Bukisa Changes Minimum Payout Level

If you're using Bukisa to promote your eHow articles (or considering it), you might be interested to learn that they have added two new minimum payout levels of $10 and $25.

Prior to now, you had to earn $50 to receive a payout, which was frustrating for a lot of people. Now you have a choice of six payout levels: $10, $25, $50, $100, $200, and $500. When I logged in today, my minmum payout had defaulted to $10, which was great.

If you've not heard ot Bukisa, it's another online writing site that pays you for content. You can also earn on the content of your referrals, which is great for creating a passive income stream.

Bukisa is new, and the earnings don't yet compare to eHow, but it's a great way to build links to your content and earn a little something at the same time. And now that the minimum payout has been reduced to $10, you won't have to wait so long to see a payment.

Using the eHow Widget

I'm not going to lie. I'm in love with the eHow widget. It's such a professional way for us to feature up to five of our eHow articles. In fact, someone on the eHow forums said she started a blog just so she could use the widget. How cool is that?

So which five articles should a writer feature? In my opinion, you should go one of two directions:

1. Feature articles that have been performing well for you. Play to your strengths. Don't try to prop up articles that aren't doing well; help the high performers do even better!

2. Feature new articles. Help your new articles get views (and hopefully earnings) by getting them seen in the widget.

This is also a good time to mention that when at all possible, use a photo with your article. That widget looks so much better (and clickable) with those photos featured along with the articles.

Quick eHow Tip: Related Articles

You should always attempt to include your own relevant articles in the related articles section of the eHow template. The idea is that when someone clicks away from your article, you want them to click on something that benefits YOU, whether that is an ad, an affiliate link, or another of your articles.

I've found, however, that when searching for my articles using the search function in the eHow article template, I can't always find them. Even when I put the title in word for word.

One trick I've found is to use different combinations of words in my title until I hit on my own. I may have to remove the 'How to' part of the title. If that doesn't work I'll remove other words and then add some back if necessary. Sometimes I can find it when entering just one or two words from the title.

The good news is that once I've played around with this enough, I can usually hit on the article I'm looking for in the search results and add it to 'related articles'. Hopefully that little bit of persistence pays off with additional article views.

eHow Article Widget is Live!

See that cool eHow list of five of my articles below and in the sidebar of this blog? That's the new eHow widget and any eHow author can get on to put on their blog or other sites.

The eHow artaicle widget features the five featured articles that each eHow author can choose from their list of articles.

To get yours go to your eHow profile and look on the left sidebar. There you'll see 'Custom Widget' and you can grab yours and start promoting your eHow articles today.


How to Videos & Articles: eHow.com

Two Bits of Good News: eHow Earnings Updates and eHow Ebook on Sale

After a rocky period at eHow regarding earnings updates, everything finally seems to be back on track. Earnings are updating daily and usually around the same time.

Regular earnings updates make a huge difference to eHow writers. It's nice to get that daily feedback, no matter how small the update. And if you're tweaking articles or using SEO techniques, it's important to know if your methods are working.

Another bit of good news: Janet Ford's ebook How to Write for eHow: The Ultimate Guide to Writing on eHow is currently on sale for $15. That's a huge savings over the regular price of $27. I don't know how long the offer is good for. If I am able to find out, I'll let you know here.

I've reviewed Janet's ebook and also compared it to the three other ebooks currently being offered by eHow writers.

eHow Ebook Authors Sweeten their Deals

Two of the eHow ebook authors have recently added value to their ebook offerings:

Annalise Kaylor, who has written Writing Online: Making Money and Residual Income with Online Content has updated her ebook package to include two bonus books: 101 Awesome Headline Copywriting Tips and How To Succeed As An Article Writer. The second book is 330 pages long. Quite a bonus!

The new discount code is "Package" and it gives buyers all three books for $17.00.

Writergig, author of How to Earn Passive Income at eHow.com: Residual Income for Web Content Writers, has also updated her ebook to include the following:

• Expanded information on search engine optimization and keywords
• Detailed information on adding affiliate links to articles
• A specific section of tips on writing high earning articles
• Updated information on promoting eHow articles with backlinks

This ebook has been expanded from 22 to 34 pages and sells for $25.

Results of The Passive Income Experiment I Didn't Know I Was Conducting

As I wrote about earlier, I only added three articles in January to my eHow library. That wasn't my intention, but life got in the way.

As it turned out, only one of those articles earned anything: 35 cents. Which means that almost all of my earnings for January were passive income. Income that I earned for work I did prior.

So what was the result? My January earnings were $143.13, an almost 10% increase over December's earnings.

Regular eHow-ers know that things have been a little rocky over there lately. Bugs in the system make writing frustrating, and lately those bugs have extended to views and earnings. It's easy to get discouraged.

And still, with all the rockiness and life getting in the way of my article writing, I continued to earn and, in fact, had my highest month yet.