How to calculate how money much your ehow article will make

Are you tired of sitting and waiting to see how well your ehow article will do? Are you confused about why some articles have thousands of views and made almost nothing and other have a couple hundred and made a fortune? Well here's all the answers! You'll feel like you can predict the future after reading this and you'll certainly be making a lot more money because of it.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. First of all, this entire article ONLY covers the Google Adsense ads on your articles, not the ones by other companies. But google's are a good indicator for the rest so this whole process still provides a pretty accurate prediction anyway. The first and most important thing to know is how the Adsense ad system works. If you already know, skip this step.
   Basically people want to sell their products and services. So they make a website and they want to make people come visit and buy something. So they go to Google and set up an advertising account and pay to have links to their site put in Google ads across the entire internet. People see them and click on them and the advertisers have a pre-agreed upon rate that they'll pay per click. Let's say it's $0.50 per click. Google keeps a portion but gives a commission to the website that hosted the ad where it got clicked on. I don't know the rate but let's say Google gets $0.25 and the website hosting the ads gets $0.25. Well here on ehow, they keep some ad revenues from Google but also pay article authors a commission. I don't know that rate either but it would be a portion of the afore mentioned $0.25. This may sound like splitting up the money too many different ways but trust me, it’s still pretty easy to make A LOT of money.
2. Per-click payouts before ehow even takes a share can range from $0.04 to many dollars. How the per-click rate is determined is complicated but to simplify it, it’s basically just about competition. If an advertiser is selling pools and there's 100 other companies wanting to sell pools through Google ads, they’re going to have to outbid others or at least come close to others’ bids in order to get their ads shown at all. So if the current bid is to pay Google $1.00 per click on pool related ads, someone can come in and say they’ll pay $1.05 per click and tada, they get their ads shown instead of the other person’s or at least more often. On the other hand if someone wants to advertise through Google for a product for which there’s very little competition, they’ll barely have to bid at all and the per click rate will stay really low. For instance, someone who is advertising their site which sells tickets to turtle races, they could probably get away with a bid of $0.10 per click because nobody else wants to bid higher on that keyword. Speaking of keywords, that’s what they’re actually bidding on. Someone can bid on words or sets of words like “pool” or “pool supplies” or “pool cleaning,” all of which are on completely different bidding auctions.
3. So what does this all mean to you? Well when Google ads are shown in your article, they send an automated program called a robot ahead of time to read through all the text on the page and figure out what it’s about. The logic of the robot is becoming comparable to a human and it can distinguish from context whether your article is about “pool” the game or a swimming “pool.” So for now just assume that no matter what your article is about, the robot will be able to figure it out. Once it scans your article, it builds likely keywords and then shows ads for those keywords. If your article is about pools and someone bid $2.00 per click for the keyword pool, you could be making $1.00 per ad click on that article!
4. Now we get to the technical part. First come up with some article ideas that you want to write. Try to have at least 10 good ideas that you could seriously just sit down and write about. You probably don’t want to take the time right now to write all 10 of those articles and then just sit back and see which actually make money and now you don’t have to. It’s time to predict which ones will do well.
5. Take the first article idea on your list and come up with a bunch of keywords that you think the robot would logically grab from your article. Keep in mind that when you’re writing it, your article usually has to actually mention the keyword in writing for ads to be shown for it. Don’t assume that “how to care for your dog” will automatically show ads related to the keyword “veterinary care” unless you literally write those words in one of the steps.
6. Once you have some likely keywords in mind, go to the Google adwords keyword tool. It's at:
   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
   
   It's a tool that's actually for advertisers, not ad hosts, but we can use it for our purposes too. Given the current design of the tool when this article was written, the default settings when you get there are all correct. But just to be sure, make sure it's set so that it will let you type in your own "Descriptive words or phrases" in the middle text box.
7. turtle race results Type in your first keyword or phrase and click "get keyword ideas." After searching its database, it will come up with a list starting with what you actually typed. The next entries will be related keywords that other advertisers have used. Ignore everything but the keywords and their bars for "Advertiser Competition." The other stuff only matters if you're actually an advertiser selling something. The bigger the competition bar, the more people are bidding on that keyword so the more money you'll make per click if your article is about that keyword. For example, if you put in "turtle racing" you'll get something close to the attached image. That means it’s likely that absolutely nobody is advertising under any of those keywords or at least not more than 1 person.
8. mortgage results Change the text in the box at the top to your next keyword you think your article would generate and click "get keyword ideas" again. It will generate new results for that new keyword and others related to it. Some keywords do a lot better than others. If you put in "mortgage" you'll see that pretty much any keyword phrase related to mortgages is heavily bid upon as in the attached image.
9. more realistic results More than likely, your results will look more like the ones attached to this step for model rockets than the previous 2 extremes. Go down your entire list of keywords for your first article idea and get an idea of how heavy the ad competition is for the related keywords. After you do so, you'll have a pretty good idea of how valuable the ads that will be shown on your article will be after you write it. Go through the entire process for each article idea you have and make note of the ones that will contain a lot of really "expensive" keywords. Those are the ones you're going to want to write because they'll end up making the most money.
10. Well I mentioned there's an actual calculation. Time to do some math! It's sort of a loose estimation but if the competition bar is empty for most keywords relating to your article idea, you'll make next to nothing. If there's between a sliver and a quarter bar you'll probably make $0.15 or less per click. A half bar to a 3/4 bar would be closer to $0.30-$0.50 per click and a full bar is almost definitely $1.00 per click or more. Certain ridiculously hot keywords can even be bid up to $10.00 a click but if the bar is full there's really no way to know how crazy hot it really is. So estimate about how much of a commission you can expect in general with all your keywords.
    Then factor in that about 0.5% of visitors will click on the ads. Yes, it's seriously that low on average. So for every 1000 views, you'll probably get 5 ad clicks. So 5 ad clicks per thousands times let's say you estimated $0.50 per click and you're making $2.50 per thousand views.
11. But wait, that's not quite all the calculating you need to do. The equation still needs some tweaking. You need to add on a huge boost to the 0.5% click rate if your article encourages people to click the ads. Keep in mind it’s against Google and Ehow’s rules to literally say “hey, click on my ads” or anything even close to that in your article and you’ll get banned for it. I mean more like if your article is “how to buy the right boat for you” and the ads are selling boats, maybe 3% of visitors will click on the ads instead. Who knows, maybe it could be 25%! I have an article that explains how people can track down where you live just from your IP address and the ads are for services that hide your IP address and that one is currently my #1 highest money making article because such a high percentage of visitors are clicking on it. It’s hard to tell exactly what % to really put in there but just take a guess because you probably won’t be too far off.
12. Another tweak is for low competition keywords that make a lot or high competition keywords that don’t make much. If you type in “ringtones” into the google ad keyword tool mentioned in earlier steps, you’ll see that the competition bar is completely maxed out. That makes sense. You see ringtone ads everywhere! A goldmine, right? They must be worth $1+. WRONG! They’re worthless! Ringtones typically cost $0.99. Factor in that, operating costs for the seller, Google’s share, ehow’s share, and the fact that not every single click actually results in a purchase and you come to the conclusion that pretty much all ringtone sellers only could afford to bid about $0.08 per click and still make a profit. On the other hand, if you type in “bugatti veyron” you’ll see that it’s not a very heavily competed keyword compared to others. And that makes sense because it’s a specific make and model of car so not many people are advertising it. But wait, that car costs over a million dollars so even if they bid $10 per click and only 1% of people who click on the ads actually buy a Bugatti Veyron, they’d still make an enormous profit. And it only takes about 5 dealerships to realize that before the keyword is bid up to ridiculously high levels. So also consider the cost of the product or service related to your keywords and alter the estimated value based on the competition bar accordingly.
13. Okay now if you didn’t already during step12, do a google image search for “Bugatti Veyron” because you have to see how cool that awesome car looks!
14. So now that you have an idea of the percent of visitors that will click on your ads and how much each click will be worth, all you need to predict is the amount of views you’ll get and you’ve got a complete equation. Well look at your other articles and see how many views they got. If a bunch of your 1 month old ones have about 500 views, then you’ll probably get 500 views per month on any future articles you write too. If you plan to submit the article to digg and post a link to it on your myspace page and otherwise advertise it like crazy then make the view estimate higher. Whatever you feel it might be, use that number.
15. Now let’s say after all these steps my first article idea is likely to have a 1% click per view rate, each click will likely make me $0.50, and it’s probably going to get 1000 views per month. Well multiply it all together. 1000 views times 0.01 times $0.50 equals $5. Oh boy, I’m going to make $5 a month on that article! I should probably write that one. And if my second idea is for “how to race turtles” and I determined that the variables are a 0.5% click rate, each click will be worth $0.04 and it’ll get 400 views per month then that article is going to make me $0.08. Obviously I should forget the second one and write the first one instead.
16. Don’t rely too heavily on the actual dollar value you get from the equation because it’s probably not terribly accurate. This whole process is just meant to group your list of ideas for articles into either worthless bombs, average to good money makers, or gold mines. Don’t write worthless bombs for which you estimate under $0.50 or so per month because they’ll probably in reality make nothing. If you figure it’ll make a dollar or two a month, sure go ahead and write it. There’s always a chance it will really take off or more people will click on the ads than you thought and it’ll make tens of dollars! And goldmines for which your estimate says like $10+ a month, you better write that one because chances are, it will make you A LOT of money!
17. So there you have it, how to predict which of your article ideas will be winners and which will bomb. One extra technique to ensure that your prediction comes true is to come back to the google keyword tool once you’ve written your article. Change from “Descriptive words or phrases” to “Website content” where it lets you put in a website instead of keywords and paste in a link to your article. It will quickly send the robot to your page and read through it and it will spit out a list of keywords it got from your article. If you really wanted ads related to “car air filters” to show up but that’s not on the list, you better go back and change the text of your article to mention that phrase a couple more times. And if you see some accidental keywords that aren’t actually related in there, go find where they came from and delete that text from your article. For example, this article isn’t about ringtones but if the robot saw that I mentioned that word several times and thinks my article is about ringtones, I should go delete all the instances of that word that I can. For example I can say “them” as often as possible instead of actually typing the word ringtones again.
18. One last awesome tip is a major shortcut. If you want to write how to change your air filter, find another ehow article about that exact thing and paste their article’s address into the tool instead. See what it comes up with for keywords and if they’re mostly low-competition ones, skip the whole calculation process and don’t write it. Plus, you don’t need another ehow article in direct competition with yours anyway.