eHow Experience: Day 16 - A Little Help From My Friends

Another eHow milestone. I've now passed the 100 article mark (again) (see Day 5 post).

With 101 quality eHow articles to my name and Google AdSense set up on my website I think it's finally time to proactively add some eHow friends to immediately increase my exposure.

You might recall that on the Day 8 post I discussed the advantages of waiting to add more eHow friends until I had more substance on my eHow site and on this website (eHow Experience). Well, eight days later that time has finally come.

As I discussed in the Day 8 post:

"Adding a new friend on eHow is sort of the acceptable version of saying, 'hey look at my articles if you want' and with a friend request you can do this without sending annoying spam. It's an opportunity that you only get once with each eHow friend, so I want to make the most of it. Like they say - you only get one chance to make a first impression."

Before sending out eHow friend requests I want to strategically position the best five articles in my Featured Articles section on my eHow homepage.

Of course the five articles in my eHow Featured Articles section are always strategically placed. However, before sending out friend requests I'm going to give special consideration to article titles that are most appealing to eHow members. Broadly this includes articles about how to make money online, how to make money from home, how to get more people to read eHow articles, etc.

The next step in preparation for sending out a lot of eHow friend requests requires a bit more foresight.

I might be over analyzing this but I've made sure that my ten most recently published articles are also particularly appealing to eHow members (same criteria as the with the five Featured Articles).

My rationale is that if a new friend looks beyond my Featured Articles to my entire eHow article collection the articles will show up chronologically, so again I want this first page (ten results) to be especially appealing to eHow members.

As far as my website goes (eHow Experience) I've decided to use my Day 5 post as an opening page and to entice readers with the phrase - "How I published 70 eHow articles in one day and why you shouldn't." Hopefully the Day 5 post will allow people to learn from my mistakes and help reduce headaches for the eHow team as they'll likely have to deal with fewer instances of this once I get the word out.

As a small side note I also think the weekend is the best time to send out these friend requests because people will generally have more time to review articles and be in a better mood. (Did I mention I might be over analyzing this?)

Now that I finally have the content and look that I think will optimize my first impressions I'm going spend some time sending out a LOT (2,000+) of friend requests. I've been preparing for this the last couple of weeks and I'm very optimistic that the exposure will give me a huge boost.

Some people are understandably concerned as to if this practice defiles the spirit of adding eHow friends. Before passing judgment I suggest reading the Day 17 post in which I discuss the results of this friend request experiment and some of the surprising ancillary benefits.

For information on how to request thousands of new eHow friends in one day see the Day 18 post.