eHow Experience: Day 1 - My First Full Day on Ehow.com

The first thing I noticed on day one of being on eHow was being bombarded with friend requests. While I was asleep 36 eHow members requested me to be their "friend" on eHow. I didn't know that eHow was a community that involved "friends" in the same way that Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn do. This was news to me.

I don't know if the number of eHow friends that I have has an impact on how much money I make, but I accepted all of the friend requests.

I didn't spend any time reviewing the profiles or articles of my new eHow friends but I probably will when I'm bored or have writer's block.

My "friends" started giving me positive comments and reviews on my eHow articles. I'm guessing this is an effort to get me to return the favor (which I don't mind doing). I'm not sure if the positive comments and reviews (like having five stars by an article) will help my financial bottom line, but I'm pretty sure it won't hurt.

I've also started receiving messages in my eHow inbox that are sort of like emails. These messages are almost entirely written to ask me to look at the eHow articles of the people who sent the messages. This spam is already pretty annoying.

I'm pleased with the number of views and comments that my eHow articles have after one night. I have seven articles that have been up for about twelve hours. I haven't made any money yet but I didn't expect this to be a get rich quick scheme. I would be perfectly happy with a get rich slow plan.

My top four eHow articles have 12, 11, 6, and 4 views so far.

I'm not sure how views correlate to money earned.

Below are some of my initial eHow questions. I'm guessing some will be answered in the next few days while others may never be.

• I can add pictures to the eHow articles. I don't know if there's a direct correlation between the number of pictures and how much money an article makes. The pictures can definitely be helpful and also make the articles look more appealing. Maybe that's the extent of the helpfulness of the pictures.
• How does the eHow point system work? Does it have any impact on how much money I make? I realize that I get points for publishing articles. Will I get more eHow points for including pictures, making comments on other postings, rating articles, adding friends?
• Is it a problem to publish articles on topics that have already been addressed in many other eHow articles?
• How am I going to keep coming up with ideas to write quality articles? I'm happy with my first ten eHow articles, but I'm already concerned that this is going to be harder than I thought.
• I'm wondering if I can write multiple versions of a similar post. For instance I just wrote an article about how to write a Valentine's Day card. Can I use the same format to post: how to write a birthday card, how to write a Mother's Day card, how to write a Father's Day card, etc. This could be a great way to quickly turn one idea into a lot of eHow articles.
• My friend requests have slowed down dramatically. I'm not sure if that's because it's now Friday night (and I'm in the Pacific Time Zone) so there are probably fewer people are on the eHow website.

At the end of 24 hours of being on eHow I have 21 articles and 2,670 points. Several of my articles are repeat type entries like the Valentine's Day card example I described above (how to write a Valentine's Day card, how to write a birthday card, how to write a Mother's Day Card, etc.). I don't know if eHow will allow me to keep up these relatively similar posts.

I'm setting a goal of 150 articles and $20 of earnings for my first month on eHow.

From what I've read in other forums these sound like very aggressive but attainable goals. I guess we'll see what happens.
__________________________________________________________

Final Note:

By gaining enough points I went from eHow Novice to eHow Expert to eHow Authority in 24 hours... I'm not sure what that says about being an "Authority."