eHow Experience: Day 30 - Only the Beginning

Very interesting eHow developments today on what has always been planned to be the final day of this journal (turns out it won't be). Before I get into the unsettling details I'll let you know where my eHow numbers stand on this, the planned final morning of my thirty day quest:

• 128 articles
• $19.04 in earnings
• 12,057 views

I fell short of my Day 1 eHow goals of 150 articles and $20 in earnings, but I'm confident that if I wouldn't have run into the setbacks that I encountered on Day 5 I could have surpassed both my goals.

Based on my earnings it looks like if I would have published 150 eHow articles I would have clearly surpassed the $20 mark.

It was always my intention that on the 30th day I would reflect on what I learned along the way, but I already did a fair amount of that in the Day 27 post and I'm actually too befuddled by this afternoon's events to clearly reflect on the last thirty days on eHow.
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The morning started out like any other and I spent my time meticulously updating the last quarter of my eHow articles with affiliate links (see Day 29 post).

One interesting note is that thanks to Google AdWords (first discussed in the Day 15 post) I've been able to position one of my articles as the #3 result when you Google the main term (it's an insurance related eHow article).

It's really encouraging to see that the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) research that I've been doing has carried over to eHow and is paying off. It's exciting to see that I'm one step closer to my goal of generating natural targeted traffic to my eHow articles instead of relying solely on promoting my articles within the eHow community.

As expected the brand new affiliate links didn't make me an overnight millionaire, in fact overnight they didn't make me a cent. That's okay though. As I discussed in the Day 27 post this is a process that is requiring a lot of upfront time in the hopes of laying the foundation for future passive income.

Unfortunately, it's exactly this optimistic attitude that made what happened next so incredibly frustrating ...
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It's now after lunch and having completed my affiliate updates (see Day 29 post) I'm ready to finally start publishing eHow articles again. I settled in behind my laptop and logged in to eHow - or at least I tried to. Much to my chagrin I found the following message upon attempting to log in:

"Your account has been disabled. If you think eHow made a mistake by disabling youraccount (sic) please email us at member_service.com"

To say seeing this message was a reason for concern would be an understatement.

Being the laid back person that I am I calmed myself down and took comfort in the fact that I hadn't done anything wrong. Confident that this must just be a misunderstanding I became optimistic that I'd be back up and running on eHow in no time. I was wrong.

Encouraged by the fact that the message implies that eHow does make mistakes with this sort of thing it was my hope that I could simply email the address I was given and quickly receive confirmation that this was in fact a "mistake" on eHow's part. I was wrong again.

After spending time carefully crafting a professional email to the eHow team I sent my message to member_service.com as I'd been instructed to do. The only problem was that this email address doesn't work. Doesn't work at all.

I rechecked the email address that eHow gave me to make sure I copied and pasted it correctly and then tried again, and again, and again. I repeatedly received the following response from Mail Delivery Subsystem:


This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notifcation

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

member_service@ehow.com


I was now officially very worried.

Posting an email address that doesn't work could be an honest mistake on the part of eHow but in my current state of mind it certainly seemed like eHow didn't want to have to deal with people questioning their decisions - even if they made (as they put it) a "mistake."

With no sign of a phone number anywhere on the eHow website I sent a message through the "Contact Us" email format on the website. I also sent an email to support@ehow.com, which is the email address that sends messages about when someone posts a note on your eHow profile or requests to be your eHow friend.

After not receiving a response in the first couple of hours I began to speculate on what could have happened. Here's my best theory:
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An automated computer program that eHow runs detected that in a very short period of time I had input very similar text in dozens of articles (references to affiliate links).

The same computer program decided that this must mean that I was copying, pasting, and publishing the exact same eHow article dozens of times when in reality I had just been updating my affiliate links. I imagine that the computer program detected this "issue" and because I'd been warned about a misunderstanding regarding saturation (see Day 5 post) my account was automatically disabled.

The confusion was likely because as I've stated before (see Day 14 and Day 7 posts) I've at times focused on publishing several eHow articles about the same specific topic: BlackBerry phones, golf, etc. Doing this not only allowed me to consolidate my research but also allowed me to link these similar articles together (Day 7 post).

As a reminder I'm talking about different topics within the same subject, e.g. How to Download Ringtones to a BlackBerry, How to Charge Your BlackBerry When You're Camping, How to Fix Your BlackBerry if it's Dropped in Water, etc.

Here's an example illustrating my guess as to why this happened:

While updating my affiliate links I found a great book on golf that I've actually read and recommended to friends before. I then incorporated this same recommendation into the resources section of each applicable article - which in many cases meant quickly inputting the same text into numerous articles.
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This misunderstanding was all explained in a professional friendly tone in the message that I was now trying desperately to get in front of the decision makers at eHow.

Unfortunately the email address I was been provided (member_service@ehow.com) doesn't work and I'm beginning to think that since it's now the middle of the weekend (today is Saturday) I probably won't get a response back from the other eHow email addresses I tried until Monday morning at the soonest.

It quickly became apparent that the new best case scenario would be that this entire weekend, which I'd thought would be a productive one, would be an entire waste because I can't access my eHow account.

During my search for an effective way to report my issue I came across the ehHow Terms of Use where I was able to find a link to the eHow Privacy Policy. This was a very good find because it contains an email address for canceling your eHow account which is interestingly:

• member.service@ehow.com

Strikingly similiar to:

• member_service@ehow.com

The main difference being that the new email address that I found actually works.

Now armed with a functioning email address I was finally able to tell my side of the story (we'll see if anyone listens) . I also decided to politely suggest to eHow that the email address in the disabled account message be corrected to avoid future confusion (it hasn't).

Feeling confident that I've done everything in my power to correct this misunderstanding all I can do now is wait until Monday in anticipation of a favorable response from the eHow team.

[As soon as I complete the appeal process I'll write updates on how that experience went, the outcome, and most importantly what I learned - become a Follower of this website (column to the right) to get the latest updates.]