Thank you for coming back! If you haven't yet, please subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up-to-date.

When I first started writing for eHow, I didn’t think I was going to get very far. It’s not like I don’t know enough, it was really the matter of turning what I know it a multi-step article. I really struggled with it at first. In my first month I managed to do 16 articles, in the second month, I only came up with 6.

One day while I was sitting at the neurologist’s office waiting for Eric to get his MRI’s done, I came up with an idea. I wrote down every letter in the alphabet in my notebook. I decided I’d try to come up with something for each letter. So I started with “How to A” and got “How to Achieve Your Goals”. I just ran down the list after that. I had to skip some letters and come back to them later, but amazingly enough, it worked! I had a whole list of how-to ideas. After that, ideas came more easily.

Right now I have 114 articles up, 9 more written, and 38 ideas in my book waiting to be written. I’m hoping that I will be able to find the inspiration to write even more. I want this to become a good income line, so I know I need to write a lot of good quality articles to make that happen.

Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff I think of just won’t fit into a how-to with multiple steps. I’ve had to try to come up with things that I can break into steps, or at least a numbered list of tips. I’ve actually converted quite a few of my recipes into eHow format. Recipes make great how-to articles.

I was a bit upset that eHow wouldn’t let me have HTML in my articles. Some time back, Eric and I were going to be teaching a computer course at the local rec center, before they lost their funding. I had written out a basic HTML course for the classes. When I found the notes, I thought it would make a fantastic series of how-to articles. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t allow code in the articles, so I wasted my time writing them. I had 5 written, and more in my head, when I tried to post one and found that it wasn’t allowed.

Right now I’m trying to write up all the ideas that I’ve come up with. I suppose I could stop trying to come up with new things until I’m finished with all the existing ideas, but I’m trying to avoid having a bunch of downtime where there’s nothing going up on the site. With any luck, I can keep a stream of articles flowing onto the site for many months to come, and with them, bring myself a valuable and increasing income stream.

And to think, I wanted to write BOOKS for a living!

Related posts:

1. Attention all Bloggers… Please read
2. My Progress with eHow
3. Need ideas for how-to articles
4. Don’t Get Discouraged about Writing for Associated Content
5. More writing and blogging

Tags: computer course, ehow, html course, letter, matter, neurologist, rec center, site, step article, stream, tricky business