eHow Experience: Day 24 - Two Pieces of Advice

In my Day 14 post I said that I was going to start experimenting with some different subject types on eHow (e.g. recipes, technology, making money online, health, etc.) and that I would let you know which ones (if any) stood out in terms of eHow performance (earnings/views).

It's now ten days later and I'm prepared to give the much anticipated eHow update.

I'll end the suspense right now by saying that eHow articles about making money online like my one about CafePress (see Day 20 post) did by far and away the best for me.

However, because up until this point my audience has primarily been eHow members (see expanded explanation in Day 23 post) it's not surprising that articles with titles about making money online were popular amongst people spending hours on eHow trying to make money online.

The bad news is that none of my other article subjects are getting much traction.

I wrote ehow articles about golf (see Day 7 post) in the hopes that because golf is an expensive sport it would translate into readers who were interested in spending money through golf advertisements. I also secretly hoped that because golf enthusiasts tend to be an older crowd that I'd attract readers who were less internet savvy and as a result less accustomed to automatically mentally blocking out advertisements.

I wrote about recipes and focused on affordable options. My hope was that given the state of our economy there would be an increasingly large audience on eHow looking for affordable options for eating at home.

I wrote about technology (mentioned in the Day 14 post) because I hoped that because technology is always changing there wouldn't necessarily be a backlog of similar articles on eHow. I'm by no means a technology whiz but because I've had a BlackBerry for the last three years I know some tricks on it and focused on writing about those.

I wrote about health issues. I'm not a doctor but Web MD and other similar online resources have tremendous amounts of useful information to help with research if this is something that you choose to write about (you might even learn something along the way). I thought this subject might do well because it's been my experience that health concerns are the types of questions that people first turn to the internet for help. I decided to write about health issues that although very serious can be a bit embarrassing to discuss. Because the internet provides an anonymous way to find out information about subjects that people might otherwise feel uncomfortable talking about I chose to write eHow articles about subjects like prostate issues.

Each of these subjects contained eHow articles that had at least some success, but I haven't yet stumbled upon the Holy Grail of subjects that will instantly boost my eHow earnings, and maybe there isn't one. For now though, my best advice is to (1) write articles about making money online and (2) spend time learning about Google AdWords (see Day 15 post) to automatically drive traffic to your eHow articles.