Earn More Money by Organizing Your eHow Workflow

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Here is a guest post from Sarah at Lifestyles of the Organized. Sarah hosts one of my favorite blogs, which isn’t specifically about money, but about being organized. I definitely recommend checking out her website and her valuable content.

If you write for eHow, then you know how easy it can be to publish an article and begin earning passive income.  I joined eHow back in November 2008 after hearing about it from Pat and have since published just about 100 articles.  My earnings are steadily increasing each month, which is fantastic, thanks in part to great advice I read right here at the Smart Passive Income Blog.

But one thing I’ve noticed is that there’s quite a lot more to keep track of as I continue to add new articles to my collection.  As an organizing junkie, I couldn’t help but see a need for a little organization regarding my approach to writing for eHow.

Why should I bother spending precious time to organize my approach to eHow when I could just be spending that time writing more articles?  Well, I believe that if I get a few aspects of my eHow workflow organized, I can actually increase my potential for earning more income.  Spend a little time up front and reap the benefits later on.  Hey, that sounds familiar…

I’ve been operating my new and improved eHow workflow for some time now and I love it.  Today I’d like to share six ways you can begin to organize your own eHow workflow and hopefully maximize your potential for earning passive income!

1. Organize Your Goals

Before undertaking any task, small or large, it is always good to set clear goals.  People have discussed eHow goals a little here in the past so I’m not going to go too much more into detail except to say that the more defined your goals are, the better chance you have for reaching those goals.  Write them down.  Be realistic.  Be specific.  Be diligent.  And be organized.

How I’m organizing my goals: At the beginning of 2009, I made the resolution to write at least one article a day, leaving me with 365 articles at the end of the year.  I decided up front that I would not make myself actually write ONE ARTICLE EACH DAY, because frankly that is not always practical.  I just make sure that I am caught up to date and I write several articles at a time in chunks.  I currently am at 60 articles for 2009 and at the time of writing this post, it was February 23.  31+23=54, so I’m a little ahead of schedule.

2. Organize Your Ideas

As soon as I read Pat’s suggestion to keep a notebook to keep track of article ideas, I knew I had to do it.  You can’t possibly remember every idea that might pop into your head throughout the day so it is best to just write it all down.  But that’s only part of what you could be doing with your notebook.  To further organize those ideas, you could divide them up into subject categories or even into categories of subjects you are very knowledgeable about versus subjects you might have to do a little more research about.

How I’m organizing my ideas: As I said above, I keep a special eHow notebook.  In my notebook I have three sections: (1) “anything goes” article ideas, (2) special keywords I’ve actually already researched, and (3) rough article outlines.

3. Organize Your Tools

If you’ve spent any time at all learning about how to maximize your eHow earnings, then you ultimately understand the importance of SEO and keywords.  I’m still getting the hang of it all, but I’ve seen a huge difference already in earnings of articles I’ve carefully researched and chosen keywords for, and articles where I just wrote anything.  Fortunately there are a lot of tools out there for finding good keywords.  However, all these tools can also be a little overwhelming when you are trying to decide which ones to actually use.  Enter organization.  Understanding all the tools available to you and getting them organized will help clear up some of the confusion and also aid in making your keyword researching workflow go much more smoothly.

How I’m organizing my tools: I have 3 main tools that I use to research keywords: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Worktracker Keywords, and Google’s auto complete function in their search engine.  I also recently have been toying with Anthony Delgado’s free Increased Web Site Traffic Keyword Ranking Tool.  How do I organize all these tools?  I simply keep them bookmarked in a folder I label eHow SEO.  When it comes time to do some keyword research, I open the entire folder in tabs so I am ready to go.

4. Organize Your Time

Even though I’ve only been on eHow for a few short months, I’ve quickly realized that it is very easy to spend time doing other eHow-related tasks besides writings articles.  For example, an active eHow member can spend a lot of time reading and posting to the helpful eHow forums.  Members also can devote a significant amount of time to reading, commenting on, and rating other member’s articles.  Keyword research, article composition, and article promotion are all very important components to writing articles that earn, but each component also takes time.  The point is, since there are so many things you could be doing on eHow, you have to not only prioritize your time, but also schedule your time.

How I’m organizing my time: Each week I set aside usually one day that I devote to eHow.  I like to write several articles in one sitting because the streamlined process is more efficient.  I decide exactly how many articles I will write and then at the end I take some time to RCR other member’s articles after I’ve published my own.  I visit the forums usually every day just to keep up to date with the latest news, but I try to only spend a couple of minutes there.  Overall, anything I do on eHow I try to schedule first so that I know I am using my time wisely.

5. Organize Your Articles

eHow operates with a system where the writers retain copyright for all their articles.  So if you retain copyright, then you should make sure you’ve got all your articles organized and stored offline in addition to online.  You never know when eHow may randomly pull one of your articles or if eHow will just one day up and disappear (hopefully not!).  These are your articles and you should make sure you’ve got them stored properly.  Furthermore, organizing your articles offline by date, or even by subject, will really help you in the long run when you need to access or edit an article.

How I’m organizing my articles: I keep a single folder on my hard drive where I save all my eHow articles.  The article files are Word Documents and are labeled with a system that keeps the articles in order from oldest to newest (for example, “2009-02-22 How to build a house.doc”).  I also keep one special file that serves as my article template.  I include all the regular eHow headings and completely write the articles offline first.  I’ve heard too many horror stories of people who are writing an article using the publish tool, something goes wrong, and all their data is lost.  That and the fact that these articles belong to me are reason enough to keep them stored and organized offline.

6. Organize Your Earnings

eHow provides earnings data for its writers in a number of ways, but these ways are not always ideal.  In order to really keep track of your earnings, it is good to keep a database elsewhere where you can perform beneficial analyses and keep better track of trends.  The better understanding you have of earning trends for your individual articles, the better you will be able to earn more in the future by writings articles that have more earning potential.

How I’m organizing my earnings: If I were a programmer, I would have a totally cool database of article earnings to analyze and create graphs for.  But I’m not.  However that doesn’t mean I can’t organize my earnings data at all.  Currently I track my earning trends in the form of an excel spreadsheet.  I record anything I can (i.e. anything eHow tells us) so I’m able to keep track of changes, trends, and the big picture.

Reader Reflection

What do you do to organize your eHow workflow?  Have you noticed benefits?

For more organizational tips, please feel free read more from Sarah at Lifestyles of the Organized.

Tagged as: organization

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