keywords, the ads will start to change accordingly. For example, Google knows TLD means top level domain so in step 5, I shouldn't mention it 3 times in a row. I could alter the sentence "The letters directly before the TLD are the actual domain" to say "The letters directly before it are the actual domain." It still says the same thing to humans, but not to the adbot. Now I have one less reference to the keyword "TLD" and the adbot will have one less reason to think the article is about domains. So basically, find words related to keywords that you don't want and remove or replace them and add in more instances of keywords you do like. There's actually not that much I can change in that particular article without either making it sound funny or using too many unspecific pronouns that would confuse the reader. So I'll just have to leave it as is. One great tip to remember is never obsess about perfecting every single article. Some will always have some of the wrong keywords picked up no matter what. You can't expect every article you write to show perfect ads related to the best keywords.

So articles with some bad ads are basically dead to me?

Not necessarily. Don't freak out if you try everything and the adbot still thinks your article is about something slightly different than it really is. If you wrote a superbowl article and it got confused so now there are some ads showing for football pads and training equipment, don't panic. There's really not much you can do since those two topics are so close together and use the same words. The good news is Google automatically adjusts your ads so the stupid ones stop showing and the ones that are actually getting clicks and making money show more often. Basically it builds a rather wide list of ads that it thinks are related to your article. So let's say it comes up with 50 possible ads. It randomly shows 4 of them per ad block and there are 2 standard ad blocks on your article. So it can show 8 at a time. Over time, it will remove ads from that group of 50 that aren't making any money and not only keep the ones that are making money but show them a lot more often. It will also experiment by adding to the pool more ads that it thinks may help. After a few months, they should be adjusted to be showing the best possible 8 ads that will make the most money and you didn't even have to do anything because it's all automatic.

My best ad just disappeared!

So let's say you wrote an article and came back a day or two later and saw one ad that's so awesome, you even wanted to click on it yourself. You just know it's going to be awfully tempting to any readers of the article so you're going to make a ton of money. For example, if you wrote an article about lasers and there's an ad showing for $50 handheld laser cutters capable of lighting paper on fire and popping balloons (yes, those exist). That is so awesome, you want to immediately go order one yourself. And sure enough, that whole month you make like $30 on that article and that ad has adjusted to be the first one showing all the time. Then suddenly it disappears. You didn't change any keywords or anything, it's just gone and now that article stopped making money. Well, the sad truth is that the more money an ad makes for you, the sooner is disappears. When advertisers go to Google Adsense, they say "for this month, I'm capping my ad spending at $300." So if they're paying $2 per click, 150 clicks later, their ad isn't shown for the rest of the month. Depending on their settings, it might come back next month but it might not. Usually people run one month ad campaigns with Adsense and see if their purchases actually went up because of it. If they spent several hundred on ads and their sales stayed the same, you're probably not going to see that ad again because they won't renew it next month. And remember, their ad is showing all over the internet, not just on your article. So if it's a really tempting ad that a lot of people click on, it's going to hit the budget limit really fast. The good side though is if all the laser enthusiasts reading your laser article click on the ad and some actually order their products, the company will see their sales suddenly double and come back next month with a $1000 ad budget because it obviously worked. Unfortunately, no matter what happens, you have no control over it at all. But if your earnings suddenly drop to almost nothing on an article that used to be making tons of money, now you know why it likely happened.

The title is the key!

I said I'd talk about writing a good title so let's do that right now. Since the title of the article is the most heavily weighted text on the entire page, you better spend some time perfecting it. Like I said before, it's not like you can write a perfect title and then not worry about anything else because you're all set. It's just another important thing you need to spend time on to make this whole thing work. But if you purposely wanted to screw with the adbot and confuse it, writing a wacky title is the best way to do it. So you pretty much need to write a good title to prevent that from happening.

There are two things you want to consider about the title, one is how the adbot is going to read it and the other is how search engine robots are going to read it. The adbot just picks up keywords to decide what ads to show and it's completely unrelated to the other Google robot from their search engine service. And then there's Yahoo's robots for Yahoo search and Ask.com ones for their service, etc. Both robot types read keywords and phrases on the page, but do it in slightly different ways for very different reasons. Long story short, if you write the title of the article really well, someone will go to Google and search for "how to tie your shoes" and your article about that might be the first result. Remember that the title of the article is contained in the link itself so it better be good because that's the first thing someone sees in the search results.



The search engine robots put way more importance on the title than the adbot does but for both robots, you want to follow the same tips. Try to group "keyword phrase words" together and in the proper order. Keyword phrase words are any set of words that go together to form a keyword phrase. Peanut is a keyword, butter is a keyword, and peanut butter is a keyword phrase. If you somehow manage to put "peanut *some word* butter," it's not going to pick up on "peanut butter." Words like "and," "or," and "the," aren't considered keywords. These filler words are ignored by search engines but not completely. So don't split up keyword phrases with fillers or it will hurt your chances of being the first result in a search on any search engine like Google or Yahoo or Ask.

For example, an article titled
"How to Properly Inflate Your Car Tires"
would be a lot better as
"How to Properly Inflate Car Tires."
People would go to Google and search for phrases like "properly inflate" and "inflate car tires" or just "car tires." The word "your" will hurt your chances of showing up for anyone who searches for the phrase "Inflate car tires" simply because search engines prefer words that are all right next to each other. So any othe website with those three words all in a row will be shown before yours which is broken up by the word "your."
One of my titles,
"How to Repair a Burnt Out Light Bulb"
is also really good. It wouldn't be doing nearly as well if it was
"How to repair a light bulb that burned out"
because there are filler words breaking it up.
"How to prevent your Paypal account from being stolen"
is a pretty bad title. It's got filler words between just about everything. But there's no other logical way to phrase it so it has to stay like that. Remember, it still has to be proper english and make sense to the reader as well as use words that are used in everyday speech. Often time you'll find yourself unable to eliminate most of the filler words in a title so if you have to have them, a good way to do it is to put the most important phrase first. The most important phrase is the one you want the ads to be about and the one you think people will go to Google and search for. Then after you put that in, add a tail to the end of it that add the specifics on why your article is different than others.

For example, I have an article titled: "How to Paint Metal so The Paint Doesn’t Flake or Scrape Off." No matter what, I want ads about painting metal and people will be searching on search engines using the phrase "paint metal" so that's why "paint metal" is first. But the article is not just about painting metal because that's easy. You might think it'd a good idea to simplify it to "How to paint metal" but if your article is more specific, that needs to be shown in the title. This article tells how to paint it so it doesn't flake or scrape off. So in my title, I took the opportunity to repeat the word paint since that's an important keyword and I could fit it in the title twice without it sounding weird then added two more keywords that people may search for: "flake" and "scrape." In longer titles, the first couple words are considered slightly more significant to pretty much all robots so tacking other less important but still related words onto the end is your best bet. One more great example is "How to get rid of the recent documents folder on the start menu in XP" People are going to have "Recent documents folder" in their search no matter what so that's first and then in case they also add "start menu" or "XP" to their search, those words are there too, but they're at the end of the title where they won't interfere with the most important phrase.

Pick the point of view of your title wisely

Another slightly important thing to remember is if you absolutely need to put in a filler word, put in the correct one. That would be the one that people are most likely to use in a search. Search engines claim to ignore fillers but behind the scenes, they do actually consider them a little bit. So put yourself in the place of someone who wants to find out how to do what your article is about. They're going to go to a search engine like Google and type in something, you just need the figure out what. If you wanted to know how to bait a lobster trap, you'd search for "how to bait a lobster trap" so that's what the article title should be. If you named your article "how to bait your lobster traps" that's a problem because although it's a fitting title, nobody is going to search for the word "your" because they at a first person point of view and shouldn't be talking about themselves in the second or third person. If anything, they'd search for "how to bait my lobster traps" instead of "your." So avoid using the word "your" in a title unless it sounds really strange without it.

Don't confuse the robot

One more tip is to remove any words that will confuse the robots. Replace any words with two definitions if you can. Like my article "How to jam all cell phones around you to disconnect them" might possibly convince the robot that part of my article is about delicious jam. All I have to do is inadvertently mention the word "peanut butter" or "sandwich" or "bagel" in my article and tada, an ad for strawberry jam shows up. But don't be too paranoid about it and start swapping words out for rare one that nobody uses. In this case, there's no other word I can use because it's called "cell phone jamming" and that's what people will be searching for. If I put in "block" instead of "jam," nobody's searching for cell phone blocking so the article won't get as much traffic from search engines. I'd be better off deleting any other words in my article that are related to the other definition of jam and leaving the title as is.

But wait, I can pick keywords. Ehow said so

NOPE! If you're thinking you can skip all the clever sentence writing and title alterations and just tell it what keywords you want in part 4B while you're writing an article, sorry to disappoint you but you can't. You're all probably familiar with this box:



Ready for a big surprise? Google can't see those. Search engine robots and the adbot can't see those. They're not placed on the page at all. Those keywords are ONLY used by the Ehow search engine. Or I should say they were used since they just switched over to a Google powered internal search feature. Their old search engine wasn't made by a multi-billion dollar company with a decade of development and artificial intelligence programming like Google. Theirs actually sucked really badly, which is actually why they ask for keywords instead of cleverly pulling them out of the article. Since they didn't have a robot at all or if they did, it's not very smart, they made you put in your own keywords and that's what they used. That simplified it a lot though. You didn't have to worry about dual meanings and related words so much. You just put in anything anyone will ever enter into the search box on Ehow to find your article. You could get pretty clever when it comes to this but don't agonize over it for several minutes because it doesn't appear to be used anymore at all with the new search system. You could fill it with gibberish if you wanted and it wouldn't make any difference. There is one small fact that Anthony Delgado reminded me off (thanks!) and that's that the keywords are probably still used to determine which other Ehow articles show up in the Related Articles area.

So because of that and just in case they switch back to a search that incorporates those keywords again, I'll keep explaining. You can see in the above example for my article about detecting fake e-mails and scams that I put in several terms that people may use but aren't necessarily in the title. If someone searched for "how to know if an e-mail is fraudulent" then I've got the word fraudulent in there, which wasn't use in the title. Whatever you do, DO NOT run words together because the old Ehow search engine couldn't split them apart. So don't put "greentea" in there because nobody's searching for "greentea," they're searching for "green tea" and there's nothing you can do about it because the old Ehow search engine can't handle keyword phrases, only single words.

You don't have complete control over the whole keyword and search engine system but tweaking your article using all the tips I just mentioned can help greatly. So now that you know how keywords are picked up on and how to try and make the keywords you want stand out, you need to know what to write about.

More things you absolutely must know

Hey, remember those people that rush to write dozens of really short, careless articles and just cross their fingers and hope one makes money? Well, I think we left them behind about 30 paragraphs ago. I hope by now you realize there's A LOT more to it than that. The fact that you even took the time to read this far is a good indication that you're going to do a lot better than those lazy freeloaders. Anyway, here's a random article that's not necessarily by one of those losers but it's a good example of the length of article they usually write.

It's called "how to make toast." It's a nice, simple title that no adbot could possibly get confused by. The word toast appears in it several times and it's not too wordy. I bet it will have tons of bread, toast, toaster, and cooking ads just waiting to be clicked on by all the cooking enthusiasts that read it, right? Well, take a look:



Uh oh, what happened to the ads? There's nothing in the article about dieting, public speaking, oak floors, or Tyson chicken. This is a huuuuuge problem on Ehow that almost nobody realizes. If the adbot reads the page and there's under a certain amount of text on it, it ignores the whole thing and shows default ads that aren't related in the least. SO DON'T WRITE ARTICLES THAT SHORT FOR ANY REASON! There's nothing wrong with this article. It says exactly what you need to do to make toast and if you are only concerned with sharing toast making with the world that's fine, but it's too short and will never make any decent amount of money. If you're trying to think of the simplest, shortest articles you can write like making toast, you're wasting your time. You are definitely on the train to nowhere and you better start thinking of more complicated articles to write!

It varies depending on the number of comments people leave on your article (since that adds to the total amount of text), how long the title and introduction are, and how many ads are available for the keywords that are there but the approximate minimum amount of text required is 2-3x what you see there. Remember, it's well above Ehow's minimum character requirement! So even if Ehow doesn't think it's too short, it probably still is.

Another very, very important thing to know is if Google decides that your main keywords are offensive (lewd, racist, violent, drug related, etc) they will automatically have the ads removed from that article and then you're guaranteed to make nothing. So all you pervs writing pervy sexual articles better think again because you're not only a disgusting freak but you're also not going to make any money.

You may have noticed that there are other ads on the page that aren't from Google Adsense. Vibrant generates those green, double underlined words that pop up an ad when you hover over them. I have no idea how their view/click system works or if we even get a share of that revenue at all so if you're wondering about them, keep wondering cuz I dunno :-P I mostly just ignore them since I bet most of my earnings come from Google ads.

I mentioned this earlier but remember that the adbot isn't immediate. It takes time to read your article and even longer to actually find the related ads to show. So don't come back to your article 15 minutes after publishing it and wonder why there are unrelated, default ads showing.

How the earnings system DOES NOT work

It's time to dispel some of the myths floating around about how to write a good article that will make money. Warning: some of these are unbelievably stupid (but people seriously believe them.)

Myth: submitting your article to Pingomatic helps

"Ping-O-Matic is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated."
That's right on their homepage, people. All it does is tell search engines to send a robot to look at your webpage because you made changes and now it's different. It was designed for blogs and other types of content that rapidly changes. Your Ehow article is almost completely static, not dynamic content. You don't add stuff to your articles every day like a blog. The whole point of ping-o-matic is to send a robot there to read the new content and update their search results accordingly so when people do a search, it doesn't show a blog post from a week ago in the description. It doesn't even submit your article to regular Google! It submits it to Google Blog Search, which as you might guess, is only for blogs!

This is even more useless because Ehow is such a popular site that search engine robots are constantly checking it for new content anyway. So you don't need anyone to tell the robot to come visit because it will be there soon enough anyway. Did you know that around 40% of the average Ehow article's views are from robots! If you got 1000 views in a day, 400 of them were robots reading your article. I got to the conclusion on June 13, 2008 when Ehow changed the way they count view to include robot views. Everyone's views jumped around 40% overnight. Since the change was applied retroactively, mine went from about 27,000 to 42,000 views overnight. Rich posted that Ehow thought it would be beneficial if they stopped filtering bot views from the count so whatever reason they had, that's how it is now.

Update: Around mid-March 2009, they changed the system again to stop counting robot views in order to make a more accurate view count.

If you're extremely impatient and want the Google search engine bot to notice your article immediately, you can submit it here and they'll send a robot to go read it ASAP. But don't do that either because really, do you want people coming from a Google search and reading your article an hour after you published it when the ads haven't gotten filled in by related ones yet? NO! You won't make any money off those first visitors that way.

Myth: high ratings and lots of comments make my article appear higher up in the search results

OMG I hate that lie so much. Google doesn't care what it's rated. Any website owner could rate everything on their site 5 stars to trick Google into thinking that they're all really good so any kind of rating, Google just ignores. And with all the cheating jerks on Ehow, horrible articles are rated 5 stars and good ones could easily be at 1, 2, or 3. Because of this, in the search results for Ehow's oldbuilt in searcher and the new one, it doesn't show the article's rating anymore until they actually view the article. So rating doesn't matter at all anymore.

As for comments, all they do is water down your article's keywords by adding more words. There are tools for measuring this, none that I know offhand, but important keywords in your article should be around 2-4% of the text. So every 25-50 words should be "toast" if your article is about toast. But add 5 comments worth of text and they just cut that in half for you. Until Ehow fixes this by telling the adbot to completely disregard and ignore the text in the comments section, this will continue to be a problem. If you don't believe me, write a short article about cooking and have 5 people leave comments talking all about basketball. Guess what kind of ads will show up. Basketball ads! If it were possible, I'd disable commenting on all my articles.

If you're in one of those read and rate rings and wasting time every day rating and commenting on each other's articles, STOP DOING THAT! Ratings mean nothing and comments are just destroying your friends' ads. Seriously, stop!

You may have noticed that Ehow says that high ratings and comments affect earnings and I say it doesn't. Well, we're both right. Having a higher rating or some comments might maybe make some people think the article is a little better than it is so they might maybe be more likely to post it on their blog or e-mail a link to it to someone which might drive a little more traffic to your article and some of those people might maybe click on an ad and it will give you a little more money. So by that logic, a higher rating might make you more money. It used to be more true when an article's rating was displayed next to it in the search results for Ehow's built in search engine because people are more likely to click on a 5 star article than a 2 star article. But now, it means almost nothing because they removed the rating in the results. As for direct correlations, no such thing. Like if you're wondering if Ehow pays you a 50% commission on ads for a 5 star article and a 40% commission on ads for a 3 star article, think again because I SERIOUSLY doubt that. I can't prove that they don't do that but they would have absolutely no reason to so I don't think they do. There's no logical reason to pay someone less or more based on something that doesn't affect earnings. If your article truly is better, it should just make more money so it's plenty fair without them trying to adjust the commission.

Myth: having tons of Ehow friends read my article will make me lots of money

OMG NO! And if I get another mass PM that says "read my new article!" I'm gonna lose it! By the way, PM = private message. They're not called e-mails, they're called PMs. Just because it says Inbox does mean they're e-mails because they're not. Anyway, there's a rule against members clicking other members’ ads so how are you going to make money if 100 of your friends view your article and none click on the ads? Even if that wasn't a rule, why have 100 random friends view your hunting article when you could have 100 hunters read your hunting article instead. They're a lot more likely to be interested in the hunting related ads on the page than 100 random friends. So really you're just annoying people. Don't focus any time and effort at all on trying to get other Ehow members to come read any of your articles unless you have another reason for sharing it than making money (like if you just want to spread the word about how to tell if you have cancer). Other than that, you want "interested traffic" not "random traffic" to be viewing your article. I'll tell you how to get those 100 hunters to read your hunting article later.

Myth: having a lot of points on your account makes you more money

That's just not true and that's about it. They're unrelated. The Ehow staff has said that points don't affect your commission or earnings in any way.

Myth: if I duplicate my article text and just change the title, I'll get twice the traffic and make double the money

OMG if you actually do that, I wish I could reach through the screen and slap you. That is the worst kind of cheating possible in my opinion. It’s soooo lazy and so unbelievably selfish, I can't believe people used to do it. I say used to because Ehow took my suggestion and turned their anti-plagiarism system on Ehow's own database. If you copy someone else's article or even your own article, it'll be gone within 48 hours. People used to just copy and paste 90% of the text and change one step and the title and call it a new article. Then they'd pump out a couple dozen of clones like that and assume that more articles = more money and that's that. Don't waste time thinking of new ways to cheat the system to make more money. The tips in this guide are all you need to make a lot more money.

Myth: more views = more money

That's false but a little true. There is no direct, mathematical link that turns views into money. I have articles with over 10,000 views that made nothing because views and earnings are two completely different systems (and the ads on that article suck.) More ad clicks means more money and that's literally all there is to it. Technically more people viewing your articles means there's more possibilities that someone might click on an ad but there's no guarantee. It's all about having the right type of traffic. On average with poor to mediocre ads, about 1 in 200 readers will click on an ad. Ehow articles do a little better than that though because the traffic is less random. So with that logic, double the views and double the earnings. But there's a difference between suddenly being the first result in a Google search and thus doubling your views and just running around on the internet, dropping links to your article everywhere you possibly can in hopes that people might be curious and click on it and doubing your views. That will just result in angry people who will never stay on the page long enough to click an ad.

Myth: if I click on my own ads and get my friends to click on them too, I'll cheat the system and make a bunch of money

This one is in red because it's the worst thing you could ever possibly do. It's called click fraud. The money doesn't come from a magic money dispenser. Companies paying for the ads have to pay for each click and fake clicks steal money from them. Would you walk into that company's headquarters, grab a stapler, and walk out? I hope not so don't steal money from them with fake ad clicks either. If you owned your own website and had one single sentence on the entire site that suggested people click on an ad, Google WILL find out and they WILL ban you for life from their Adsense service. In bad enough cases, Google will sue the people behind large operations of click fraud and often times they'll go to jail. If you do it on Ehow, you'll be really lucky if all you get is a warning because they'll definitely ban you for it. Google requires that they stomp out any kind of click fraud operations that occur or they'll get in big trouble. So don't even think about it!

If you're still thinking about it, here's another reason not to. It doesn't work. This is in the Myths section for a reason. Remember how I said the average click rate is 0.5%. Guess what happens when you click on 3+ ads within an hour? That's waaaaaay over the normal rate and it will assume you're clicking them for something other than curiosity or interest. Then your IP address gets put on the ignore list for a long time by the Adsense main system and none of your ad clicks count from then on. Money from previous ads clicks may even be reversed if it was within one day. Even one ad click per day is extremely high in terms of the normal amount from one person. Most people ignore 99% of ads so you can't hide an abnormal amount of clicks from Google. A few years ago, if my memory is correct, the estimated loss to companies by click fraud from that year by Google was $40 million. So they're very serious about stopping it and now have even more protections in place to prevent it. Proxies don't even work anymore either because Google ignores known proxy addresses. Even if you had multiple computers on multiple IPs and friends, you can't get away with a click pattern that's above normal and since the average click on an average ad will get you about $0.25, put your time and effort into writing new articles instead! You'll end up with more money that way and you won't be banned, sued, or arrested.

Writing

Okay, you're not flying blind anymore but there's still a long way to go before you're an expert. If necessary, take a break so your brain doesn't explode then let's move on to writing.

Pick your topic carefully

All the keyword picking and title altering (also known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO) won't force some articles to make money. You have to write about the right topics. I already said not to write overly-simplistic articles. They're too short for the adbot to pick up keywords. One of the questions you have to ask yourself is if people are actually going to look for that article on the internet. Do people really not know how to make toast, tie their shoes, boil water, and boil and egg? Well okay, I'm an awful cook and might look up how to boil and egg, mostly to see how long to do it for, but the rest aren't going to be heavily searched for on Google and other search engines. A great way to tell if people are searching for certain terms is to use that same keyword tool I mentioned earlier.

This time instead of putting in a URL to one of your articles, just typing in the main keyword phrase you'd expect from the article you're planning on writing like "basketball" or "paint metal" or "fix a radiator." Once you do, it will list that and other related keywords along with a bar for "advertising competition." This represents the amount of different people trying to advertise under that exact keyword using Google Adsense. For advertisers it pretty much goes like this. A keyword starts at like $0.05 or something. Let's say it's "hot tub." Someone comes along and decides to show ads based on that exact keyword phrase cuz they're selling hot tubs so they pay the default $0.05 per click. Then someone else decides to advertise under the same exact keyword phrase because they also sell hot tubs. I'm not 100% sure how this all works but it's something like they have to outbid the previous person so now they pay like $0.10 per click. But they don't just let the top bidder show ads that's that. They let multiple people show ads and yet somehow they outbid each other and...I dunno, the more people want to advertise under that phrase, the higher the price somehow goes. I think it's like if you're the top bidder your ad gets shown 70% of the time for example while someone paying a couple cents less is shown 30% of the time. You have to keep your bid competitive at least to have it shown a reasonable amount of times so that drives the price up.

That's all great to know but we're not advertising, we're on the other end of things. So what does this mean for us? Well, you write about mortgages and you're going to get some $28 per click (base rate) ads! Write about Japanese origami competitions and you're gonna get $0.05 per click. Here's some real examples from that tool. Everywhere you go, there's mortgage ads. Everyone wants you to refinance or get a mortgage with them. The competition is insane so it drove the price up so high that "mortgage" is in the top 100 most valuable keywords ever. Here's what you get when you put "mortgage" into the tool:



That means pretty much any article about mortgages is going to have some seriously expensive ads on it. So if you were thinking about writing an article about a certain topic and the keyword tool gives you results like that, definitely write it because you might make a lot of money off it! Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of keywords like that. What you'll usually see is something more like this:



So if you know about model rockets, go ahead and write it because those are some pretty decent ad competition ratings. I bet "model rocket" alone is about a $4 keyword. Most common topics that tie back to products have decent ratings like that so pretty much anything you can think of will be worth writing. That is unless you see something like this:



Turtle racing isn't that popular apparently. That's right, 0's across the board. That typically means there's either one or zero people advertising under that keyword so each click is probably worth less than $0.25. And remember, Google and Ehow take their cut so you're probably not going to make much on that. If you really love turtle racing and want to share your knowledge about it with the world, I'm not going to tell you not to write an article about it because you certainly should. But if you're only concerned with making money off that particular article, it's probably not worth writing. Any other keyword with results like this really isn't worth writing for high earnings either.

What I suggest doing it getting ideas for articles and quickly running their main words through that tool and trimming off the really unpopular article ideas that have poor results. Do keep in mind though that you may be able to make up low ad costs with volume of clicks. There's also a column in that tool for approximate searches in the previous month and approximate average monthly searches since they started recording. That's the approximate number of times someone has gone to Google's search engine and typed in that particular keyword or keyword phrase. Like for model rocket kits it says 2400 for an all time average. That means if you write a model rocket kit related article and it shows up as the very first result in a Google search, that's 2400 people that will probably come read your article. That's pretty good. The number of people advertising under that keyword and the number of people going to Google and searching for it are completely unrelated so you need to consider both. If a keyword isn't bid up very high due to low competition but 10,000,000 people searched for that term, it might be worth writing just because of the sheer volume of people interested in it. When you think about it, having ads that are worth 1/4 as much as the ones on other articles doesn't matter if you have 10x the traffic coming from Google's search engine because it should even out to make a decent amount of money.

That's not the whole story

If you finally got that whole thing down, sorry to tell you but there's an added twist. Yes, even more to think about :-( Advertisers can't pay more than their product costs or they lose money. How many ads do you see for "free ringtones" on the internet? That keyword phrase has so much competition, it's insane. But at $0.99 each, they can't afford to pay $1.50 per click. Also remember that not every single click turns into a paying customer. So they really can't even afford to pay $0.50 per click. Ringtone ads are actually nearly worthless. Mortgage companies make like $400,000 per mortgage! They can afford to pay $28 per click and even if 1 in 100 clicks turns into a customer, they still make a massive profit. So basically, if the product or service isn't very expensive, the ad isn't very valuable even if it has a high competition rating. Even if the competition is low on "waterproof safes" they're like $5,000 so if there's 5 companies selling them, they can afford to bid it up to a couple dollars per click just between themselves. So the competition bar isn't everything, the search volume isn't everything, and the product cost isn't everything but together they give you a good idea of how much money you'll make on any given article.

How do I get ideas for articles in the first place?

Everyone gets writers block once in a while. But I would definitely recommend you always carry around a writing utensil and pad of paper in case you suddenly think "hey, that would make a great Ehow article!" because trust me, you won't remember what it was when you get back to your computer.

For brainstorming, think of what you do as a career. Things may seem obvious to you if you're a professional plumber but most people don't know a thing about plumbing so you might as well turn some of your knowledge into articles. Then move on to what you do for hobbies. If you play paintball a lot, why not write gun upgrades and maintenance articles. Or maybe ones about good strategies in a paintball match like how to defend against a rush. Maybe you're into hunting or car upgrades or bird watching. Whatever you do, chances are you know more about than the rest of us. Plus, if it's a hobby, people who want to get into that same hobby look up information about it online. So that's naturally going to attract some traffic.

You can also think about the last time you really screwed something up. Like you were cooking and something lit on fire. Or you didn't know not to spray paint styrofoam because it will melt. You can turn a lot of mistakes into articles about how to do things the correct way and avoid your mistakes. Like "how to spray paint styrofoam without melting it."

One of the most important things to remember is often overlooked. When you get an idea, stop and ask yourself if it's more like a VCR manual or if it's like a magazine article. What I mean is, if you write how to change a tire, it's going to give people exact steps and they do them and the task is done. If you write how to improve your marriage, that's not a preset, exact path of steps that they can follow to get the task done. It's what I like to call a "tips" article because it just gives helpful tips instead of explaining how to do something beginning to end. Even if you were to write "how to find a cardinal while bird watching" it's pretty set in stone. You get good binoculars, look in certain places, watch for certain things, and you'll probably see a cardinal. But if you write "how to have a better attitude in the morning" that's just going to be a list of various tips. They're very similar types of articles because they both do in fact have steps but there's a big different in the amount of traffic and earnings they each get. Exact processes that have steps like a technical manual are things that people search for A LOT. Everyone wants to know how to change a tire, fix a bike, wash your dog, and cook lasagna and they go to the internet to find out how to do it. For the tip articles, often times they're great tips and it's a great article but nobody's searching for it. It's the type of thing where if you saw the headline in a magazine, you might read it but you don't go out of your way to hop on the internet and search for how to have a better attitude in the morning. So try and stay away from tip articles.

I shouldn't even have to say this but make sure your idea is actually a how to article. I've seen poetry, I've seen riddles, and most of all I've seen purely informative articles. Most of them start with "how to understand" like "how to understand the history of the US" and step 1 is a paragraph about how the British colonies were formed and 2 is about the revolutionary war and three is about new colonies and Lewis and Clark. That's a great article but it's not at all a how to article and doesn't tell anyone how to do anything so the editors will eventually delete it. By the way, a couple articles on Ehow came from Demand Studios and use an experimental informative layout. If the title doesn't start with "how to" then you just found one of them. That doesn't mean you can do the same though! So wait until that template and article type is officially launched to the general public of writers then use it. Until then, you're out of luck if it's not a how to article.

Always remember this when writing

Nothing kills an article faster than missing information. You already know what to do but the person reading has no idea. So it's easy to leave something out. If the reader gets done reading and has remaining questions about how to complete whatever process the article explains, the entire article is useless to them. Every time I write a step, I try to imagine what someone might ask if they were reading it. Then I answer it ahead of time. For example, I'd write "Now you might be wondering what type of pan to use. I prefer to non-stick ones because they're easier to work with. You'll also want to use one that's at least 8 inches or it will be harder to flip the giant omelet." They might wonder what to mix the omelet with if you don't specifically say a fork too. Name your tools and specify sizes and other details like that for everything involved. Just because you're picturing a 1.5 pound mini-sledge hammer doesn't mean they won't try and get out a full sized one to open their coconut. And then they'll rate the article 1 star when it doesn't work for them.

I'd say with the couple things I've looked up on Ehow, it takes about 3 articles before I have enough information to actually do what I want to do. So the problem is obviously really bad! That's why it's extremely important that you always think of the reader and be as detailed as possible. If they're actually going to attempt to do what you're explaining, they're going to need all the information no matter what! As an example, check out my article about installing 12V devices in your car like internal neons or a volt gauge. Even in step one, I didn't just say "get some wire" and assume they'd pick the right stuff. I told them what type to get, where to get it, and instead of saying "make sure it's thick enough to handle the current" I put how to calculate how much current your device will draw and what gauge wire can handle that. In step 2, I figured they'd want to know what the fuses looked like so they could pick them out in a store so i attached an image. The same goes for the ring terminals in step 3. And the rest of the steps are pretty long because I have to make sure they don't blow themselves up or electrocute themselves while doing it. If they get to step 10 and all of a sudden have a question about something that wasn't specified in my instructions, they're wont be able to continue and probably won't be very happy.

Not all articles are on topics so wide in scope and complicated so obviously I don't think they should all be that long. Just make sure no matter how simple or complicated the idea is, you cover every part of it and give 100% complete instructions

I just wrote an awesome article! Now what?

So you decided on a great topic to write about and wrote that sucker. You perfected the title and the keywords are all set and balanced. The first thing you need to do (even before keyword tests really) is EDIT IT! Read through it once. I've never in my life written an article with no typos or spelling or grammar errors. Your article really doesn't sound respectable if it has a bunch of errors in it and people will stop reading. More importantly, they'll be less likely to pass it on to their friends or post links to it on forums, etc. It's definitely worth your time to look it over.

For spelling and grammar errors, I'd suggest writing your article in Microsoft Word first then putting it on Ehow. It has a very good spell checker and a so-so grammar checker. If you don't have Microsoft Office or your copy didn't include Word, you can use WordPad which is installed on all Windows computers by default. It's similar but has fewer features. Or you can download a free Word look-alike that comes in the open source package, Open Office. I always write in Word then as I paste each step in, I read it and if there's an error or something I forgot, I correct it. It's also a VERY good idea to keep a copy of every article you write on your computer. If they accidentally get deleted from Ehow somehow or as soon as you hit publish, it errors out and wipes out all your progress then you still have a copy saved as a Word document.

Advertising Do's and Don't's

An article can be the best one ever written but with nobody to read it, it's not going to make you much money. What you need to do is drive traffic to your article. "Traffic" just means people coming and viewing your article. There are many different ways to advertise your article but be careful. For every good, legitimate idea or tip you hear on how to get people to come read your article, there are 10 bad ones. Seriously, most things don't work. Luckily, I'm going to give you the best ways to legitimately drive traffic to your article.

The most important thing to remember is that not all traffic is created equal. Don't think of it as a math equation where +500 views from one source will make the same amount of money as +500 from another site. A really exaggerated example is if you write a tennis article and you decide a huge, 100,000 member cooking forum you're a member of gets so much traffic, you should totally post a link there. Let's say over a week, you get 1000 extra views because people are clicking on the link there. Chances are, not a lot of them are interested in tennis. They're on the forum because they're interested in cooking. So when they see some ads about tennis equipment on your article, they ignore them and you make very little money.

Now let's say you put the link on a tennis forum. It's a guide for how to repair a tennis racquet so it's really fitting and welcomed on the forum. So you get 1000 extra views and they're mostly tennis enthusiasts. When they catch a glimpse of the tennis related ads, they're much more likely to click on them to see if they can get some good deals. What you always want are people reading your article who are genuinely interested in the subject matter. If you did your job and the ads are actually related to your article, you'll make a lot of money that way because it will result in a lot of ad clicks.

Search Engines!

This is the biggest, most important way to get people to your article. And it's the best because if someone goes to Google and types in "how to bake a cake" then they obviously are interested in learning to bake a cake and should be reading your article. That's a lot better than sending some random person on the internet a link to your article because they're probably not interested in it. The trick with search engines though is you want to try to be the very first result. Google gets around 70% of all the internet searches and some other search engines eat up most of the rest like Ask.com, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. I only worry about Google because that's what most people use. The others work similarly, just not as well, so anything you do to make your article more search engine worthy should work for all of them.

How Google decides which page is first in the results is an extremely complicated process. They've put years and years and millions of dollars into developing the smartest ranking system in the world. So don't think there's some magic trick to always getting to be the top ranked site in a Google search because there isn't one. It's a combination of many different things. Just remember though, the vast majority of people go to Google, search for something, and then click the first result if it looks decent. You stand a decent chance of getting clicked on you're in the top 5 but after that it falls off significantly. In a recent study, they found that if you're not even on the first page of results, you get about 1% the traffic compared to if you had the top result and if you're past page 3 you might as well not exist.

Getting the #1 spot

Here's some tips on getting the #1 spot in a search engine or at least in the top 5.

The most important thing to remember is you're not entitled to a good spot! If you're on page 5 of the results, Google or Ehow isn't "broken" as I've heard people say in the past. It's no glitch, it's your own crappy content's fault. Even if you do everything right, there's competition out there also trying to get the #1 spot and they'll stomp on you a lot so don't ever think you're guaranteed a high spot in the results.

Huge websites that get a ton of traffic and have a LOT of links linking to them all over the internet are given a massive advantage from the get go regardless of the content. So be really glad you write on Ehow which gets 30 million+ visitors a month and probably has at least 10,000 links to them all over the internet. Probably more like 100,000. It basically means that Google has a really high opinion of Ehow so even if your article sucks, just being on Ehow gives it a high ranking.

The next extremely important thing is the title of the article. That's weighed even more heavily by the Google search engine robot than it is by the adbot. The title is what the article is about so if someone searches for your exact title, you've got a really good chance of being #1 because Google assumes your article is about what they're looking for. So I hope you paid really close attention to the title writing section above. If you follow all those tips like re-arranging filler words and putting the most important phrases first, you'll have a major advantage.

There have been some problems with how Ehow article pages show up in Google but when it's working perfectly, the link text is the title itself and your introduction text from the article should be the description/excerpt. Check out this correctly displaying one:



So all you really need to know is to write the title correctly and don't put anything really stupid in the introduction or leave it blank because that's what people see when they do a search. Other than that, Ehow's website name alone and how they structure the page title is awesome! People who want to know how to do something read it and instantly realize "Ehow" probably is a site for how to articles. And the title of your article gives it away too. It makes it a very tempting result to click on. That's why even if you're in the 2nd or 3rd spot, someone might take a look at the first 5 results and decide a site that's specifically for how to articles is probably their best bet for finding what they're looking for and click on your article's link instead of whatever other website is in the first spot.

As for keywords, my advice is exactly the same as for the adbot. Around 4% density of the most important keywords and make sure there's no conflicting words that would lead the robot to think your article is about something that it's not.

This is pretty obvious but it's worth mentioning. If you're writing an article about something not often talked about like how to hold an origami competition, you're probably going to get the #1 spot. If you wrote about dieting, good luck being on the first 100 pages. It's all about competition and there are probably close to a billion articles online about dieting. The simplest way to test how much competition you have is to go to Google and type in "how to _____" and have the ____ be whatever your title will likely be. I typed in how to cook a turkey as an example. Thanks to Thanksgiving, there's a lot of content on the internet about that. In the top right of the page right above the results, it says "Results 1 - 30 of about 71,800,000." You'll want to pay attention to that last number after the "of about." That means it found almost 72 million pages that have content related to cooking turkeys. In other words, you stand no chance of getting the top spot. Well okay, not "no" chance since the 10th result in that particular search is an Ehow article :-D It's just extremely unlikely.

Now I just tried searching for "how to cook a turtle." Only 4,710,000 results and the 6th result is an Ehow article, yay! You have a lot better chance with those odds. Remember that 4.7 million sounds high but if the title of your article is exactly what the person put into the search box, you just beat out 99.9% of the other results.

If you want to be almost guaranteed to get the first spot, write something that has 10,000 results or less. Shoot for under 100,000 though. Even "how to be a mime" got me 2,470,000 results so it's rare that you'll write about something so unmentioned on the internet as a whole that it'll be under 10,000. Plus, if it's that unpopular that nobody is writing about it, is anyone even going to be searching for it? I got 108,000 results for "how to get a Wisconsin fishing license" though so that would make a perfect Ehow article.

If you want to write an article and find that there's 50 million other results you have to compete with, don't decide against writing it just because of that. First of all, it's unlikely but possible you'll get a really good ranking in searches anyway. In fact, a search for "how to move objects with your mind" gets 53 million results but my idiotic April fools article by the same name is currently the 6th result. Also, there's other methods of advertising that work as good and better than search engines.

So what makes a page worthy of being in the top few positions? That was what Google asked themselves way back when they started. The only requirement that they heard from users was "it has to be good" and "it has to be what I'm looking for." They have the second part down with computer logic and keywords but how can a computer determine how "good" an article is? It's impossible. Google found that out a long time ago so they decided to let humans decide instead. How? By measuring the amount of people who link to the page. The more people that link to a webpage, the better it must be. That's because the owner of that website is referring their own visitors there via a link so it must be worth going to or they wouldn't have linked to it. That has held exceptionally true so it's one of the major backbones of their ranking system.

If you think about it, let's say Site A has song lyrics and has 50 different other sites link to it. That's ranked higher in Google searches than Site B with 2 sites linking to it because those 50 sites obviously thought Site A was better or they would have linked to Site B instead. It's pretty smart and not very easy to cheat because who owns 50 different websites to plant fake links on? And if you have 1000 websites linking to yours, you can't fake that. 1000 people thought your site was worth linking to and that's that. So that's why they count on it so heavily.

When the Google search engine robot gets to a webpage, it follows ALL links on that entire page (with exceptions but don't worry about those.) When it follows a link, if it doesn't recognize the page it lands on, it reads it and enters it into the search index for the first time so it starts showing up in search results. In the much more likely case that it recognizes the webpage as one Google has already indexed, it sort of virtually adds a tally to that page's link count. And since they have a ridiculous amount of robot servers, they pretty much know how many links point to every significant pages on the entire internet. So if you have a blog and you post a link to one of your Ehow articles on it, the Google bot will eventually see it and you may have just bumped your article up in the search results from 20th place to 4th place because your blog is vouching for the fact that that article is worth going to by linking to it.

This next part hasn't been officially verified by Google but everyone assumes this is how it works based on how the search results behave. I personally think it's true. There are three major tiers that your page can fit into when it comes to links. The first is zero links, where absolutely no webpages on the entire internet link to you other than Ehow itself. You're probably not going to get a good ranking if nobody links to you. It's possible if there's little competition to get a good spot anyway but you should try and get at least 1 link somewhere. There's a pretty big difference between 0 and 1 believe it or not. The majority of pages on the internet aren't linked to directly by any outside sites. It's something like 90-95% if I remember correctly. That's because they're just side pages or special-use pages that shouldn't be linked to because it wouldn't make sense for someone to go to just that page. Because of this, if your article isn't linked to from anywhere, they wonder if it should be linked to or if it's just some random page in the Ehow help section that there's no reason to navigate to directly because it won't make sense by itself. Either that or nobody linked to it because it sucks. Either way, the Google mainframe of indexes doesn't rank it very high."

But let’s say one person on some forum somewhere or a blog or a social networking site links to your article once. That at least lets Google know it's worth going to and not some random page so it boosts your chances of being one of the first results greatly. After that big jump, there's a smaller but still significant difference from 1 to several-ish (let's just say 10). One single link can be a fluke but if 3 different sites link to your article, now we've got something. And if 10 link to it, it must be really good. So that's sort of like tier 2. Tier 3 is where it's so crazy, that they sort of stop counting each new link as a massive bonus. 1 might blow away 0 and 5 is considered roughly 5x better, maybe a little less, but when a site gets linked to from 324,081 different sites, it kinda caps it because that's still not a guarantee that that webpage absolutely beats all others no matter what. Youtube is a great example. You know how many people link to some Youtube videos? Like for example, that hilarious video of David, the 7 year old, who's a little loopy after the dentist it got over 12 million views in under a month because it was linked to by probably well over 10,000 different sites. Does that mean when you type in "dentist" for a search at Google, that should be result #1? No! The title on the video isn't even all that search engine friendly because it's lacking in other related keywords. So the moral of the story is, don't count on just one thing to boost your ranking to #1. You still need good content and keywords even if you have that many "referrals" by other sites.

Check out the 5 sites that gave that Youtube video the most views. That's a lot of people!!! Unfortunately they don't have a full list publicly available, only the top 5. But it's a loooong list because everyone everywhere linked to it.



By the way, wouldn't it be nice if Ehow would display who's linking to your articles in a similar way? I would love to know if some other site linked to it and they're giving me 90% of my traffic for that article. It would also allow everyone to see how many sites total are linking to it so we can weed out the ones with no links and plant some ourselves. Anyway, when millions of people go view a video or any other type of web content, it's referred to as "going viral." That's because one person saw the video and then thought it was so great, they couldn't keep it to themselves and sent it to their friends and posted it all over the internet. Then those friends did the same until it seems like everyone in the entire world saw the video. If you wrote an article on Ehow about how to build a jetpack for $200 and it actually worked and could fly like a mile, I guarantee it would go viral because that's seriously awesome but short of that, don't count on your article going viral. How to guides aren't exactly as hot as hilarious videos.

Another extremely important thing to remember is that it's not just a simple mathematical count for the number of links leading to your article. Every link is counted differently. If a super respectable, popular, high-traffic site with a good overall Google ranking like CNN links to your article, that's worth a lot! If some relatively unknown site without a lot of inbound or outbound links puts a link to your article on their website, it still counts but it isn't considered as respectable of a referral. Keep that in mind but don't turn down any opportunities to put a link somewhere legitimate.

There are some sites that are basically parasitic, link drop sites. They promise to be able to "increase your Google ranking" and "drive more traffic to your site." In theory, both are true because all they do is have a giant, submission based link dump. It's literally a glorified phone book of websites. Why do they exist? Because they let you submit your links for free and on each page of links, they show their own ads and hope to make a few bucks off it. Google doesn't just ignore most of these sites but some have such a shady reputation as spam sites, having a link to your article there will prove you're trying to generate fake, illegitimate links to drive up your Google rank and they'll trash your Google ranking if not remove your article from the index completely. So don't go near those kinds of sites! Pretty much any service claiming to be able to drive traffic to your article or increase your Google ranking is a scam, a lie, or a big mistake that will harm your article's ranking.

So the title, keyword arrangement and density, and the number of sites linking to your article are about all you should be concerned with. There are small details like how long the article has been around that are also taken into consideration but those are the most important parts that have the largest influence when it comes to search engine rankings. One quick thing I should mention though is I've heard that Google ranks content lower when it finds that exact content elsewhere. That may or may not be true but I know for a fact that when Google finds the same article on two different sites, it can read when each page was created on the server and whichever is older, it will give preference to. That way if someone writes an article and someone else steals it and puts it on their site, the original will be higher up than the copy so the person who originally made the content still gets all the traffic. So if you're bent on putting your articles on other sites, definitely publish it to Ehow first since they pay the best and get the most traffic! That's the place you'll want Google pointing to. But really, I would strongly recommend against putting your article on any other site at all. Aside from maybe AC, there aren't many good ones out there, and even Associated Content's earnings system is a bit unfair.

Stay especially far away from Bukisa!!! It's a horrible scam like 5 different ways. For starters, they planted fake reviews from fake users claiming they made so much money on Bukisa even though the owner came out and admitted at that point in time, nobody had actually made pay out so nobody on the planet actually made money with Bukisa. Speaking of that, they're really new which is why they use a semi-pyramid scheme as a marketing strategy (in that you make a lot more money from referrals than from what you actually do on the site.) That's barely legal in the US but guess what! Another good thing to know is a company based in Israel owns and controls it. Israel is right up there with Nigeria, China, and Russia when it comes to internet fraud and scams. They aren't based in the US because they'd be in big trouble for astroturfing (planting fake reviews for their site.) Bukisa's article license is pretty sketchy too. And best of all, their earnings system is horribly unfair and assures that even if your article makes $100, you won't see much of it because it gets divided up evenly among the people who have worthless articles but still somehow manage to get views. Do not even go to their site!

Oh and one last tip barely worth mentioning. If you Google search your article idea before writing it and you get something like this where there's some other reference that you didn't anticipate like Have a Nice Day is one of Bon Jovi's albums, don't write that article if you're counting on search engine ranking because it will get buried for various reasons.

The "never do this" list

If you can't get a decent search results position, don't worry. There's other methods of advertising that work great. Well, some advertising methods work. Some are kinda sketchy and might get you results. Others are just plain bad and horrible and wrong. Let's start with the worst of the worst that you should never do.

I already mentioned above in the myths section that Pingomatic is great but it's useless to us at Ehow. It will do absolutely nothing for you so don't use it. People who tell you to use it don't know how it really works. So don't ever use it for Ehow. Feel free to use it on your blog very time you update it though because it works great for that.

As for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking sites. DO NOT go near those! You are trying to send people to your article to make money. People on those sites are trying to hang out with their friends and share pics and good websites and stuff. Those two goals are not compatible! When those two collide, spam happens. I don't care what your opinion is, if you go to any social networking sites and make an account/page and get some friends and then send them messages that they should come visit your articles, THAT'S SPAMMING! You're pretending that you're legitimately interested in some amazing web article that you had to share when in fact you're the one who wrote it and you just want financial benefit from it. All the services I mentioned are extremely strict on spammers and you'll probably get banned for spamming Ehow links on them so don't bother.

Also stay away from those link dump sites I mentioned previously.

Direct messaging isn't a real good idea either. Sending an e-mail saying "hey, read this" to everyone in your address book is a bad idea. All you're doing is annoying your friends and they'll consider you a spammer. DEFINITELY DO NOT send out mass PMs to your Ehow friends list. People are extremely annoyed by that. I bet by the time I'm done writing this, they'll have already blocked stuff like that so don't even think about it. Sending out messages to random people is annoying and ineffective. You want to get archers to read your archery articles because they're interested in all the archery ads that you made sure were there by adding archery keywords, remember? It's all a system and throwing random people on the internet at the article isn't going to do much for you. Don't get me wrong, if the New York Times wants to put your article on their homepage then by all means, send a million random people to the article that way but other than that, it's not a good idea.

Sketchy advertising methods

Here are some ways of getting more people to read your article that might work or kinda work but your time would be a lot better spent on other methods.

Don't use Digg. It's just not worth it. It's not a terribly awful thing to use like some of the others mentioned here but it's a huuuuuge waste of time. Digg is a site where people register an account and when they see something that absolutely needs to be shared because it's so unbelievably awesome on the internet, they Digg it so others can see it too. But it's so heavily spammed, it's insane. Even if there was no spam and just legitimate websites being submitted there, you're going to get yours buried. The more Diggs you gets, the more people look at your article because they assume it's worth looking at but you need A LOT of diggs to make it to the homepage. All the dug articles on the homepage get tens of thousands of people clicking on them but trust me, you're never going to get on the homepage. It's only happened to one Ehow member ever as far as I know and that's been in over a year of me being there. The Digg community is mostly immature, liberal losers who like hearing about political discord and idiotic news stories. How to articles aren't exactly their thing so don't even bother with Digg.

Stumble Upon is almost exactly the same. I've never used it so I'm just going by how I heard it works. The idea is people find neat stuff online and then submit it to Stumble Upon under certain categories so people who are also interested in that category can tell the service to take them to a random site that was submitted because other people said it was awesome. It's a little less random than Digg when it comes to traffic but still not very effective and heavily spammed. I wouldn't bother with it myself but I've heard people have, in rare cases, gotten good results from it.

Squidoo is yet another site like Digg and Stumble Upon but it's structured in such a way that it's better. I've also never used it but heard how it works. You make a "lens" which is supposedly the way you see a certain topic online. I dunno what that's supposed to mean exactly but that's what they say on their site. Here's how it really works. If you like football, you put your favorite football links on it and other football enthusiasts find your football lens and it's like a gold mine for awesome footballness all over the web. Pretty neat idea but a lot of the lenses are rigged and just trying to send you to a site owned by the maker of the lens. And guess what, yours probably will be too. If you like pets and know a ton of pet websites and wrote some pet articles then add all of that to the lens so it's not all random, unrelated Ehow links. The whole point of a lens is that all the links are about the same topic so if you wrote all kinds of Ehow articles, that's sort of a problem. They tend to frown upon every link being to the same site anyway because that's what spammers do. So it might work really well for you if you make a genuine lens with a variety of great links and only have some of the links be to Ehow instead of an "Ehow only" lens. Making money off your own articles still isn't exactly the intention of their site though.

Probably the best option out of all the so-so methods here is to make your own blog through a free blogging service. You can control all the content and write whatever you want and arrange the links however you want. Just like squidoo though, people aren't going to read your blog if it's all "hey, go here and read my Ehow article" and that's it. That seems kinda spammy, not to mention boring. The only way to have a successful blog that people actually visit is to mix your links to Ehow articles with other interesting content. I know a lot of Ehow members that have blogs about one topic like caring for dogs and they post pictures of their dogs and have discussions on a forum/comment system with the visitors and give tips and also post links to their Ehow guides related to pets. The blog links will certainly count to boost your ranking in Google search results plus anyone who follows the links from the blog won't have to go through a search engine. To top it off, they'll all be obviously interested in dog care or whatever your blog is about. That's a lot of potential, interested traffic so what's keeping this option in the sketchy category? There's two catches to this method. Once you have a blog, you usually have to put in some effort to get a decent amount of people to come read it. So it's like you're advertising your blog to try and get people to go there so they can come to Ehow and read your articles. Trying to drive people to a blog and your Ehow article can easily turn into twice the work. Then there's the fact that you have to update a blog regularly so the readers don't get bored. And you have to come up with new, creative content other than Ehow links to put on it. That time could be better spent writing more Ehow articles. So it pretty much boils down to the fact that if you're passionate about a topic, start a blog for it and incorporate links to your articles in it otherwise there are better methods you could use.

The best advertising methods by far

Finally, I'm going to tell you things that actually work. Everyone should use these methods before any of the rest because they're the most logical, most effective, and will get the best results.

I already said before that search engine traffic is perfect. Someone searches for how to _____ because they want to learn how to _____ and want to read your article and possibly click on the related ads. It's great traffic, it works, and if you hit the first spot in the search results, you could get many thousands of visitors so that's why it's in this best methods category. You can do everything right and still show up buried on page 15 of the search results though so that's why you shouldn't count solely on search engines. But since it can be so great, you should ALWAYS follow the tips earlier in this guide to design your article so that Google can pick it up and will rank it well.

Another great place to go is Yahoo Answers. People go there and can ask any question and other people answer it. So naturally there's always people asking "how do I cook a salmon?" and "how do I defrag my hard drive?" So you can go there and give them a simple answer like "Defragging is built into windows and it's pretty simple to run. Just take a look at this article and follow the steps. It's pretty easy" and then post a link to your Ehow article about defragging hard drives. But why would you go through all that trouble to get one individual person with a question to come read your article? Well, Yahoo Answers pages have titles that are often phrased perfectly for search engines and their site has an extremely high overall Google ranking. So when someone types into Google a question to the effect of "how do I defragment a hard drive" and they don't get your Ehow article in the first couple results, there's a really good chance the question you answered on Yahoo Answers will be there instead. And what if you got spot 1 and the Yahoo Answers question gets spot 2? Then you'll catch just about everyone searching for it! Questions and answers do not expire and thus are not deleted so once you answer a question, it's on there permanently and can be picked up by Google even years later. It also takes very little time to type a quick answer and paste in a link. Fast and effective is the best way to advertise. And of course the link counts as a pretty good reference as far as search engine bots' link counts are concerned. There are two little catches that almost bumped this method down into the sketchy category though. One is that if you answer every single question with a link to Ehow, Yahoo detects it and will ban your account, assuming you're a spammer. So you should shoot for approximately 50% answers with links and 50% answers without links. It doesn't take long to answer a bunch of questions without links though so just keep it in mind and do it. Or just keep registering new accounts after you get banned. Either way, be aware that it might happen. The other catch is that you're competing with other people giving answers. The asker of the question can choose the "best answer" and if they don't, the other users can vote. Once the best answer is selected, it's highlighted and moved to the top so anyone arriving at the question from a search engine will see and read that one first. While it's likely you posting a linkt o an entire guide to answer the person's question will beat everyone else's answers, it's not guaranteed.

Now time for the second best thing you could possibly do when it comes to advertising. So you just wrote how to cook a lobster. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a magical place where a whole bunch of people who were interested in cooking lobsters resided? Then you could go there and tell them you just wrote a guide for it and they'd get all excited about learning something new about what they're passionate about. Hooking people up with information they want to learn is the whole point of Ehow. Well guess what, places like that do exist and they're called forums. Specifically, specialized forums about one topic. For example, let's go through the process. I wrote an article about airsoft guns. They're like paintball guns but they shoot solid plastic BBs and trust me, you know when you get hit by one in competitions so they don't need to be filled with paint. Anyway, I went to two of the largest airsoft forums on the internet and posted links to my article in the specified area. One forum even had a category of posts specifically for guides about airsoft stuff. I couldn't find that website for some reason or they re-structured it but anyway, here's another example. This is an area on a popular airsoft enthusiasts forum for guides and information about airsoft gun upgrades and modifications, which is roughly what my article is about.



Take a look at just how many people registered on this forum and how many visit it regularly.



That's no typo or glitch. There are almost 30,000 people registered at that forum and that doesn't count everyone who visits as a guest and never registers an account. And there were over 1000 people currently viewing the forum at the time this screenshot was taken. So it's no surprise at all that out of all my articles, my airsoft one has the most views by a wide margin. It's just short of 18,000 at the time this article was written. It also made a lot of money because obviously people who go to an airsoft forum are always in the market for buying guns and holsters and masks and ammo and everything else that appears in the ads on my article. So the odds of them clicking on an ad are at least 10x as good as random internet traffic if I were to just spam my links on Myspace or something and hope people click on it.

Chances are whatever your article is about, there's a forum for it. Just go to Google and type in the topic of your article then the word forum. Once you find one, register for an account there and start posting helpful stuff. The only slight catch is, people on forums don't immediately respect members with a low post count. If they see you register and you have a post count of 1 and your only post was "hey, I wrote an article about ____ and you should totally come read it" then it might seem a little spammy. You might want to stop in at the “introduce yourself” section if they have one and say hi. Or at least go read some other posts and reply to them with your thoughts so they don't think you're just there to drive traffic to your article and that's it. If that seems shady, remember that you won't have to pretend to be interested because if you wrote a how to care for Pomeranian puppies article, chances are you're interested some other posts on a Pomeranian owners forum. They don't expect every user to stick around forever either but do come back and read replies to your posts for at least a week or two. If someone replies with "hey, you said in step 4 that I should do this but you didn't say what brand to use" then you better come back and answer or it's obvious you just joined, posted the link, and left. Then your post might get deleted by moderators. Even if a bunch of people just say thanks for the awesome information, you better reply saying thanks for reading it to prove you're still there.

An alternate, less spammy method is to add a link to some related articles to your signature on your account at a forum. A signature shows at the end of every post you make and most forums have that feature. This works extra well if you post a lot because every time you post, people see the links. I had over 1000 posts on a tech support forum when I added three computer related article links to my signature there. People knew I was a long time, respected member of the forum so the links in my sig must lead to some awesome and important stuff.

Remember how I said posting article links on related forums was only the 2nd best thing you could do? You're probably having a hard time imagining what could possibly give you more views and more earnings from the best possible traffic that's most likely to click on an ad. Well, it's not really all that different than posting it on a forum yourself, it's just one step up. The best method is to get other people to post links on forums and blogs and basically everywhere else on the internet. How do you do this? Write a quality article that actually helps people do something worth sharing!!! No amount of advertising and search engine optimization or anything else can outperform simply writing a good article. Why? Because people will advertise it for you!

For the perfect example, let's look to my #2 article when it comes to most views. All I did was write it. I didn't post it on any forum anywhere or really do anything to advertise it except making it really search engine friendly. It's about how to configure video games' graphics options to make the game run as fast as possible. It breaks down all the weird options that nobody really has any idea what they do inside most 3D games' config screens. For example, I say what anti-aliasing is, what it does, what you should try setting it on first, and how much it impacts performance if you turn it up later. When I got done, I even thought "wow, this is a REALLY good article!" People ask about this stuff online and look it up all the time. Nobody really knows what HDR and bloom lighting are and which takes more resources until they look it up.

So if I didn't advertise it, how did it get a ton of views and do so well? Because people read it and it was so helpful and informative and awesome that they bookmarked it/added it to their favorites. Then at some later point when someone else was asking about configuring graphic options on a forum somewhere, they dig up the bookmark to my article and post the link and say "read this, it explains everything." Ehow makes it almost impossible to detect who's linking to you but fortunately, I did a Google search for the title and found some people quoting the title exactly and linking to it. The How Project linked to it. Two or three gaming forums had posts linking to it. Someone even linked to it from a Washington Post story! Yeah, the Washington Post! I also Googled the URL to the article itself and found that a business support forum post linked to my article. A whole bunch of super small scale search engines linked to it too, although those are kinda automated. I would have trouble running around to all those different places and posting the link myself. Plus, that's a lot of time and effort. I didn't even have to do anything this way because people read it and thought it was great and advertised it for me. There are probably 5x that amount of forums and other sites linking to my article too but Ehow doesn't have a feature to track them and Google doesn't always pick them up. So I might have had 30 different people telling others all over the internet to come read my article because it's awesome.

Youtube has a "who's linking to me" type feature though and when I look at one of my videos there, it tells exactly this kind of story. I made a smoke bomb video that tells how to make a gigantic smoke bomb with Potassium Nitrate and powdered sugar. Then at the end, I incinerate the surrounding grass, almost flash burn myself, cover the entire sky with thick smoke, and generally blow up my entire backyard with it. But before that I tell the viewer exactly how to make one of their own. So naturally people found it, watched it, and then turned around and went to pyrotechnics enthusiast forums and posted a link to the video. Now it has around 150,000 views. In total since I posted it, I estimate that over 50 different sites linked to it at some point. So write really good articles that are worthy of being shared by readers (in their opinion, not yours) and they'll advertise it for you. No squidoo or spam PMs or tweets or pokes or anything like that required on your part. You just sit back and let others add links to your articles to their Squidoo lenses and Myspace pages and forums.

I bet after reading a bit of this guide, you bookmarked it and you're already thinking "OMG I have to send this so all my Ehow friends. They need to read this!" See, it really does work. You write good content on the internet and people share it for you :-D If I was making regular ad money off this guide, I'd be really happy because everyone would direct traffic here for me.

By the way, if you took a look at that video of mine, I put a link to my Ehow article about how to build a smoke bomb in the description to the right of the video. That's also a great way to advertise. It's honest and effective and a great way to direct traffic. When people read something to the effect of "and if you want to know exactly how to do this, check out this article I wrote about it" they usually click on it if they're interested after watching the video. So do that too if you have related Youtube videos. Like if you wrote a skateboarding article about how to do a certain trick and you have a video of you doing the trick on Youtube, put a link to your Ehow article in the video's description and say "if you want to learn how to do this, check this out." That will work great for driving a lot of traffic to your article.

That's about it

See, it's all just that simple :-D Well okay, it's complicated but now you sure know a heck of a lot more about how to succeed on Ehow than you did before. Good luck and I hope you make a lot of money and encourage all the lazy, careless, greedy people who are ruining Ehow with crappy articles to come read this too!

Shameless Plug Time

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