A Tale of Three eHow Ebooks: Which One Is Right for You?

NOTE TO READERS: A fourth ebook review has been added at the bottom of this post.

In the sidebar of this blog you will find links to three ebooks about writing and making money with eHow. You will also find talk of these books on the eHow community forums, where all three authors are active.

So you may be wondering which of these ebooks is right for you?

First let me say that the reason I have all three books and link to them from my blog is because I have had the opportunity to meet all three authors and found them to be sincere people who are committed to making the most of eHow. I can also vouch for the fact that all three have earned significant income from their eHow articles.

I do realize, however, that it’s not possible for everyone to invest in all three ebooks. With that in mind I thought it might be helpful to write a compare and contrast ebook review so that readers might know which of these books would be the best fit for them.

How to eHow: The Ultimate Guide to Writing on eHow by Janet Ford

Length: 82 pages

Price:$27 $15

Summary: The titles promises an “ultimate” guide to writing on eHow and you can see from the number of pages that this book definitely delivers. With comprehensive sections on creating a profile, navigating eHow, and using the forums, etc. this is the ideal guide for beginners.

More experienced writers will be interested in the sections on brainstorming ideas and earning affiliate commissions with eHow articles.

What makes it stand out: Easily the most valuable part of this ebook is the section on article promotion. Twenty different methods of promotion are covered.

Moneyback Guarantee? Yes, within 60 days, no questions asked.

How to Earn Passive Income at eHow.com: Residual Income for Web Content Writers by WriterGig

Length: 34 pages

Price: $25

Summary: This ebook approaches eHow from a passive income potential perspective. While basics are touched on, this focus of this book is maximizing income. The author shares how eHow differs from traditional freelance writing and shares her passion for creating residual income

What makes it stand out: The section on eHow Income Potential paints a picture of what is possible with eHow. Information on specific writers’ earnings are included.

Moneyback Guarantee? Yes, after trying method for 30 days.

Need Extra Cash? Write Articles That Pay by Anthony Delgado

Length: 25 pages

Price: $19.99

Summary: This book is probably the least eHow-specific. Rather, it’s a primer on SEO (search engine optimization) which you can use to choose profitable eHow topics. If you’re an experienced eHow writer, you won’t have to wade through sections on choosing an avatar, etc. You’ll get right to the meat of choosing profitable keywords and using them in your articles.

What makes it stand out: Anthony includes a section on Finding the Balance Between Traffic and Revenue that takes the basic SEO information most experts offer and takes it a step further. The sections on titles and writing an article also worth a read.

Moneyback Guarantee? Yes, with conditions.

Writing Online: Making Money and Residual Income with Online Content by Annalise Kaylor

Length: 27 pages

Price: $25 (currently $15 with the discount code NEWYEAR)

Summary: Annalise is a web editor, SEO specialist, and freelance writer so she approaches this book with a wide array of experience. The book is geared toward those who want to make money writing for established sites (like eHow) that pay (or revenue share) for content. She also focuses on increasing earnings by maximizing content and affiliate marketing, etc .

What makes it stand out: The section on 'Websites That Pay You to Write for Them' is definitely unique to this book. There are also some techniques in the SEO and keyword sections that I hadn't seen before.

Moneyback guarantee? Yes, if your earnings don't increase in 30 days.

Another eHow Writer to Watch

In October I attended an eHow writer's conference at the Demand Studios home office in Santa Monica, California. There were 17 writers in attendance and one of them was Anthony Delgado.

Anthony is a husband and father of two small children who has made the move to earning all his income online. One of the ways he's doing that is by adding eHow articles at an amazing rate.

Recently he crossed over the 300 article mark and is now headed full-steam to 400. Besides being a prolific writer, he's also a pretty cool guy.

Anthony has also written an eBook called Need Extra Cash? Write Articles That Pay. Anthony's book is a wealth of information on writing for search engines and would be of benefit to both eHow writers and writers for other websites and blogs as well.

If you'd like to get an idea of what is possible with eHow as far as earnings, you'll want to watch Anthony's progress. It's going to be exciting!

Work Smarter, Not Harder, on eHow

The best way to generate eHow earnings is to write, write, write. There's nothing more sure-fire than adding articles to increase the money you make monthly with eHow.

But it also pays to work smart, and not just hard, when writing for eHow.

Here are some things to consider before you start tapping away at your keyboards:

Write what works

By that I mean take a look at your article library and see what your top earners are. Sign into eHow and pull up your list of articles. Now click on the earnings heading twice to order your articles from highest earners to lowest.

Look at your highest earners. Do they have anything in common? Are many of them in the same category? Consider writing in that category again. Are any about the same topic? Definitely plan to write more on that topic.

Sometimes writers can re-create their success this way, and sometimes not, but it's certainly worth a try. And if you've written on the topic before, chances are it will be easier to write on it again.

Promote your best earners

There was a discussion on the eHow forums a while back about whether it was better to promote or produce. In other words, if you want to make more money and have a limited amount of time, should you produce more articles or promote the ones you have?

My approach to that is to use Pareto's Principle, or the 80/20 rule. When applied to eHow, Pareto's Principle would hold that 80% of my earnings will come from 20% of my articles.

Keeping this in mind, any promoting I do is of my top articles, which have already proven productive. I don't spend a lot of time trying to prop up the low earners.

Link to your own articles

When writing an eHow article there is a section where you can place related articles from eHow. I almost always search for and put my own articles there.

Ideally I'll have articles that are closely related to the one I'm writing. That's not hard to do since I'm usually writing in one of just a few major categories. But even if I have to stretch a little I'll still try and put my own articles in this section. It increase the odds that when a reader clicks away from my article that they're clicking on something that will make me money.

Add Affiliate Links

One of the greatest advantages of eHow is that you can put affiliate links in the Resources section of articles. Even if you did nothing more than join Amazon Affiliates, there will almost always be a book or product that you can link to that is related to your article.

If you're not active in affiliate marketing, you can use this section to link to your other sites or blogs. Again, in order to create value for the reader, the links should be related to the article you're writing. But as long as that's the case there's no reason why you can't include these links and increase the odds that you benefit when the reader decides to click away from your article.

Re-Write for Other Sites

As I've mentioned before, at eHow you own the rights to the content you create. This means you can make your writing do double duty on other sites where you own the content.

I recommend doing some simple re-writing so you won't be placing duplicate content on different sites, but that's fairly easy to do and, again, it's writing smarter not harder.

What things do you do to make sure you're working smart and making the most of your eHow writing time?

eHow Article Template vs. Word

I’ll admit it. I love writing my eHow articles directly into the eHow template. I know I should write them in Word and transfer them over, but it’s so much easier to just open up the template and start writing away.

Even so, I’ve committing to change that practice. I’m even going back to the 140+ articles I’ve written to date and copying and saving them as Word documents. Ten a day, every day, until it’s done.

Why go to all that work?

Well, the obvious reason to create eHow articles in Word is so that if the system goes all buggy while you’re typing you won’t lose all your work. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens often enough and it’s incredibly frustrating when it does.

But there is another reason – a more exciting one – to create your articles in Word or another word processing software. It all has to do with the fact that at eHow, you own your content. You’re not selling your content to eHow, you’re sharing it with them for a piece of the revenue pie.

Why does that matter?

Well, since you own the content you can place your eHow articles other places on the web and reap additional earnings from them. Whether it’s another revenue sharing site like Bukisa or Squidoo, or a site or blog that you’ve created yourself, owning the content means you can make those articles do double (or triple) duty.

Now before you go all crazy with the copy and paste, you should know that it’s best not to place your articles elsewhere word for word. The word is that Google doesn’t like duplicate content and you’re not as likely to rank as well if you’re placing the exact same content somewhere else. But with your articles in Word, it’s easy enough to re-write paragraphs and make some word substitutions so as not to have duplicate content.

That requires a little bit of work but it’s certainly easier than coming up with a new article idea and creating an article from scratch.

And even if you’re not interested in creating content somewhere else, having all your articles in Word helps you hedge your bets a bit regarding creating content for a site you don’t control (eHow). So if eHow were ever to go *poof* (as unlikely as that might be) you could take your content and place it somewhere else on the web.

And for those of us who worry about putting our writing up on someone else’s site, that should help us sleep a little better at night.

November eHow Earnings Update

I was excited to finally break the $100 ceiling on eHow this month. My eHow income increased almost 33% to $101.26.

I added 15 ehow articles for a total of 142.

My total earned at eHow to date is $320.62.

It's been a rocky week at eHow with all the site changes coming right before the Thanksgiving holiday. It seems to be settling down, however, and the bugs are getting ironed out.