eHow Experience: Day 5 - The Day of Reckoning

I'm beginning the day with an impressive 65 eHow articles, which might not sound all that impressive until you remember that I've only been on the site for less than a week - four days in fact.

That's 65 articles in 4 days (26 are from yesterday alone) for an average of 16.25 eHow articles per day.

If you're baffled at how I've been able to publish articles at this rate read the posts from Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 (click on the days to access the posts).

In addition to 65 articles I have 748 views and $1.04 in earning. I've broken the $1 barrier after only four days (is that good?). I'm now officially into paper money.

My Day 4 strategy for putting up 26 articles included publishing 23 articles about how to find the best burger in Chicago, How to find the best burger in Dallas, How to find the best burger in Miami, etc.

The last couple of days I've gradually pushed the envelope with these types of repetitive articles targeted to different cities and so far I haven't heard anything from the eHow team so I'm assuming for the moment at least that everything's cool.

Today I'm going to throw caution to the wind and expand my postings to: how to find the best pizza, how to find the best tacos, how to find the best BBQ, etc. and then publish each of those categories for 25 different cities. I know it will create some really boring articles but if there's a chance that this works then I can't afford not to try it.

Consider the envelope pushed.

(Below the line is how the day ended.)

___________________________________________________________

After publishing 70 articles in one afternoon (possibly a single day eHow all-time record) I ran into a little problem ... I noticed that my eHow "articles written" number that had been around 140 went down to 32 (not good).

In the span of about 30 seconds I went from confusion, to disbelief, to frustration, to anger, to concern, and finally to fear as I realized what had just happened. The jig was up.

All of my duplicate articles were being deleted and not just the ones that I had posted today but also the ones from the day before and the day before that and so on.

Now my huge concern was being forever banished from eHow.com - not a minor thing in my world.

Only a week earlier I'd never heard of eHow and now it consumes my life from the time I wake up until the time I fall asleep.

Even when I'm not typing on my computer I'm thinking of new eHow article ideas. I fall asleep at night wondering how many cents my account will tick up before I check it first thing the next morning.

It was then that I noticed a new message in my inbox and it was from the eHow team.

I received the following message (verbatim) from eHow:
____________________________________________________________

Hi,

You're receiving this notification because some of your articles have been removed due to violations made against the eHow.com's publishing rules and guidelines. We have recently seen an influx of users writing articles with different titles, but with the same body of content (i.e. How to Do our Taxes in California, How to Do Your Taxes in Texas, How to Do Your Taxes in Washington, etc.). On eHow.com, we consider this as an act of saturation by way of SPAMMING. In order to maintain the integrity of the site and ensure member created articles are providing quality and resourceful information, we must refrain writers from conducting in such activity on the site. As a writer on eHow.com, we value your contributions, and we are sending this warning as a way to educate you on what is acceptable as an article contribution. If we continue to see the aforementioned type of articles being submitted, we will close your account down without further notice. Thank you for your understanding.

For more information on eHow Submission Guidelines, visit our FAQ.

Thanks,

Rich
____________________________________________________________


Ouch.


It's strangely intimidating getting a message like that.

Clearly there's a reciprocal relationship between an eHow writer and the eHow website but it's frightening to remember that they have all the control in this relationship. They can completely cut you out at any moment at their sole discretion. There's no innocent until proven guilty or chance to have your day in court to clear your name - if they don't like you you're gone.

I'm not sure if it would have been possible to slyly get by under the eHow radar with a few repetitive articles but it's definitely not something I'm going to risk trying. I've already used up my get out of jail free card and the last thing I want to do is to get exiled.

If you take nothing else from this website do not make the same mistake I just did. (1) Getting kicked off of the website would not be good and (2) you waste a tremendous amount of time. I only wasted a couple of days but it was miserably boring time spent monotonously cutting and pasting. It's still very frustrating for me to think about all of the prospective money making articles that I could have been churning out during that time.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there are going to be any shortcuts here, but that's okay.

Part of me is glad that I'm dealing with a credible website and company in eHow. One that has the foresight to realize that if everyone starts posting a hundred worthless articles every day it wouldn't be long until the entire site is a complete mess.

One strange thing is that whoever deleted my articles (I don't know if it was a computer program or a person) didn't adjust my eHow points. I'm still showing the amount of points I'd have if I had 140 articles. I guess the points really don't matter.

It's sort of cool having way too many points. If anyone takes the time to notice it on my profile they might think that my points to articles ratio is so high because I've somehow published such ridiculously high quality articles that I've been given mysterious eHow bonus points.

Today has felt like being on an emotional swing set. It had been a while since I'd experienced the anxious high from feeling like I was getting away with something and then the terrifying stomach dropping feeling when I realized that I'd been caught.

It's been a long day and this has been a long post. Thanks for making it to the end and stay tuned to see what happens next.

Important Note: Even if you don't have any reason to think that any of your eHow articles may be pulled it's always a good idea to back them up. In fact take the time to back up everything on your computer.

Some people like to first write their articles in Word or Notepad and then paste them into their eHow account. Other people like myself prefer to write the articles on eHow.com and then copy and paste the info into a word processing application (Word, Notepad, etc.) so that we can then save the info on our computers.