Like everyone else, I want each and every one of my eHow articles to earn money for me. The duds can really bring down an otherwise decent portfolios of articles.

My friend Norm, over at The Cheap Bastid, really works hard on his articles, adjusting and tweaking, so that that he squeezes out every penny that an article should produce. I tend to have the whole write-and-forget method. To be honest, if you want to succeed on eHow, you need to be more like Norm.

As such, I have started messing around with my non-producers. I am going to treat these articles like under performing employees. As my tendency is to create experiments out of everything (hence the name Experimental Blogging), I am going to start a new one. Here is the criteria for articles to receive a performance review and, hopefully, an earnings modification:

  1. Article must be more than 2 months old
  2. Article must have produced $0.00 in earnings
  3. Article must have less than 500 views

As I do not want to take away too much time from writing new articles, I will limit these rewrites to 2 per week (hopefully I will run out of non-producers pretty quickly).

So here are the stats for the first batch of eHow re-writes:

Article #1 – written at the end of October 2008 – 211 views and $0.00 in earnings
Article #2 – written at the beginning of December 2008 – 139 views and $0.00 in earnings

For each of these articles, I added a fresh new title using the same keywords. I added a few pictures (with the image names also being keywords – thanks again Norm). I removed anything confusing or unnecessary from the articles to make them more streamlined. Additionally, I added a few affiliate links in the resource section (which I should have done from the beginning but didn’t).

Once I hit publish, I viewed the articles to see what ads appeared. If I did not like what showed up, I went back and tweaked them some more until I got the desired results.

I will add a separate page to track the results of this experiment. You can find it HERE!

What do you guys think? Have you tried doing this in the past? Did you have any success?