Pages

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

eHow Articles New Approval Process


Articles submitted on eHow.com by member-writers now go through a process in which they are evaluated and subsequently approved and published, or rejected, by the system. It's unclear whether the process is currently moderated by actual content editors, however.

I have published four new eHow articles since the new system was activated on my account, and it works very smoothly at this point. After clicking the "publish" button, you'll see a "thank you" screen indicating that your article has been accepted into the system and will be evaluate shortly, usually within ten minutes. In the meantime, the article status under "My Articles" will appear as Pending.

All of my articles were live on the site within 10-20 minutes of clicking publish. This is excellent, because as content writers know, some niches are hot for a limited time and getting your content online quickly is important. If the approval lag time was days or even hours, it would potentially discourage writers used to instant publication.
New to eHow? Learn how to get eHow earnings from your content!
My opinion of the new process is that, if it eliminates post-publishing article deletion, it is a huge improvement and will make a positive difference on eHow both by preventing inferior content and spammy articles as well as ensuring that articles published on the site stay published and are not deleted months or even years after they were submitted.

So who or what decides whether an article passes muster? At this point, it's not clear and there's been no official or unofficial word from eHow. If live humans are behind it, the article moderators are not necessarily eHow employees sitting in their offices in CA; most likely, they are freelancers who have been chosen for the job much like those who determined which articles would be deleted in the eHow Article Sweeps.

Perhaps there is a computer algorithm that checks the content for plagiarism, advertising/spam, and flags potential violators for a real review.

To increase your odds of success, be sure your submitted work meets eHow submission guidelines and is quality, relevant, well-written information in true how-to format. Provide original material that will help the reader. Don't just produce fluff content with keywords chosen to earn money -- eHow is not going to accept it.

UPDATE: This is from Julie, one of the eHow community managers:

Hi,

The New Article Review does not exempt an article for review during future Article Sweeps. Currently when your article is submitted for publication and "pending" the following is evaluated:

1. Is the article a duplicate title? Does the title already exist in the system?
2. Plagiarism check

In the future we hope to do a more robust review of the article but currently we only do a basic processing of the article when it is first submitted. Therefore, the article will then be checked for compliance with Publishing Guidelines and other site rules by our editors during the Article Sweeps.

Hope this clears up any questions or confusion.

Thanks!

Julie


Have you noticed the new approval system for your eHow articles? What's you opinion?

(Photo from eHow.com's thank you page.)

6 comments:

deversole said...

I love it...I have posted a number of articles since the new system. This should help keep the spam etc from the site and only improve the place for those willing to write...

Anonymous said...

I only hope this works for the better.

Moon Loh said...

Normally I just submit articles to Hubpages or EzineArticles. I don't actually know that can submit to eHow and earn from there. This is a great new source of income I believe. :)

Moon Loh
MompreneurAsia.com

eHow Insider said...

I think the article sweeps can definitely be helpful, especially if you have a sense of which articles have been deleted!

Marty said...

It used to take a few minutes for this approval system. Now it's taking about 12 hours--even if it's just a tiny edit. But still, if it increases our chances of not getting "swept" later, this is good.

Beth said...

My articles have been taking hours to go live. :(