eHow Experience: Day 23 - A Must Read

After taking a close look at which of my eHow articles are getting the most views and which are making the most money per view I've come to a couple of conclusions.
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eHow Articles Getting the Most Views:

These articles are primarily about making money online - like my CafePress article about making residual money online by designing t-shirts (described in the Day 20 post).

Working from home is a similar theme that gets a lot of positive attention.

I think that the reason these eHow articles are getting the most attention is because up until a few days ago when I started focusing on using Google AdWords (see Day 15 post) whether I realized it or not I was primarily writing for the benefit of the eHow community.

Without any kind of knowledge about search engine optimization (SEO) my primary audience for getting views had been the eHow community and more specifically my eHow friends (see Day 16 post).

This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is always important to realize who your audience is and in this case it was a collection of people spending hours on eHow in an effort to make money online. As a result it's no surprise that article headlines relating to making money online grabbed their attention (like the CafePress article mentioned above).

My ultimate goal is to use Google AdWords and other search engine optimization techniques to drive search engine traffic to my eHow articles so that I don't have to actively promote my articles.

(This next section is extremely important)
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Articles Making the Most Money Per View:

I'm honing in on eHow articles making the most money per view instead of just articles making the most money because I think the articles making the most money per view present an untapped resource.

What I'm saying is that these articles have tremendous potential and once they're identified the challenge will be to increase their views (get them in front of more people). How to promote eHow articles is another important topic altogether and maybe one that I'll address in a future post.
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The first thing that all of my high dollar/view articles have in common is that the advertisements around these eHow articles relate to the subject matter.

A poorly written (by eHow standards) article can result in Google Ads that don't even relate to the subject matter. This happens when the Google Gods aren't able to decipher key words and phrases to base their ads on. Unrelated ads translates to a diminished likelihood that an eHow reader will be interested in the advertisements.
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My second observation is much more of a revelation and one that will shape how all of my future eHow articles will be written. As I've familiarized myself with Google AdWords (see Day 15 post) I've learned an important acronym: CPC.

CPC is possibly the reason why an eHow article might have a lot of views but very little income.

eHow doesn't tell anyone how many ad clicks an article receives - only views and earnings are reported. It's entirely possible that an eHow article could have a lot of clicks (and views) but if the CPC is low the earnings will be low. Let me explain...

CPC stands for Cost-Per-Click and this is the amount of money that an advertiser pays for one click on an ad that brings one visitor to their website. This cost per click number usually ranges anywhere from $.05 per click to $30+ per click.

What's important to understand here is that not all ads give equal payouts. As an eHow writer you want your articles to attract ads with high payouts.

Generally speaking the subject matter that an eHow article focuses on will determine what types of ads are placed on the page.

CPC amounts go up (which is what you want as an eHow writer) because (1) there's a lot of competition amongst advertisers in a particular field, (2) the product being sold has a very high sales conversation rate once a visitor clicks through, and (3) the product being sold is very expensive so even if only a small percentage of clicks result in sales it's still worthwhile for the advertiser to pay handsomely for ad space.

If this is a little bit confusing remember that as a rule of thumb some general topics like "dogs" have CPC amounts in the $.50 - $1.25 range while terms like "credit report" have CPC amounts in the $6 - $14 range and a subject like "car insurance" has CPC amounts in the $9 - $30 range.

Remember that the higher the CPC amount of the ads on your eHow articles the more money you'll get per click (assuming of course that eHow doles out the money proportionately).

It's of course difficult to generalize actual CPC figures in this post because they're constantly evolving. Hopefully the examples above demonstrate the point.

Keep in mind that eHow keeps an undisclosed portion of the CPC fees for themselves for overhead and profit. Because the percentage is confidential we don't know if they keep 10%, 50%, or 99%.

Perhaps the best tip that I can give you for attracting high CPC advertisers is to think about the industries and products that primarily focus their marketing/advertising budgets online, have expensive products or services to sell, and are in competitive fields.

Additionally Google's Adword Keyword Tool should be extremely helpful once you learn how to use it effectively.

If you weren't already familiar with CPC this post could be the most important eHow information you ever read and I encourage you read it a second time if anything isn't clear.