What Makes a $1,000+ eHow Article?

At some point last month, another eHow article moved into the $1,000+ slot among my top earners. Now that I have four articles that have each earned over $1k, maybe I can shed some light on what it takes to make that much from one simple how-to article.

But first of all, can I just say, how cool is that?! When I first started writing eHow articles almost two and a half years ago, I had only an inkling of the potential for good earnings and certainly didn't expect to see articles do that well. Neither did anyone else -- except maybe a few folks at Demand Media.

Now, about those articles. What goes into a thousand-dollar eHow article? And more importantly, how can we all write more of them?

Some things are fairly consistent with top earning articles. The main traits these four have in common are good SEO, uniqueness and worthwhile content. Three have all those aspects; one admittedly possesses just the first two. Three are personal finance or career-related topics, the other is a home and garden article. Here's what I've learned about their similarities:

• SEO, Search Engine Optimization: Researching good keywords and properly placing them in your article is the best strategy for earning with online content, especially on eHow. I use free tools such as Wordtracker and Google Adwords to help with this aspect. When you link to your article from other sites, use the main keywords as anchor text.
  
• Uniqueness: Are the keywords you want to use already the main topic of another eHow article? Or are they so competitive that a Google search returns pages of quality, relative results all with good SEO-titles? If either or both these are in the affirmative, you'll do better looking for another aspect of that niche and switching to different keywords. To earn well, your keywords need to be unique on eHow and in a somewhat unsaturated niche online.
  
• Content: Make sure the introduction and body of your eHow article provide the information your reader is searching for. Your article should be in-depth enough to provide a good reader experience and convey the knowledge you're sharing. Fluff pieces won't make it to the top (with rare exception).
  
• A little luck: One of my articles, the one that's garnered $1,900+ so far, is based on keywords that showed very few searches at the time of the writing. However, I wrote the article on a bit of a hunch and it played out. There were no other eHow articles using those keywords when I wrote it, and when the topic became popular it was one of the top results in the search engines.
  

Each of my top four articles is about two years old -- they were written at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. While time is important to see full earnings potential, high earners will often show their value early on. One of these articles earned $400 in a single month only six months after it was published.

For more on maximizing earnings, check out my ebook: How to Earn Passive Income on eHow

Do you have some high earners on eHow? Share your tips with other readers in the comments section.