eHow Experience: Day 12 - Exceeding Expectations

After publishing 21 eHow articles yesterday and increasing my total articles by 49% (from 43 articles to 64 articles) I was very anxious to see if my new articles would have an immediate impact on my bottom line.

I've gotten my hopes up with eHow before only to be woefully disappointed when I logged in to see new earnings of only a few cents after putting in a full day of publishing new articles.

Fortunately, for the first time ever my eHow expectations were actually exceeded.

eHow summary of my changes from Day 11 to Day 12:

• Articles increased 49% (from 43 to 64)
• Total money earned increased 67% (from $2.85 to $4.77)
• Views increased 43% (from 1,080 to 1,549)

Even though I've earned a total of less than $5 this sort of measurable correlation between effort (articles published) and results (dollars and views) is very motivating. This is what makes eHow addicting.

Interestingly, after taking a closer look at my numbers what I thought was a clear correlation may in fact be much more random than I initially thought.

Specifically I'm referring to the fact that just one of my eHow articles (How To Make Theater Popcorn) received 218 views in its first day and alone earned 96 cents. If it weren't for this one article my eHow statistics wouldn't look nearly as encouraging.

The How To Make Theater Popcorn article was actually one of three articles that I wrote in response to the eHow "user requested" articles section. I don't know if that had anything to do with this article's (literal) overnight success.

Perhaps my article was put somewhere on the eHow homepage (my goal from Day 6) or maybe I wrote a breakthrough article that will be a cash cow into perpetuity. I guess I'll have to wait and see. Forgive me if I temper my expectations.

Another eHow day is in the books and I'm finishing the with a total of 81 articles.

Seeing such remarkable results today motivated me to have another huge day and publish 17 more articles. I was able to publish so many eHow articles in one day because I already had the ideas down on paper and outlined (described in the Day 11 post).

I'm optimistic that tomorrow will be another big earnings day as my 21 articles from yesterday start to gain momentum and and my 17 articles from today get their initial exposure.
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UPDATE: Since writing this post I received an interesting theory from an eHow friend who had a similar experience with a user requested article being an overnight success.

His theory (that I buy into) is that these user requested articles are especially lucrative because they have to get in front of an eHow editor for approval (to verify that you should receive the bonus points for writing a requested article).

Now that the eHow editor has already seen the article he's likely to put it on the homepage ... if he likes it.

As an editor his choices are to simply put the article that he's already read and liked on the homepage or to scan thousands of articles that he hasn't read yet. I think I know what I'd do if I were an eHow editor.