Reading a press release describing the explosive recent growth of eHow™ in our currently twitchy economy, I wanted to see what it was all about. Of course that led me to the website of its Santa Monica-based parent company, Demand Media.

Demand Media has an interesting, integrated network of distributed social media offerings, including, to my surprise, LIVESTRONG.com™, the personal improvement social site that is part of the LIVESTRONG movement started by six-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong. But more on that in a minute.

eHow logo

eHow™ boasts over 500,000 how-to articles and 100,000 how-to videos, such as:
–How to Teach Your Dog Hand Signals (from over 9000 entries on dogs)
–How to Avoid Falling Asleep During Night Duties (one of 2200 work effectiveness entries)
–How to Change Your Wallpaper on the iPhone (there are almost 500 entries for the iPhone)
–How to Make Hummus (Touché – why buy it when you can make a ton for about a buck? But my personal tip is to add a little tahini, cumin and oregano.)

All this content must come from somewhere, mustn’t it?

Look no further than Demand Studios, Demand Media’s freelance web content “feeder” arm. Demand Studio’s manifesto propounds the power of information, people and groups, and of being a participant in technological change rather than just a spectator. Heady words for a company located just two blocks from the beach, but they put this creed to work in clever fashion. How? Well, eHow™, for one!

Through its proprietary technology, Demand Media evaluates the type of content Internet users want and where it needs to be in its network of entertainment and social sites (its other brands include Cracked.com®, Mania.com, GolfLink.com® and Trails.com®). Consequently, freelance assignments are offered through Demand Studios to fill the content needs. According to its website, this amounts to 20,000 articles and 10,000 videos per month.

You can join Demand Studio as a filmmaker (to create how-to videos), as a writer, a transcriber, a copy editor, a title proofer or an expert. For the wordsmithing roles, you list the topics about which you are qualified to write, and if you like you can choose for which Demand Media brand site you’d like to write, including eHow™, Loud3r™ and Essortment™, the latter two being collections of websites centered around specific topics.

Then, assuming that your abilities are attractive and an appropriate assignment is available, Demand Studios commissions you, you produce the material and you get paid. Here are a few of the writing assignments available when I visited the site:
–How to Rent a Vacation Home
–Moral Effects of Marijuana
–Learn to Speak Italian

Alternatively, you can simply sign up as a contributor at eHow™ and participate in its Writer’s Compensation Project. For help on article length, writer’s block, keywords and driving traffic to your articles, you can consult the eHow™ Writer’s Academy. And on the eHow™ community blog you can read about the writer recently featured on CNN who’s paying her mortgage writing eHow™ articles.

So, my expert friends, with over half a million contributions on eHow™ alone, not to mention Demand Studio’s extensive media network and its claim to be the biggest provider of video to YouTube, the question becomes: Where do your talents lie?

♦♦♦

I’ve been away from the bike racing news scene for awhile, so I’m delighted to see the well-developed web constellation that includes the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF, aka LIVESTRONG.org) and LIVESTRONG.com (ahem, the health and fitness social site from… Demand Studios.)

So I can’t finish this off without shout outs to my friends Chris Brewer over at LAF, who was so generous with his help when my former partner and I took over the Daily Peloton cycling news website back in 2002, and Cathy Mehl, a great cycling writer at the Astana cycling team website - you go, girl! (Visit the Astana website in case you want to see what Lance came out of retirement to do.)