Writing for eHow – The frustrations

It has been an extremely frustrating few weeks for writers on eHow. My writing has taken a nose dive because of the many glitches, delays and not to mention their new site “clean-up.” The original draw eHow had on me was that they offered a chance for everyone to write and their guidelines seemed lax, not to the point of allowing crap but to the point where one expected that there was a lot of flexibility for subject and writing levels. The second draw was earning residual income. Lately, earning residual income has come to be the only draw eHow has on most writers. It is sad because I could honestly say last month I LOVED eHow and all that it was about, even how it functioned. Now, I like eHow, I like earning my residual income but I have days where it is hard to want to even visit the site.

This site cleanup has consisted of eHow going in and deleting anywhere from 1 to hundreds of articles listed in writers accounts. These deletions are said to be a part of cleaning up their site. That is all fine except that we had no warning, were not told which articles were deleted, nor were we told why they were deleted. Some writers even had their entire accounts closed and lost everything: articles and earnings.

Some writer’s did receive a very generic deletion email that notified them that so many articles had already been removed from their pages, though they were not considerate enough to take the time to include which ones or why. They were thorough enough to say that no article that was deleted could be re-written. Their logic behind that was if the writer could not do it right the first time they probably couldn’t do it right this time. Now, I don’t know about you but if that does not put you off writing on eHow I don’t know what would.

I still stand by the fact that eHow is a great resource for writers wanting to earn a residual income through their articles, because it is. I personally lost 20 articles, some deserved deletion as there were a lot of missed errors but the reason for some that were taken was baffling and still has me and many other writers confused.

During this clean up process though it came to our attention that articles that were deleted that had decent traffic or were earning articles, though the articles were removed, the built up and promoted URL’s were not. These decent performing URLs were now being directed to editor articles (which eHow receives 100% of the earnings for) that were, way to often, shoddier than the article that was deleted. – This was a slap in the face to some writers and the forums lit up like a wildfire.

As a writer you expect a certain level of clarity on what is expected and unfortunately eHow is lacking in that department. Writers have fired back after this clean up and have demanded clear guidelines and actual examples of what eHow standards are for the writers.

Ehow has vowed to work on this issue and many of us have faith that they will follow through, though the timeliness of this fix is what we don’t have faith in. In the last few weeks, us writers have experienced site crashes, viruses when accessing the site, spur of the moment article deletions, days with no view or earning updates, some issues receive little to no communication (at least not usually timely communication), issues leaving comments, problems publishing, issues editing, we’ve lost our drafts and the list goes on. They have fixed some of these issues that have plagued their online writers but I fear the wave of frustration has just begun.

I have no intention of leaving eHow, though I find my frustrations with them lately to be high I do know that they have the potential to be one of the best sites online for a writer interested in earning residual income. They don’t cheat you like the sites that pay you based on page views – I say cheat because I have many times earned over 6 dollars on an article with less than 600 views and many sites that pay for page views offer you $1.50 for 1000 page views. I imagine you can see how that doesn’t pay off for the writer.

I still say if you are interested in earning a residual income online with your articles and writing then eHow is the place for you. Just sit tight and pray with me that they get their issues fixed soon and are soon back on the path where their writers are happy and the residual income far out-weighs the issues!

This Friday – I will be posting about a new site that I am writing on that looks like it may have some great potential. It isn’t where eHow is yet, pay is different, but with time and more content….you just never know. So, check back and find out what changes eHow has made and what this new site is all about!